Podcast Ep. 7: Equip Her With Profitable Genetics

Thanks for joining us. I'm Joel Penhorwood. We've spoken quite a bit recently on the focus on longevity and breeding for the healthier, longer-living dairy cow. But as a result, what traits should I use to place a strong emphasis on profitable genetics? Does an emphasis on health traits adversely affect production traits? And is this actually making a profitable difference in my herd? So many questions, but not to worry, because we're reaching back to our Q&A series and a discussion with Chuck Sattler, vice president and manager of genetic programs at Select Sires. And Dr. Dan Weigel, director of outcomes research for Zoetis Inc. Select Sires Director of Research Dr. Bo Harstine helps to host this discussion. We'll get to that in a second. But first, it's time for today's highlight of the podcast. Jersey Development Manager Herby Lutz joined us last episode to discuss the exciting sexed-only options in the Jersey breed. Today, he's back to continue on the Jersey discussion. Herby?

Herby Lutz 

Hello, I am Herby Lutz, the Jersey development manager for Select Sires and we as a sire team are extremely excited to bring you an offering of Jersey genetics for all member-owners and breeders of the Jersey breed. No matter what your desire, we try to have a sire to match what you are looking for. Maybe it's high-ranking proven results like 7JE1630 KESTREL-P or 14JE769 JX STONEY {3}, or maybe bulls that make the kind you'd like to see every day, like 7JE5004 CHROME, 7JE1344 MATT, 7JE1354 TEXAS, 14JE725 CASINO, 7JE5032 VICTORIOUS, or a new proven star like 7JE1699 JX PINE {6}, 7JE1617 JX KIAWA {6}-P, and 7JE1719 JX ADAMA {6}. Or maybe you like more genomic stars like 507JE1816 TUCKER {6}, 507JE1820 HOLEINONE, 507JE1985 GEPPETTO {6}, 507JE1913 ALCAN, 7JE1907 MAHOMES, 550JE1947 JX CORSAIR {5}, 7JE1965 BLIZZARD, 507JE1987 PATRONUS, 614JE1908 POTOGOLD, 507JE1928 NICKLAUS or 7JE1980 KAMAKAZI, or maybe polled is your desire. And on top of the ones mentioned earlier, look for 507JE1930 DABO-P, 507JE2000 MONSTER {6}-P, 614JE1929 JX SKALSKI {5}-P, 14JE1830 JX HOOPTIE {4}-P, 507JE1899 JX GOALS {5}-P or proven bulls like 7JE1219 OLIVER-P and 14JE1675 IROQUOIS-P. Select Sires, Accelerated Genetics, GenerVations and World Wide Sires strive every day to meet your desires to be the most profitable and long term sustainable dairies around the world. We appreciate each and every one of your comments and help in building what we think is the most all-around and elite Jersey lineup in the industry.

Joel Penhorwood 

Thanks, Herby. As always more on those sires and many more online at  www.selectsires.com. Now onto our main discussion led by Dr. Bo Harstine.

Bo Harstine 

Today, our experts will be reviewing traits and indexes to equip your cattle with profitable genetics. Joining me for today's discussion is Chuck Sattler, the vice president and manager of genetic programs at Select Sires. And Dr. Dan Weigel, the director of outcomes research for Zoetis. Chuck and Dan, thank you both for joining us today.

Chuck Sattler 

Thanks, Bo. Glad to be here.

Dan Weigel 

Yes, thanks so much.

Bo Harstine 

Great. Let's get started. Our first question is going to put some of those profitable genetics into perspective. Why is there a need to place a strong emphasis on health traits?

