Not much can be done if all of our time is spent running around dousing one bush fire after another. We know that during their formative years, Herefords, Angus and Shorthorns were primarily bred for" beef", but cows must've been important or keeping track of cow families would not have been initiated. .For those of you who couldn't attend the last KC gathering at Miles City, please know I was especially intrigued by one of the very first slides presented to us at the Fort Keogh Research Station. It stated that the initial purpose in the 1920's and 30's was to develop lines for crossing in order to produce higher yielding hybrids similar to the successful methodology then being practiced by corn breeders. Whatever their initial selection criteria was in each of the several lines, the only line that survived to date were the Line 1's and 80 or 90 years later, to my knowledge that initial purpose has not been implemented. Could it have been their selection criteria?
However, we were shown maps that illustrated the infusion of the Line 1's is in over 50% of the Hereford breed's ancestry today.....some think the Line 1's were the major contributor to the salvation of the Hereford breed in North America. Without question to that extent, the Line 1's have been very successful in serving a purpose. Are they going "too far"? Today, the research team at Ft. Keough still maintains the first priority of selection which is maximizing yearling weight.....but the current team expressed their concern with the lowering trend of fertility and increase in birthweights.....we were told that less than 80% of the cows are getting rebred. Fearing possible extinction, the current team is trying to ascertain whether the problem is management or genetic. I had to smile when we learned that the "management teams" salary was based on the sales of the cattle, that they wouldn't breed their own cattle "that way".
Based on my observations of many different cattle over the years, I believe the problem is simply the natural consequence of the "Line 1" selection priority. However, while we were told the YW trend is still going up after 80 years. I am convinced that the SURVIVING females tend to slow down the advances in "growth" contributed by the males and that the Line 1's would become extinct before they could ever reach the maximum limits of the Line 1's growth potential. Watching several high performance breeders who's primary selection is for butts and guts also needed to select for nuts.
Losing strong sexual distinction between the sexes, they have had to rely on sustaining variation in this ongoing battle which allows nature to uphold reproduction from the functional females within the variance of the distributions..... these surviving females become fewer and fewer over time, thereby lowering their average conception rates. I've also experienced this natural reaction in my herd....so from the 80 years of research results of constant selection criteria, Fort Keogh has at least reaffirmed that much.
My limited observations of the surviving Line 1 cow herd was as expected, that they were quite acceptable functional cows. What would have been much more interesting to see would've been all the non-survivors over the years. We didn't see but a handful of the maternal composite herd that Ft. Keogh began developing about a dozen years ago.....nor did we need to at this early stage in their development. I don't know if this attempt to develop an ideal red Montana range cow is a continuation of their initial goals which began 80 years ago or not. I am NOT familiar with the Ft Keogh selection priorities for their maternal composite or why they decided to develop a maternal line. Perhaps the purpose of the ideal range cow maternal line's design is to compliment the Line 1's and will be implemented after 15 generations or another 80 years to stabilize this maternal composite. Within the current distributions they are still experiencing reversions back to the original breeds and it sounded like the biggest human problem thus far was disposition, a highly heritable trait. Ben told us when he worked there at calving time, about 20% of the cows would try to kill 'ya.....I don't know if that trait would be down to 10% or up to 50% since that time. By the way, has anyone noticed the industry has recently created new EPD for stayability and docility......I wonder why.
Dr. Wagner, the extension specialist, couldn't blame his problems on inbreeding or the loss of variation, or any particular individual bull....his maternal problems originated from HIS selection criteria. So I felt a sense of satisfaction when Dr. Wagner was enlightened saying - "There are limits to how much you can expect and to achieve extreme levels of growth and/or milk production is very stressful and any cow can only handle that much stress for a limited amount of time. If you were to characterize an old cow in a herd, she would be anywhere from slightly below to slightly above average in production at weaning, she is fertile, and she hasn't had any calving difficulty. Will you get these average cows selecting extreme "spread" bulls? Not likely!" Nature's distributions will usually provide a few, and they will pull down the primary "high performance" selection criteria, an expensive culling proposition that naturally occurs. I could provide examples from several "old" herds but there is no need to identify them on this public forum.
As an extension specialist, Dr. Wagner could have learned some of these things from the dairy industry before he had to re-discover the same ole things again. And so I felt contentment when I saw Jack's cows who were neither fat nor exceptionally high milkers since his direction is not trying to wean 900# calves by using SAF bulls in his environment.....which incidentally is similar to the Line 1's although the management is different....Jack has a lot less people managing his outfit...with the least expenditure of labor.
