The Ebbs and Flows of Animal Breeding

If you've been an animal breeder for very long you will experience the ebbs and flows of genetic progress and marketing. You hit a solid lick for several years where you just can't miss. Every mating seems to work out just like you planned. Then as soon as that run starts it seems to fade away just as fast.

Likely, what happened was that you were working off the outcross effect. Let's say that you have a herd of tightly bred cows that have very similar pedigrees. They also likely have a level of uniformity. Sooner or later, you bring in a bull that is a genetic outcross and the calves are phenomenal. His daughters, on the other hand, are hit or miss, or they make great cows, but their calves are inconsistent. In this case, your battle is with heterozygosity - meaning that there is enough diversity in the gene pool to be great performers, but it creates a challenge in realigning these gene pairs in a fashion that creates consistency. In this instance, I find it best to reset your herd by using a bull that has a pedigree that is stacked with similar genetics to your cow base. As long as he also carries the matching traits to your herd he will help by stacking in more homozygous gene pairs to your cow base.

Another possibility is that you had a very consistent set of females that were uniform in type and kind and you mated them to a bull that brought forward very specific traits to improve your herd. If this bull is very prepotent, you will get all of the good and the not so good together. He stamps his calves with all of the bone and natural thickness that you desired but they don't have the structural correctness that you are used to. This can carry on for a few generations and possibly be accentuated if you don't find the right bull for these females.

In either case, finding the right bull to bring into your herd is paramount. What works the best is playing the long game by breeding "Like to Like." This means that you seek the sires that possess similar traits to your cows while making small incremental changes along the way. This may seem too slow for many, but if you don't require drastic change, it will pay off by keeping your herd out of the ebbs and flows of animal breeding.