Chuck Sattler 

Well, Bo, we're definitely seeing a reduced level of dairy replacements being raised across the industry. So with reduced number of heifers being raised, we're going to see a reduced level of culling in the milking herd. And with the reduced level of culling in the milking herd, we're going to see herds with that have more older cows in the herd. So obviously, there's tradeoffs here that we're dealing with. As we're looking at young cows versus older cows, older cows will definitely milk more. But they'll also have more struggles, avoiding things like mastitis and hoof problems and getting pregnant. So we're dealing with some tradeoffs here that herd managers deal with all the time. But we, I think, have some good updates of some economic data to show what the right balance here is. And then we have some updated Economic Studies from the University of Florida and Dr. Albert DeVries. And Dr. DeVries, has been studying the economics of culling for a long time and recently refreshed this study because his thoughts were that we're seeing increased rates of genetic improvement over the years, and he was wondering how this impacted the economics of culling. So he updated this study, and included all the important economics of herd replacement costs. Included lack of maturity costs are the benefits of increased production, as cows get older, included the genetic opportunity cost, to look at the value of the rates of genetic progress, the fact that our heifers have better genetics than our older cows and balanced all these kinds of things in the study. And the bottom line here is he found that the optimum culling rate is right at 30 percent, there's a pretty steady improvement as you reduce culling rate from 40 to 30 percent. It gets flattened out there between 30 and 25 percent. So there isn't much difference, loss or increase in value from changes between those two values. But then if you reduce culling below 25 percent, you start to see increase in costs, again, as you have more and more older cows. Somewhere between 30 and 25 percent culling rate seems to be the sweet spot. Industry average has come down recently, but it's probably somewhere between 35 and 40 percent. So we have room for improvement there. And definitely economic benefit to reduce culling and reducing the number of younger cows in our herd and moving to a herd with more later lactation cows. So then the question then is, are we breeding the right cows that we'll be happy with when they're milking in their third lactation? And I think there's some different challenges there. When we think about what the cows need to do. And we need to think a little bit less about the cows with high production and a little bit more of breeding for cows that can avoid those health events like mastitis, like lameness, making sure they're getting bred on time, and, and some other things like twinning and transition metabolic diseases. So I really think that as we work with more older cows, there's definitely more value, and we need to put more emphasis on selecting for those health traits.

Bo Harstine 

All very relevant points. Dan, do you having to add to that?

Dan Weigel 

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think Select Sires and Zoetis both share a common thing, we spend a lot of time working with our customers on the farm analyzing their data, we're seeing the same things, right. I mean repro is really, really improved. I mean, you guys, I don't know if it's you, or the systems or whatever. But I'm seeing 40 percent preg rates now. Who would ever dreamt of that? I mean, I remember when 13 was, okay. So it's tremendous differences there. And again, as repro increases, well, then now other things are more important for reasons the cows are leaving. And again, strong. I'm a quantitative guy, I really like numbers. That's kind of a soft word. Strong. I mean, certainly production is a big part of our index, Dairy Wellness Profit Dollars (DWP$). And we put we put a fair amount of emphasis on health traits. I mean, I'm not a person that really maybe, you know, likes individual indexes for herds, you know, I analyze a lot of data, everybody has kind of the same issues. I mean, I remember years ago, we launched the calf health traits and one producer said, yeah, I just built a new barn and he's I'm not really treating calves anymore. I don't think I need that. Well, okay, five years go by, analyzed his data the other day. He's treating a fair number of calves. So you know, those same pressures problems are always on all the dairies we have. Probably the one exception would be, lameness does seem to be lower in robotic barns. If you're a herd that's completely robotic, I'd probably entertain reducing the incidence of lameness a little bit. But again, Chuck hit it on the head mastitis is strong. Well, certainly, I think it should be more than less than 1 percent of the index. I mean, that's, I mean, especially if you're a Jersey breeder. I mean, if you’re not paying attention today, that breed has a fair amount of mastitis in it. And if you're not paying attention today, it's like for some Jersey bulls at the top of some lists that are really bad for mastitis. That's not what anybody wants.

Bo Harstine 

Very good information, Dan. And I heard you mentioned lameness in that and so that leads us right into our second question. Why should producers place more emphasis on Zoetis’ lameness than other traits, like feet and leg composite?