Like Dr. Wagner, Jack has said he was enlightened several years ago and now earns a more contented living with his structural functional cows who swing their hips when walking a coupla miles to water with healthy calves rather than waddling followed by runty calves....... and I didn't see anyone at the "gathering" searching for that outlier cow (the one with the biggest calf) either at Jack's or the cattle at Fort Keogh. I regret that they didn't cause more than likely they would have seen that they weren't the biggest, thickest cows with the highest RFI scores in the herds.
Always conscious of "looks", what would that mythical "average Angus cow" actually look like in reality, the one that's overlooked by the mainstream registered people? Probably a lot like Jack's work and wear cows. I had thought my cows were also about average Angus cows but without changing them, alas, I've watched the movement of the industry turn them into being well below breed average in most of the numerically measured traits. For those who didn't hear Bootheel Joe's talk at the banquet, what I remember most is when he talked about "truth".
I thoroughly enjoyed seeing cattle in their natural habitat and the complete absence of any overblown glorification or exaggerated promotional claims which are so common in this business. Anyway, for whatever it's worth, the foregoing seven paragraphs are my overall synopsis of the Miles City gathering. As usual, I certainly enjoyed all the pictures Dylan and his lovely wife and daughter took to capture those moments in time....except for the one of me standing beside Dennis.....looks can be deceiving, phenotypically we are certainly fire and ice but genotypically we are identical twins.
Some of us on KC know how MK's ability to capture one moment in time on film has brought a few of my below average cows to the forefront. Mike recently posted the below picture of one of them on KC, as a young cow who apparently caught his eye 9 yrs ago. I think Mike has a more recent picture of her in his photo files since she is no longer a "Shoshone" cow, nor EVEN AN ANGUS cow.....she is now a KEENEY cow since it was HIS selection criteria that made her a Keeney Model A cow.....obviously, he and only he is responsible for HIS selection criteria, whether it stems from within or outside his herd.
MKeeney wrote: ",,,,,,,
I came upon a picture of 2966 as a three year old; she hasn`t changed much in nine years even after her current stay in ky.."
"I don`t believe she`s maternally efficient though, she looks like she could hold a lot of grass... " When I saw this picture, I smiled thinking
"wow, this is a 'Keeney Portrait of Maternal Structural Perfection' from the tip of her tail to her shiny nose, I wanna entire herd of Model A cows jusssst like her". Under another topic Bootheel said: "This is where it gets muddy, and people start getting mad, throwing tantrums and saying
''average, average, we don't need no stinking average cows". I laughed thinking maybe we need more numerical "below average" cows.
This cow pictured in the middle of summer raising her 2nd calf with a body condition that is indicative that we are what we eat.....born in 2000, now a 12 yr. old replication of her grandams who were paternal half sisters born in the late 80's. Her established exceptional fertility and problem free functional maternal values are a direct result of the selection criteria., not an accidental by-product of numerical selection. She has less than breed average EPD except that she is way above average in CEM and $EN (dollars saved on maintenance requirements)....so she doesn't qualify as an "average Angus model"....... remember they are virtually non-existent.
And being close bred she certainly is a long ways from being an "F1" cross descending from fire and ice. Mike can attest that these "picture perfect" cows produce about "average" progeny so they certainly couldn't be labeled as being fire but since my entire existing herd would all have similar EPD, I suppose the mainstream would consider them to be a herd of ice frozen in time.....I do consider the most problem free ones to be the "icing" on the cake.... but I doubt they are suited best for the northern fringes of Canada or the southern fringes of Argentina.
Nuff said about my "below average" population of cows.....who are neither above or below average when compared to themselves.....like Jack said about his cattle - "I LIKE THEM AND THAT SUITS ME".
Folks, we all had to get our cattle from somewhere. In the registered world, the breed's public pedigrees are provided for some kind of "authenticity" which allows giving credit or damnation to any ancestry. Breeds or pedigrees are often chosen because they either seem to fit our selection criteria or in order to ride on that breed's or individual animal's coattails or simply because of ancestral reputation We're all riding on the coattails of something done before us until we hop off with our knapsack to clear our own path.
Although the Pioneer or DeKalb's breeders know the characters of the parentage in their knapsack, the general public has no need to know. Although K.A. Clark had his own treasure chest full of nostalgic paraphernalia, commercial customers sole interest was in their results. In an ideal Tru-Line world, any references to or comparisons with any breed or breeder's parent stock is avoided, the name of the breeder and the strain's earned reputation are the authenticity and any commercial breeder's sole interest is in the reliability of the results. The registered world has a policy of "trust but verify", a result of those not so few apples spoiling the whole barrel.
