Farmer's Weekly (South Africa)
New thinking in beef cattle breeding
Winners of the Agricultural Research Council’s Beef Performers Awards, Llewellyn Angus (2017 National Beef Cattle Improvement Herd) and Sanele Mbhele (2017 Emerging Beef Farmer), attended this year’s Beef Improvement Federation Symposium in the US. In par
The Beef Improvement Federation Research Symposium & Convention is held annually in the US. Each year it is hosted in a different state by a local university with an animal science division. The format is similar to the annual Aldam Stockman School held in the Free State, only larger.
This year’s symposium, held in Loveland, Colorado, and hosted by Colorado State University, was the 50th anniversary of the event and drew about 500 delegates. The main theme was ‘Elevating the industry’.
The buzzwords were ‘singlestep’, ‘estimated breeding value (EBV) evaluations’, and ‘genomic-enhanced breeding values (GEBV)’.
The difference between the cattle breeding industry in the US and South Africa is that in the US, these GEBVs are available with relatively high accuracies for most breeds, and the application of reproduction GEBVs is gaining ground.
us beef breeders emphasise early growth and meat quality
The importance of good, clean performance data was also emphasised at the congress. Solid phenotypic data is required to implement good genomics.
The emphasis in the US is on early growth as well as meat quality, and in this respect the Angus breed plays an important role.
reproduction benchmarking
According to one of the conference speakers, Dr Cliff Lamb of Texas A&M University, 60% of cows in a herd should calve in the first 30 days of the season. This implies that nearly 60% of cows should be in-calf after the first 21 days of the breeding season.
Lamb stressed that the gestation rate had an economic impact four times greater than any other trait. It is followed by growth rate. To achieve this, heifers should calve easily at 24 months under high nutrition levels.
For example, if a farmer is looking to replace 70 heifers, 90 should be retained during initial selection and thereafter 70 should be selected for early gestation.
The length of the breeding season should be reduced to
72 or even 65 days. According to Lamb, when early calving weaning weight increases, so does the reconception rate.
Synchronisation of fertility cycles and the use of artificial insemination (AI) are effective tools in increasing the gestation rate in the first 30 days of the season. Culling or attrition rates of animals that have not conceived is high when the breeding season is shortened, so a farmer should make sure that he or she has surplus females when selecting for fertility.
It is good practice to mate heifers 20 days before cows as this ensures a higher rate of reconception in the second calving season.
Lamb referred to the GrowSafe system, which measures the feed and water intake of cattle, and provided data on it. The first such system in South Africa was installed at the bull testing station of the Agricultural Research Council in Irene in June last year. According to Lamb, the ideal way to use this system is to put as many bulls and heifers as possible through the test before breeding them.
prime beef production
In his presentation on efficient red meat production, Michael Genho, director of feedlot business at Elanco Animal Health, said the important traits to select for were calving, early growth traits, reproduction, mature cow weights and condition scores, actual carcass characteristics and actual feed intake.
A breeder needed to measure these traits and properly catalogue and store the information. They needed to be recorded using the best linear unbiased prediction (BLUP) model, reported and marketed. These recommendations correspond with the Beef Genomics Project programme in South Africa.
Quality vs performance
According to Mark McCully, vicepresident of Certified Angus Beef, customer satisfaction with beef products improves in correlation with the percentage of marbling. However, he asked whether feedlot performance was now being sacrificed in the pursuit of quality.
beef production unfairly targeted
Dr Sarah Place’s presentation focused on sustainability in the beef production industry.
Place, the director of sustainable beef production research at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, said that beef was wrongly accused of being one of the main culprits in carbon emissions as efficient beef or protein production was not brought into the equation.
In terms of net protein contribution, beef generates two to three times more high-quality protein than it uses (broiler chickens, for example, have a value of 0,85 and pork a value of 0,7).
The main reason for this is that cattle can convert plant pastures that are of relatively or very low feed value into quality protein through their ruminant digestive systems.
According to Place, Americans today consume the same quantities of beef as they did back in 1909, but 500% more chicken.
“The fundamental value proposition of beef in the food system is the transformation of lower value resources [plants, land bases] to higher-value protein, micronutrients, and ancillary products,” she said.
She posed the following question for delegates to reflect on: “What can we do to enhance this upcycling value while minimising unwanted negative outcomes and increase social acceptability?”
‘base selection on whole-system indices’
Beef cattle farmers needed to improve the efficiency of beef production in reproduction traits and birth to finishing, said Dr John Pollak, emeritus professor at Cornell University. According to him, many valuable traits were not being adequately considered despite the fact that selection was a proven and cost-effective mechanism for improving the performance of a herd.
“Selection needs to be based on whole-system indices.
It must comprise EBVs for economically relevant traits based on sensible phenotyping strategies, combined with the use of genomics. The industry will need innovative new breeders to drive this change,” Pollak said.
• Llewellyn Angus is a registered animal scientist and a South African Interbreed Judges Association examiner. He has won many awards for stud breeding and is a former president of the South African Simmentaler/ Simbra Society. Email him at 27824909037@vodamail.co.za.