Aims for cattle breeders

Press, 28 February 1986, Page 20

Aims for cattle breeders

The pure-bred cattle industry worldwide was floundering somewhat, having become muddled on what were its goals, the director of performance programmes for the American Angus Association, Mr John Crouch, told a beef field day in the Mackenzie Country recently. The American Angus preformance programme is the largest cattle data base in the world, with 2.2 million bits of performance information recorded to date.

But in a very friendly and relaxed way, Mr Crouch went “back to basics” for the seminar at Haldon station, as a method of finding a path for the world cattle industry. He liked to quote a job description for a beef cow, he said. This was to conceive as a yearling, give birth as a two-year-old to a live, vigorous calf, give birth every year thereafter unassisted, wean her calf in the top 80 per cent of the calf drop of each year and leave a daughter to replace her in the herd. All the sophisticated performance recording programmes were really aimed at trying to bring forward the identification of superior-producing cattle and so it was necessary to know what was required of a superior beast.

Now the American Angus Association was turning its prodious programming to prediction. It was beginning to generate “expected progeny differences” not only for sires but also cows. “These are deviations from the breed averages,” he said. He then illustrated the worth of such performance recording and prediction by asking the cattlemen to consider the effect of five years’ use of two different bulls — A and B.

If both were used for five years over 60 commercial cows each, at 95 per cent calving, 300-day calf sales at 60c a pound liveweight, then bull A with a 25 per cent better growth rate performance would generate $63,000 worth of progeny. Bull B would generate only $50,000 worth. Another speaker at the field day, Dr David Mossman, a veterinarian from Wairoa who specialises in beef herd management, reminded cattlemen very forcibly that up to 40 per cent of bulls were incapable of serving efficiently. He emphasised the value of serving capacity testing

to weed out the non-per-formers.

He also called for a more concentrated calving period, saying that at present less than 14 per cent of herds have calving over within 82 days. Aiming for a concentrated calving, over 45 days, results in one calf per cow per year with an even line of bull and heifer calves, greater average weaning weights and improved feed management. Mr Peter Olsen, the president of the New Zealand Hereford Cattle Breeders Association, told the Haldon field day that the association would shortly be offering a progeny testing scheme which was unique in the cattle breeding world. He would not disclose any further details. Hereford associations throughout the world , now tended to lead, or at least to keep up with any new developments in technology in the cattle industry. “As a basic philosophy, we believe that pedigree and performance must be on balance in over all breeding strategy,” he said.

“With the Angus Society, we have a performance programme that had been in use for some years and has 66 per cent of our stud breeding cattle involved,” Mr Olsen said. In opening the field day, Sir James Stewart said that if recovery of New Zealand's pastoral industry was to be mar-ket-led then genetic gains had to be made more quickly than they had in the past.

The return of sheepmeats marketing to private industry needed to result in realistic,' timely and reasonably long-term market signals being transmitted back to the producer. “But the signals haven’t been too clear sb far,” he

said, “and we need some more competition and clearer signals than are available through the dreary old weekly schedule.”

A member of the Meat Board, Mr Roger Marshall, said farmers had responded to clear market signals in the past, for instance by moving to bull beef and to bigger beef carcases.

He expected that contracting between producers and processors would , become much more prevalent in the future, both for specialty sheepmeats and beef cuts.

Supplementary minimum prices had encouraged the' build-up of an oversupply of lambs at the expense of cattle numbers but now the market realities were being brought home to producers he expected more interest in beef cattle raising.

A stud stock specialist with Wrightson NMA, based at Timaru, Mr Newton Godsiff, said that only 18,000 to 20,000 bulls changed hands in the beef industry each year, for a gross value of about. $3O million, but the trade was very important for the whole beef industry.

Miss Nancy Ann Sayre, director of programmes and : information for Genepool Herefords, outlined where that central herd performance recording scheme was • headed and her role in computerising the information collected over 17 years so as to enable predictions of performance to be generated.

Genepool links 40 Hereford breeders to “pool the genes” of their 30,000 cows and the central herd is run on Haldon station under the direction of Mr James Innes and his manager, Mr Paddy Boyd.