Chuck Sattler 

Yeah, I think that is definitely a timely question. I think traditionally, when we thought about breeding for longevity, we thought about things like selecting for improved udders and improved feet and legs. And we certainly have a lot more genetic tools to work with today that can help us breed longevity, and it's probably appropriate for us to rethink some of those traditional approaches that we've used in the past. We've done some studying of the foot and leg traits here. And what we like to do is to look back at the performance of our bulls, and so we assembled a set of genetic evaluations on high reliability bulls, bulls that have more than 100 daughters in their productive life proof. And we also included only those bulls that we had Zoetis health trait evaluations for and the reason we'd like to do this is this way we can look at those bulls that have real daughter performance information, some real daughter data to tell us how those daughters are doing and how they're lasting in the herds. That produced a file of about 700 bulls. So a pretty comprehensive and historical perspective to look at. And then we looked at the correlations in the genetic evaluations of those bulls, comparing the longevity measures - Productive Life, Livability, and a combined value of production and Productive Life that we called lifetime combined fat and protein production, and correlated them to the foot and leg traits for those same bulls. Again, with correlation values, those values can range anywhere from minus one to plus one with a zero value that shows no relationship between the two traits. And the values that are closer to one would show a strong relationship between the two traits depending on the direction. So when we look at the traditional conformation traits, the foot and leg composite and the foot and leg score, what we're seeing is values that are fairly close to zero for foot and leg composite, and maybe even slightly negative, -0.1, and for foot and leg score we're seeing correlations of about -0.2, which says that there isn't a much relationship between these confirmation traits and longevity. And if there is that might be a little bit unfavorable, and that the bulls we think are siring better feet and legs, that might be a little bit counterproductive. But then when we look at the new traits, the lameness trait from the Zoetis evaluations, we're seeing positive correlations a little higher value more in the .25 range. And that gives us a little more confidence that including the lameness trait in in our selection programs will actually help us avoid some of those hoof health and lameness problems and assist those cows in achieving a longer productive life and more lifetime production. So I think this is very telling. We have lots of traits to select for in our breeding program, and in this day and age can't really afford to spend a lot of time to select for things that don't have a clear benefit. And typically, I think the other key point here is typically we're going to do better when we directly measure and select for the things that we're really trying to change. So, a trait like lameness, where we can observe it and measure it directly in our herds and then select for it, we're going to be a little more effective than if we're looking for a conformation trait that is indirectly related to improving what we're trying to achieve. And in this case, that would be improved hoof health and better mobility. So, lameness, hoof health is an issue on most dairies, especially as cows get older, and this is some good news to hear that shows that the Zoetis lameness trait is really helpful at addressing that issue.

Bo Harstine 

Very good news. Very helpful. And I think our third question that I'm going to go into is going to be very relatable to our producers. So if I gain these evaluations on my animals, do the high-ranking animals actually deliver the extra profit promised by these indexes? And where does this increase in lifetime profit come from?

