KANSAS CITY, Mo. – A joint North American cattle evaluation task force, representing the American and Canadian Hereford associations, has released details of an initiative to improve dissemination of breed performance information to commercial cattleman and their purebred industry seedstock providers.
The initiative formalizes a six-year pooling of the two groups’ international performance databases, allowing head-to-head, cross-country comparisons on more than 2 million animals.
Improvements. The improvements include:
* Use of a multi-trait model to provide more accuracy in performance predictions.
* Better maternal estimates.
* Incorporation of a newly perfected age slicing technique, useful in small herd situations, which will reduce the impact of seasonal changes on the direct comparative performance of animals.
* Inclusion of performance records on ET calves, where breed and age of the recipient dam are known.
* Inclusion of bull test station growth and carcass data where contemporary group status has been maintained from the weaning phase.
Producers using Hereford genetics can expect to see minor changes in some individual animal EPD values. Present breed EPD averages will not change, although some individual animals with pedigree estimates or low accuracies may experience changes until they achieve a higher degree of accuracy based on the number of calves reported.
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