RELIABLE ENERGY SOURCE

New Angus Traits

brian house Vice President, Beef Program and Product Manager

In mid-July, the American Angus Association released two indexes designed as specific crossbreeding tools for Angus bulls being mated to dairy cows. Angus-On-Dairy $Value indexes are an estimate of how future beef x dairy (BxD) progeny of each Angus sire are expected to perform, on average. This is compared to BxD progeny of other Angus sires, if the sires were randomly mated and calves were exposed to the same environment.

Two indexes have been developed for dairy producers: Angus-On-Holstein ($AxH) index and Angus-On-Jersey ($AxJ) index to help identify the most profitable Angus sires for each breed for future end marketing.

Each index comprises several genetic traits weighted by the appropriated economics to serve this terminal BxD sector including: calving ease, growth from birth through the feeding phase, feed intake, dressing percent, yield grade, quality grade, muscling and height (only included in $AxH).

I recently shared some insight about the new Angus-On-Dairy indexes in a brief audio update. You can listen to that by following the url below. The access password is ssbeefxdairy. https://vimeo.com/442101895

To sort Angus bulls for these indexes, you can visit the American Angus Assocation here: http://www.angus.org/DairyIndex/DairyIndexSearchCriteria.aspx

For more information about how these indexes were developed, follow the link below to view a presentation by Dr. Stephen Miller at the 2020 Beef Improvement Federation meeting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THLNVHsdvPM&feature=youtu.be

INTERNAL LAUNCH UPDATE

Sandra Utter

We have been talking about an internal launch this spring and the steady stream of information has been deemed to be a more effective way to disseminate the information to the field for a couple reasons. First, there are so many developments occurring within a month, it seems counterproductive to develop material that seems to change weekly. Second, a trickle of information gives those in the field a chance to “digest” the information in a reasonable fashion. We are trying to accomplish this through The Link, podcasts and other documents. The information that has been sent out can be found on mySelect.

In addition, there are several sets of cattle that will be harvested in the next month that provides data to validate the genetics we currently offer as ProfitSOURCE sires. Our team is excited to get this data out there and this will add to our story with a public launch later this fall.

The last reason is the current travel issues we are experiencing is making training or a launch a little more challenging. We are looking at a public launch later this fall and will make sure you are all trained and up to speed with the details related to ProfitSOURCE. 3