It will take quite some time before a mindset can readjust its thinking from what has been engrained for so long. The "Tru-Line" direction is not quarreling over IBC's which is just another numerical measure based on averages. Races to achieve the highest IBC's are likely to result in the same disasters as other numercial races. Without going into any details here, for those who "must measure", it may be more meaningful to measure the prepotency in the range of distributions of the population as a result of any selection.
In the meantime Mike, for those with dimming eyesight like you and I, could you please lighten the shadow of 2966 so us nit-pickers can see her underline better.
at 11
The shadow makes her look deeper than she is long.....and I'm thinking that's why you think she can hold a lot of grass and isn't maternally efficient. How much grass should a maternally efficient cow hold? Most of us wonder what those illusive maternally efficient cows "look" like?
From the Triangle research, in his last newsletter Gavin expressed his concern as to
"whether the most efficient cows have the best calves or where the calves lie in the high efficiency, control and low efficiency lines. This is of course of vital importance. It is no use us breeding a very efficient line of cows if their calve’s are rubbish and I wonder whether you lose variation as a cost." Tom D recently sent me an email to show me what several of the higher producing Pinebank cows "looked" like.....who are about 10 years old listed with pedigrees on the Pinebank NA web page. They can be viewed by clicking on the following address but I must forewarn you Dennis, nearly half of them are missing their long tail hairs
http://pinebanknorthamerica.com/category/foundation-dams/Maternally efficient cows - Dairy cows do alot more than produce dairy steers and it is well established that dairy steers have low RFI scores. I might also mention that several years ago Dr. Gosey researched several commercial herds in Nebraska and found that those cowherds with "average Hereford or Angus cows" were the most profitable. I wondered where those herds got those "average cows".
Dr. Gosey's research also coincided with the research results at Bozeman, MT, where that same university tried to develop a "black/baldy" breed and failed as they reverted back to the average of the parents, where in another new research project they measured the cow's excrement from different "types" to determine how much lactating cows ate on pasture compared to how much calf weight they produced. Long story short, the average producing cows were overall the most profitable......the higher producing cows required more maintenance even when not lactating.....yet the "performance mania" persists and high priced super cows are flushed. In light of this research, maybe we oughta be flushing the recipient cows, the ones that can do all the functional work with the fewest problems, the ones salvaged by Nature's survival of the fittest that haven't been screwed up by EPD races......could they be the most efficient cows?
Dr. Wagner said "
sometimes we need a wake up call". I had mine about 30 years ago. Filled with bewilderment hiding my disappointments, I finally had enuff 'a this "stacking" maximum performance crap. So I spent several years of intensive study compulsively obsessed to better understand the bovine.... paying close attention to what my cows were telling me to find out what the hell was going on. I finally said to myself " its the endocrine system, stupid" that's causing many of my problems. So in 1984 I analyzed the sire summary along with my assortment of produce of dam summaries to reaffirm that my previous observations were on track.
Back in those days all we measured universally was BW, WW, YW and maternal EBV's which were based on a sire's daughter's progeny ratios....back before creative computer imaging became available.....back before we could simply press a few buttons and the computer will instantly sort our national cattle data bank into groups according to any numerical selection criteria. So I had spent a couple of months of tedious handiwork to publicly display my data analysis by creating a graphic chart using different colors of "pinstripe tape", each color representing one of the four measures.
Enjoying my fascination with colors doing this similarly to the way I prepared the TruLine booklet - while neglecting my other essential duties - it turned out that the sacrificial time I spent in preparing this "chart" was all in vain. It was completely dismissed by everyone I sent it to. Perhaps the intended purpose was not recognized since it is a little confusing. So for this summation, I dug it back out of my dusty pile of "research stuff" to display it publicly for KC readers in order to visually demonstrate the natural trade-offs we were encountering while we were pursuing continual increases in individual growth/performance. Perhaps 28 years later, this time if I can explain it properly, it might help Dylan and Bootheel decide which direction to go from their rendezvous in Albuquerque.
I had sorted the bulls in the sire summary into two groups, one group consisted of all the highest growth bulls listed who had a
YW EPD of over 50# with a minimum accuracy of .80 ......which resulted in 63 of the top eligible growth sires at that time. The other tediously sorted group consisted of the highest maternal sires who had a
maternal EBV of 105 or over with a minimum accuracy of .90 .....which resulted in 39 of the top maternal sires......altogether a 102 bulls that were the current primary driving forces leading the "performance" movement......the "outliers". Professional academics and researchers get paid to do this stuff...... being a simple laymen, I did it for free at the expense of buying new school clothes for my kids or a dress for my wife.
