About Us

Jared Decker, the manager of A Steak in Genomics™, is an associate professor in the Division of Animal Sciences at the University of Missouri. He is the MU Extension State Beef Genetics Specialist and uses computational genomics to research cattle genetics. He is passionate about beef cattle genetics and helping beef farmers and ranchers adopt new technologies and best practices. See the Decker Computational Genomics Group website for more information.

The opinions expressed here represent Decker's opinions and not those of his employer.
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ARSBC 2018: EPDs and Reasonable Expectations in Commercial Crossbred Operations

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Jared Decker, PhD
University of Missouri
One point must be clear from the very beginning: EPDs work. When we select parents based on EPDs the genetic merit for that trait increases in our herd. When we select the parents using EPDs the performance of the next generation improves. EPDs Defined EPD stands for Expected Progeny Difference. These three words are loaded with meaning, thus the need to define them here. The most loaded word is Expected. Here we use Expected the way a statistician would use the word. Expected means we are making a prediction of a future value. But, in this context, Expected also means we are describing the average of a group. What is the group for which we are predicting the average? We are predicting the average performance of the Progeny or calves out of an animal. An animal’s own performance and its EPD can be quite different, because that is not the purpose of an EPD. The EPD is predicting the average performance of that animal’s calf crop. Finally, EPDs are u…
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Reverend Bayes and Cattle Breeding

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You are asking yourself, who is Reverend Bayes and what does he have to do with cattle? The answer to this question will answer a major misconception in cattle genetics.

Reverend Bayes was an 18th century Presbyterian minister. He was also trained in logic. Due to Bayes’ work on probabilities, an approach to statistics called Bayesian statistics is named after him. In Bayesian statistics, we start with a prior belief (prior probability). As more information and data are gathered, we update this prior belief. We call this new update a posterior belief. We continue this process as we collect additional data. Further, a key tenant of Bayesian statistics is evaluating the methods (i.e. models) used in our analysis. Statisticians and scientists did not frequently use this system of statistics in the early 20th century. But, with increased computing power, Bayesian statistics has become very popular in the 21st century.

Cattle genetic prediction is very much Bayesian. We start with a prior…
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Do You Own Your Job or a Business? Are You Working for a Lunatic?

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David Pratt
Presentation at Southwest Missouri Spring Forage Conference 

 Ranch Management Consultants Inc. runs two programs, The Ranching For Profit School and the Executive Link.

"When we work for ourselves, we work at what we are good at." Pratt says. We are doing the $10 an hour job. However, we may be leaving the $100,000 per hour job undone.

Most ranches are likely losing money.

Pratt encourages the audience to subscribe to the Ranching for Profit blog.


What letter is most different?

b? c? d? q?

Look again:


What about the t?

We see things through the lens of our expectations.

What if the t is a threat? What if you didn't even see it? What if the t is an opportunity? It is a lot easier to see threats and opportunities at your neighbor's operation.

Too often, we wait till we are out of time and money to make changes.
We hear the phrase, "If you always do what you have always done you will always get what you've always got." But, in the cattle business…
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