Dan Weigel 

Bo, absolutely, this is a huge question for us, right? I mean, so we, genomic testing is expensive, I mean, and producers want reassurance that what they're spending their money on is worthwhile. And again, we're lucky, you know, as well as we can go to them right away and say, well, look at these calf health traits, those are working, we can show back the scours and the respiratory diseases, a little bit of the mortality rate, they do tend not to test all the dead calves. But so yes, then we can look at Heifer Conception Rate, you know, because they, you know, they start, you know, cashing and sending us those checks, and they wonder, and then, you know, invariably, you can come back a year later, and look at Metritis and daughter stillbirth, and few other things. And, again, I think, Select does the same thing with their genetic audits. We show how well these traits are working. And we had a herd that, you know, Metritis was too high. And it clearly wasn't the heifers. It was it was them. And next year, they were better. That's what it's all about. But, the big one is lifetime profitability and productive life. How does this productive life thing work? You know it's really hard for them to get their head around, predict that so, again, we had a study that we did, published last year, people may have had something going on, and they may have missed it, but we've published it. And so again we went out to herds, and we, these are customers who are paying to test their animals with us. And it was five different herds, about 2,200 heifers across the five herds. And what we did is we went back and calculated our predictions with only information that was available when these heifers were heifers. Because we wanted to send out, you know, get something as close as possible to what we're sending out today on heifer calves, right? The only exception would be Livability, which you know CDCB added later, we couldn't go back in time and get that. So, again, this is as close we could come to a heifer calf prediction, and we rank the animals within each herd on this Dairy Wellness Profit Dollar Index. And then we looked at their data, you know, they're born in 2011. Their careers are pretty much over at the time we did the study. And, for a young guy, like you, Bo, this probably no big deal. But for an old guy like me, this was science fiction when I was your age, right? I mean, that we could go out to a herd and say, okay, this is your bottom 25 percent. And we looked across these five herds. Most economics say, a cow would need to make 50,000 pounds of milk to breakeven. Well, you can probably look at that total of 54,000 and say, well, these girls weren't that profitable, right? They paid the bills, they kept the power on, but did they gain us anything? Not really. The best group, almost 20,000 pounds more milk. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Again, Productive Life, we predicted these cows, the difference between the top and the bottom would be four months. And we actually got 6.6 months. This is where indexes get real tricky. You know, why did we get more than we predicted? Well, we got this these traits, like Metritis, and DPR, and lameness and Mastitis. And all of those things help predict how long cows will stay in the herd. So again, by weighting that index, we got more productive life than we actually expect. If you go through and do the math, you know how many days they were in the herd? And how much milk did they give? The best group gave on average, about four pounds more milk per day, they were in the herd. Four pounds more than the bottom group. And that was more than we expected. And again, that's because mature cows give more milk. Plus the heritability of milk was just a little bit low. Yeah, sum of all those things. How much money did they make? We counted for live calves are all the things you expect $800 difference between the best and worst. That's on average, that's the average, every cow in the group of 550 cows. Wow, that's pretty cool. A lot of money. So, we dig down this, mastitis goes up with lactation, just to bring this out. It's hard to analyze that, we require a cow to stay in the herd for 280 days before we'll say she didn't have mastitis. And you can see there's differences between these groups for how many cows could make it that far. And again, how many have made a second lactation? There's big differences there. Dramatic differences in mastitis between those two groups. And, the first question is, should we put a strong emphasis on the health traits. I mean this data says pretty clearly that mastitis is a big deal. And I mean, they didn't just cull these cows by gate cutting them, right? Pretty clear that these cows left because they had mastitis. And, in turn, they decided to lower their cull rate. I wonder how much more mastitis are you going to have in your cows if you do that given how much more we see in the later lactations?

Bo Harstine 

Very good information. And hey, money is money. Transcends age of the producer, Dan. Chuck, do you have anything to add?

Chuck Sattler 

Yeah, I would just like to say that this is a really cool study in that the validation of these kinds of indexes is a pretty rare event in the industry. That's a complicated process that takes, as Dan said, a lot of time for these cows to exhibit their lifetime performance. So it's a really high bar to demand of an index, and I think there's probably only two other national indexes around the world that have gone through this process. And now DWP$ is the third one, and certainly gives us and the rest of the industry confidence that the assumptions and thought process behind DWP$ makes sense and turns out to be valid in real-life situations.

Bo Harstine 

Most definitely, Chuck. And so I'm going to move us on to our last question for this session. And I've heard it from more than one producer, definitely. Does an emphasis on health traits adversely affect production traits?