In this bar graph, each four-colored vertical bar represents a single sire, each color represented where each sires comparative ranking was on a national scale for the four measured traits. The bulls within each group were then arranged in ascending order based on their
YW EPD from left to right ......and then I placed the maternal and growth group side by side. I was surprised by the fact that only FOUR out of 102 bulls qualified to be in both groups.....so I removed those four sires from their YW order and displayed them in the center of the graph between the maternal and growth groups.
When finally finished, like statisticians normally do, I drew a straight
RED line thru the the scatter for
growth and a straight
GREEN line thru the scatter of the
maternal EBV's to show the trends. The "yellow" maternal EBV's were low accuracy and it should be noted that nearly all moved downward when higher accuracies became available. Some high growth bulls who had a non-parent predicted maternal EBV (yellow) as high as 108 ended up with an actual MEBV of 95 as the accuracies increased, so just ignore those yellow bars, if they were green they would be lower. The average of the measures of each group are shown on the chart between each group with the little colored arrows. The widest distance between the colored arrows between the two groups was BW (brown), which of course led to the earlier maturing so called curve bending spread bulls as fat replaced muscle to maintain more weight on a smaller frame and on and on and on the circus of cycles goes as the distributions get wider and wider but those are stories for another day.
As you can plainly see my friends , from this crude chart the trend of the
red and
green lines formed somewhat of an "X", one line goes up and the other goes down which was the data affirmation of my own observations which also coincides with Dr. Wagner’s own more recent experiences. Natural law has not changed nor have my opinions behind the need for maternal and paternal strains. These incremental trends happen so slowly, we hardly notice them in the entire mixed up population of cattle but they are reflected over time in our culling percentages.....similar to what Dr. Wagner experienced in his "inventory". These are not "blue sky" opinions, but factual data which we can all observe sooner or later out in our own real world..
If anyone has any questions regarding this crude chart, I will try to answer them. When I prepared the outline for this summation, I had intended to prepare a new colorful computer generated modern day chart with the 25-30 newer measures to demonstrate the unintended consequences of "fire and ice" selection but it just got too confusin'.....
my new "chart" started to resemble a kaleidoscope trying to measure the trends of continuous changing directions,, so I just stayed with the old one to make a single point.
One other point I would like to make and that is those top maternal sires daughters would not have been as productive if they had NOT been mated to the growth sires on the other end of the spectrum. I'm sure all the data overload is as confusin to all you commercial men out there as it is to me and maybe that's the purpose of it......confuse the enemy to keep the status quo flowing..
So now I'm down to touching on the ridiculously high dollar values the pyromaniacs place on outliers, the fuel that feeds the fire that we all pay dearly for. When Will mentioned his neighbor who produced 200 bushel of corn per acre while the others produced about 100 bushel per acre.....it wasn't genetics that made the difference since they all likely planted a similar type of seed, the big difference was that the 200 bushel producer knew how to nurture nature better. Yet in the cattle breeding world, we often criticize people who creep feed their calves or keep their cattle in good condition in order to "express or maximize" their genetic potential.....and in a production oriented society we're besieged by nutritionists who tell us if we feed this and that, and listen to experts who tell us if we do this and that, how much it will improve our production..... not always necessarily our profit.
Introducing more energy into a commercial production system is not necessarily bad if it improves the profit, however, in the mainstream registered promotion business nearly everything is attributed to genetics.......whatta buncha hogwash, God and the steer jocks know its the nutrition. Many of us are familiar with replicated plant trials under identical environmental conditions wherein on average genetics accounts for about 5% of the difference among the different competitive hybrid varieties. And in cattle breeding, it takes a hell've bull or an unusual effect of heterosis to genetically produce much more than 5% of the differences among the current contemporaries. The exceptional animal's overall progeny might ratio 105 over the average of them all in weight and its not all free, the progeny likely required more energy as well in addition to any other consequential subsequent misgivings.
We readily accept that 200 bu. corn requires more nutrients than 100 bu. yields, but with cattle we want them to be higher producers without additional support. The traditional habit is to flock to registered breeders who promote heavy weaning or yearling weights and then pay dearly for 95% of THEIR environment......whatta buncha economic hogwash. We've witnessed how much bigger cattle got from increasing individual "performance" and how the $EN values have plummeted. There is only one way to describe the status quo of the mainstream registered world - ECONOMIC CRAZINESS.
If we're going to select bulls for maternally efficient beef cows as the FIRST PRIORITY, the first bulls we oughta cut the nuts from would be the outliers to save us a lot of aggravation down the road instead of paying a small fortune for them.......now that statement oughta stir up some controversy for debates.
