Speckle Park International magazine - 2022 edition
Technical news
Improving the decision making process with Single Step BREEDPLAN By Nick Endres
Single-Step BREEDPLAN should be of interest to buyers and sellers looking for improved EBV accuracy for rising two-year-old sale animals.
Calving and joining times for many seedstock producers is both exciting and challenging. In the case of the latter, the wait between dam/sire selections to a final product means it can take years to know whether you’re on the right track. There are many ways to improve the decision-making process and one of those increasingly relied upon by Speckle Park breeders is the incorporation of EBVs. As the old adage goes, ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. EBVs are only as good as the data that goes into them and as a relatively new breed society there is still some way to go. More studs are contributing towards BREEDPLAN which is a step in the right direction to firm up commercial relevance as well as opening the breed to a wider range of buyers. The more data contributed to BREEDPLAN, the better the accuracy and so the more it can be relied upon for decision making. Traditional BREEDPLAN analysis combines pedigree and performance data of both an animal and its relatives to calculate EBVs. Single-Step BREEDPLAN is an evolution of traditional BREEDPLAN which builds on this approach by incorporating genomic (DNA) information into the analysis. Could Single-Step BREEDPLAN be a catalyst to increase the rate of BREEDPLAN adoption by SPI members? To date there are five breed societies that have moved to Single-Step BREEDPLAN including Brahman (April 2017), Hereford (November 2017), Angus (December 2017), Wagyu (April 2018) and Santa Gertrudis (March 2021). These breed societies all have in common large reference populations of animals and a strong commercial focus.
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There are several reasons why Single-Step BREEDPLAN could be of particular interest and benefit to Speckle Park breeders. The major benefit of Single-Step BREEDPLAN is better information on animals at a younger age. DNA samples can be taken soon after birth, meaning breeders can make earlier and more informed breeding decisions which can lead to increased rates of genetic gain. In the case of Speckle Park, many seedstock producers run extensive ET programs leading to several full ET siblings being produced in a single calf drop.
Between 2018and 2020, calves produced by ET exceeded both natural service and AI combined. Under traditional BREEDPLAN, full ET siblings share the same mid-parent EBVs until performance and scan data can be recorded which is generally done as rising two-year-olds. By incorporating genomic information, Single-Step BREEDPLAN can show relative performance differences between full ET siblings and improve EBV accuracy at a much earlier age. Single-Step BREEDPLAN should be of interest to buyers and sellers looking for improved EBV accuracy for rising two-year-old sale animals. The path to SingleStep BREEDPLAN for Speckle Park would follow a different route to the breed societies listed above. Single-Step BREEDPLAN requires a reference population of several thousand animals that have both genotype and phenotype information recorded. The reference population also needs to be representative of the entire population. Other breed societies have faced challenges adopting Single-Step BREEDPLAN due to insufficient genotyping. Speckle Park however are less likely to encounter similar issues with 50K SNP profiles required to register animals born after January 1, 2018. Instead, the challenge facing Speckle Park is insufficient phenotype data caused by lower levels of performance recording and take up of BREEDPLAN. While breed numbers are growing fast enough to achieve a reference population in the foreseeable future, the data shows that insufficient performance recording is currently occurring. For animals born in 2018, approximately 30 per cent were fully performance recorded which is why BREEDPLAN adoption remains a key area of focus for Speckle Park International. The Speckle Park Technical Committee are working with SBTS and AGBU to understand the feasibility and roadmap to adopt Single-Step BREEDPLAN, however, in the meantime it will require more members to record and submit performance data on their herds to make this a possibility.