Chuck Sattler 

Yeah, this is an excellent question. And I think it's one that we all struggle with, as we put together indexes and selection programs, whether you're an A.I. stud or a dairy farm, and we just need to remember that we need to breed for the whole cow and use a long-term perspective as we put the traits together, and looking at one trait and ruling out a bull because of that one thing can be a risky thing. So you just need to have the whole perspective. These good health and fertility genetics, I think actually can allow cows to get past some of those hurdles and really maybe express their production potential to the fullest extent where if you maybe have an extreme high production bull that has a hole in a health trait or fertility trait maybe ends up the daughters having somewhat of a limited life and not fully expressing their production potential. So, I like to use an example in our new employee training process that compares two bulls, ones with high PTA production, compared to a lower production bull with better health traits. Sacrificing 500, a couple hundred pounds of milk isn't that big of a deal if that animal is able to avoid some health events and last a month or several months longer with Productive Life. So with a cow making 100 pounds a day only takes 30 days to make up 1,000 pounds of production per lactation. So that doesn't take too many extra days or avoiding a lameness event or avoiding a mastitis event for that cow to make up her a small difference in production value in her PTA's.

Bo Harstine 

Definitely, we talked last week, the best cows are the ones you don't notice, no health events popping up. Dan, anything to add?

Dan Weigel 

Yeah, and your spot on, Bo. And again, you know, people think that there's a negative correlation there. Well don't forget, you know, Chuck and I have been around. We take the long view. Correlations change, I mean, look at Calving Ease and growth. I mean, that's the strongest correlation you'll ever find. And we broke it in both beef and dairy. So yeah, we can change these correlations, absolutely. Again, we're looking at a balanced cow or, you know, we're using it in an index. So they can be extreme for different things. There'll be high on the index. I think one of the things that we do, though, is we do penalize these high heifers a little bit in our current system. I was analyzing data for a herd this weekend. And they were complaining, hey, some of their high fertility index cows, especially two-year-old really weren't milking as well as they wanted them to, when I started digging into the data, and well, yeah, they got pregnant faster as heifers. And again, when do we breed our heifers? Well, we breed them so the average heifer gets pregnant on time. So you know, those heifers calve too young, too small, and it costs them a lot of pounds, and then they got pregnant right away, then they didn't abort as much. And open cows give a lot more milk than cows, heifers that are pregnant still trying to grow. So I mean, we really kind of, again, the other thing, they were looking at milk. The meter doesn't spin as fast we're selecting for component. And when you have a high component cow, it really makes a big, big difference. 3.5% Fat Holstein is 12 percent below the breed average. I mean that's hard for a lot of people to, to get in their head. The other thing is, you know, we're an instant gratification society, you know, Twitter and everything and keeping your head that hey, putting off, we don't want these health events. This is a study we just published in the Journal of Animals. And it looks at the incidence of twins with our predictions across different fertility management protocols, you know, the herd one's utilizing a tag system to breed their cows and very few hormonal interventions. And in the herds four and five are using double OvSynch, which appears, federal law says I can't promote, that it reduces twins, it appears to reduce the incidence of twins a little bit. But still, you look at our breed average cow, which is 100. That's 10 percent, 12 percent twins, on average. Now that's something we just want to live with and say, well, that's the way Holstein cows are. Now Chuck, and I remember 10 years ago, Holstein heifers had 10, 12 percent dead calves when they calved and we just said, well, that kind of sucks. And we put it in our index, we selected for it. And over time, we've made tremendous progress and now our Holstein heifers have 2 percent dead calves. I look at these traits, it doesn't have to be all of our index, but we're going to make progress over time. And the ones that don't have these things are worth more than others. If I have ever heard of two-year-olds at 1 percent, twins, twins not a big deal to me. If I have a herd of older cows, twins are a bigger deal.

Bo Harstine 

Awesome information, very relevant. And you two are doing such a great job of presenting that even I understand it. And so with that, Chuck, Dan, thank you both for joining us today. We really appreciate your time and those valuable insights you've given us.

Chuck Sattler 

Thanks, Bo. It's been a pleasure.

Joel Penhorwood 

Great discussions here today. And you could find more on this topic and many more online at www.selectsires.com. That wraps it up for today's podcast. I'm Joel Penhorwood. Thanks for tuning in.