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Hereford and Red Angus Heifers Recruited for Genomics Research

The University of Missouri is recruiting 2,500 Hereford heifers and 2,500 Red Angus heifers to participate in a heifer puberty and fertility genomic research project. Heifers should be registered Hereford, registered Red Angus, or commercial Hereford or Red Angus. Hereford x Red Angus crossbred heifers targeted for the Premium Red Baldy Program would also be a good fit for the research project. Producers must be willing to work with a trained veterinarian to collect the following data: ReproductiveTract Scores collected at a pre-breeding exam 30 to 45 days prior to the start of the breeding season. PelvicMeasurements (height and width) collected at the same pre-breeding exam 30 to 45 days prior to the start of the breeding season. Pregnancy Determination Using Ultrasound reporting fetal age in days. Ultrasound will need to occur no later than 90 days after the start of the breeding season. In addition, heifers must have known birth dates and have weights recorded eithe
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Things that Annoy Thallman About National Cattle Evaluation

Mark Thallman
Mark Thallman recently attended a bull sale with his farther-in-law to help him buy a bull. He was annoyed to find out the embryo transfer calves only had parent average EPDs. This annoyed Thallman because his masters thesis had been focused on calculating EPDs using data from embryo transfer calves.
Thallman also speculates that herds using within herd genetic evaluations are due to frustrations with the genetic evaluations published by breed associations.
Thallman also points out that we need better fertility EPDs. Stayability EPDs were a good first step, but we can do better. He suggests implementing fitting Days to Calving and Pregnant/Open as separate traits. He also envisions fitting each parity as separate pairs of traits in a 6-trait model. Thallman also sees a "build it and the data will come" strategy working best.
We have also failed to implement and use visual scores such as structural soundness, udder soundness, and sheath scores.
Should we score breeders on how biased their submitted data is? We could then regress their EPDs back to the breed average based on the quality of their data.
We also need better decision support software. Unfortunately, as funding for national cattle evaluation research dried up, the development of decision support software lost steam.






Location: Lincoln, NE, USA

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Hereford and Red Angus Heifers Recruited for Genomics Research

The University of Missouri is recruiting 2,500 Hereford heifers and 2,500 Red Angus heifers to participate in a heifer puberty and fertility genomic research project. Heifers should be registered Hereford, registered Red Angus, or commercial Hereford or Red Angus. Hereford x Red Angus crossbred heifers targeted for the Premium Red Baldy Program would also be a good fit for the research project. Producers must be willing to work with a trained veterinarian to collect the following data: ReproductiveTract Scores collected at a pre-breeding exam 30 to 45 days prior to the start of the breeding season. PelvicMeasurements (height and width) collected at the same pre-breeding exam 30 to 45 days prior to the start of the breeding season. Pregnancy Determination Using Ultrasound reporting fetal age in days. Ultrasound will need to occur no later than 90 days after the start of the breeding season. In addition, heifers must have known birth dates and have weights recorded eithe
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