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Showing posts from June, 2020

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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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Hazardous Hair Shedding

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One of the things I learned from my student Troy Rowan was that best part of breed association's junior national expos is the contests and activities.  So, when I saw the Junior National Hereford Expo Pee Wee Speech contest was online this year, we jumped at the opportunity.  Below is Jensen Decker's speech titled "Hazardous Hair Shedding".    Really excited about the growth this young man showed through this experience! Thanks for to the National Hereford Women for sponsoring the Pee Wee Speech contest.
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Three Awesome Things We Learned From Hair Shedding

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Figure 1 from Durbin et al. 2020. We recently posted a preprint (a research publication that has not yet been peer reviewed) to the bioRxiv server. You can read the article here:  https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.21.109553   *Update: Peer-reviewed, published paper is available open-access here:  https://gsejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12711-020-00584-0  "Development of a genetic evaluation for hair shedding in American Angus cattle to improve thermotolerance" This manuscript describes our work with Angus breeders and Angus Genetics Inc. to create a hair shedding EPD for the American Angus Association. We learned a lot of cool things about hair shedding in this paper. Including how hair shedding is related to other traits and how hair shedding is related to the environment. 1) Negative Relationship Between Milk and Growth Something interesting to me was to learn more about the genetic correlation between weaning weight direct and weaning weight maternal. Most pr
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EPDs and Genomics: A Conversation with the American Angus Association Board

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At the National Western Stock Show, I had a great discussion with the American Angus Association board and members. Angus Media put together a nice summary of that presentation.
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