A Steak in Genomics™

  Beef Heifer Puberty and Fertility Genomic Research from American Hereford Association on Vimeo .

DENVER - The bustling ballrooms of Kalispell, Montana, will soon be filled with innovative and forward-thinking cattlemen and women during the 69th annual National Red Angus Convention. The Commercial Cattlemen’s Symposium, hosted by the Red Angus Association of America, is sure to be a highlight of the convention and will offer beef producers the tools and knowledge they need to strengthen their operations and improve their profitability. This year’s symposium, held at the Hilton Garden Inn in Kalispell on Wednesday, Sept. 14, will feature a diverse, experienced group of speakers guaranteed to offer valuable insight to attendees. “We are thrilled to continue offering commercial cattlemen and women free educational events during the annual National Red Angus Convention. As the Commercial Marketing Team, it is always exhilarating to bring so many commercial operations – our customers – together for this event. Red Angus has always been focused on the cow, and with the release of our new...

 As I no longer have an extension appointment, my presentations at producer meetings have become much less frequent. I did get the opportunity to present at Herefords at the Cove event put on by the Georgia Hereford Association. This is a continuation of the Herefords on the Mountain event started by Tommy Coley. Here is a link to my slides. Decker_HerefordsCove_2022.pptx As I was driving home from Junior National Hereford Expo, a thought popped into my head. I like Love's gas stations. Part of the reason I like them, is they consistently have clean bathrooms. And why do they have clean bathrooms? Because they measure it! As cattle breeders, we can take a lesson from this. We need to make sure we are measuring what is important to us and our customers.

 The Beef Reproduction Task Force invited me to present in their 2022 Webinar series. You can watch the webinar below or on Facebook. Thanks again to BRTF for the opportunity to present!

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.

We will have a scientific article describing the hair shedding research soon. Work was completed by Harly Durbin during her time at Angus Genetics Inc. as an intern.

Shane Bedwell American Hereford Association Today is the 1 year plus 2 day anniversary of AHA's switch to single-step.This is the North American Hereford Genetic Evaluation including AHA and Canadian Hereford Association. They are currently working with Uruguay and Argentina are in the process of switching to the single-step approach. Part of the process was building a fully automated genomic pipeline to run the genetic evaluation weekly. They have been very happy with the quality controls measures that were built into this pipeline. AHA implemented a data pruning strategy to capitalize on their switch to whole-herd reporting in 2001. Animals that have data reported after 2001 plus 3 generations of their pedigree are included in the analysis. They have performance data on 2.3 million animals. They have genotypes on over 70,000 animals. Previously, all traits were fit in a single model. With the switch to single-step, AHA switched to 9 cluster models. They also re-paramet...

John Genho Neogen/GeneSeek Genho works with American breeds and smaller breed associations to provide them with genetic evaluations. He implemented single-step BLUP to use genomic information. Brangus and Santa Gertrudis have monthly genetic evaluations. Brangus has over 21,000 animals genotyped. Other clients range from 3,000 to 6,000 animals genotyped. A lot of the problems with genomic prediction is having lots of animals in the pedigree, but with relatively small proportion of animals genotyped. However, Genho works with commercial ranches who have genotyped every living animal. This simplifies many of the struggles with single-step BLUP. Genho wonders what the next iteration of models will look like given the entire dataset is genotyped. All of the American breeds have Bos indicus influence. However, there are very few pedigree connection between these breeds. Genho wonders if identifying marker effects that could be shared across breeds could be an opportunity to share ...

Steve Miller Angus Genetics Inc. Details of genetic evaluation are published in their Sire Evaluation Report. angus.org/nce  The first four papers of the report contains the details of the evaluation. Miller states that it actually functions as a nice animal breeding textbook. Angus Genetics, Inc. does evaluations for 6 clients, ranging from weekly to annual evaluations. The weekly evaluation of Angus is a bit like Groundhog Day, same thing week after week. The Angus Association uses an unweighted single-step approach, and the development of this method is the result of lots of research that has been peer-reviewed and published. When they switched to single-step they asked the question if the new evaluation was actually better. They compared to the independent evaluation done by USDA-MARC. The new evaluation performed better. Because the single-step model allowed them to fit more traits in the same model, they improved the carcass trait model. By adding in weaning weigh...