But who the hell knows what today's young bulls will actually transmit maternally based on their individual phenotype with all their mixed up ancestry which tends to nullify their non-parent EPD .....which is likely based on a composite of fire and ice averages. So science protects their computerized robot by beginning with very low accuracies, I just wish science, like the government, would quit trying to help us so much
Hilly posted:One observation I had when first starting with beef cattle coming from the dairy was the amount of time spent looking and talking about bulls, didn’t matter if it was sale day or just a herd visit the bulls were always the focal point, it really took me by surprise... I would go to a bull sale and everyone was in the pens studying bulls and I guess from habit I would be out back walking through the cows, I eventually learned to study bulls with everyone else as it was explained to me that in the beef industry you sell pounds unlike the dairy.
In the dairy I was use to the sorriest looking bulls from a fat or well muscled perspective, but I paid no serious attention to their looks it was all about the cows.
I chose to build on a female base on my maternal side because my cows actually have a legitimate job year round and any faults are magnified, my bulls on the other hand only have 2 months of work and I really question our ability to interpret what a masculine bull looks like if masculine bulls make feminine cows, simply due to the fact that my dairy cows were very feminine in appearance to me and the dairy bulls would be sub masculine for their lack of muscle and fat by the more prevalent and accepted industry standard.
I realize its apples and oranges to some degree but I do have to question what “high testosterone” looks like as this guy didn’t get to two million units of high quality semen on his good looks 
I greatly appreciate your post Craig which is so applicable to this summation. A dairy bull isn't a stud bull until he has daughters in production, whereas commercial maternal beef bulls are long gone before much is known about their daughters. Since the milkiest dairy cows and the beefiest beef cows are the same species representative of "fire and ice" and form follows functional selection, the stinging reality is that optimum must be a degree of balanced compromises somewhere in between, not necessarily the highest producers but the ones that cause us the least problems for longevity.....and of course be able to swing their hips to attract the bulls.
Incidently Hilly, I couldn't help but notice Toystory'a uncanny resemblance to Francis of Wye born in 1958, a bull nicknamed Abe Lincoln who "marked the big turning point in the Wye breeding program" (taken from The Breed of Noble Bloods, page 70). I'm thinkin and smilin here how Dennis said all a maternal bull needed was 4 sound feet, a tool and a nose.....but surely he must also be the genetic equivalent of the preferred cows.
Wow, I'm gettin` worn out tryin` to squeeze a hundred pages and 50 years into one page that's gettin longer and longer. So, last but not the least, I want to reiterate what Gavin ended his last newsletter with:
".......Tomorrow brings the ability to select single characteristic with greater accuracy, and I fear that breeders will wildly rush for one character after another with disastrous affect on phenotype. If these affects could become as bad as I suspect they could then they could be very difficult to correct. Breed societies were set up in the beginning whose total job to insure the purity of the breed. ........ I must say that I am concerned for the future but then old men always are. What Gavin may not be aware of is that his fears have already been in place here on this side of the world for the last 30 plus years and they are getting progressively worse with more technology. Pedigreed purity is useless without functional purity. Whether I prefer Gavin's cattle or not, I sure as hell like Gavin and all of you people on KC.....even those above or below average...... eventually we'll all be on the same level..
Harnessing hybrid power continues to lie in wait, waiting for some understanding husbandrymen to bring order out of the chaos. Opportunity is knocking at the door that opens to a long endless road filled with obstacles but under the guiding light of the Tru-Line topic, Keeneys Corner is a good meeting place to start the journey.
And to MVCatt, I hope this summation will make your tractor seat time more tolerable for the rest of this season......it was nice to meet you at the "gathering". Anyone who has absorbed this summation need not go back and read the first 100 pages, this is the crux of it all, I am finsihed with trying to justify the need for what is known in the professional breeding world as establishing genetic truths - the "fixing of physiological functional characters". It is not recommended as a direction for con artists, marketeers with their overblown promotional rhetoric, or multipliers with high expectations.
If by now anyone is not convinced that the BEEF industry NEEDS more prepotent maternal and paternal strains where the only proof is in the puddin`, may God have mercy upon your soul.
LL in the vicinity of Eden busy fertilizing my garden with all the crap Humpty Dumpty left behind. 
Subject: Re: Reflections from LL © 
Wed Jun 06, 2012 4:04 pm
Just imagine if the Iowegian agreed, that is just creepy!
But then he would make us feel stupid the way he did to that VEGAN. Grassy could have us all entertained if he would have just kept the flag going for a while longer. But then jack aint small. 
