Welcome to The Select Sires Podcast, talking Your Success, Our Passion. Starting in three, two, one.
Ethan Haywood
Hello and welcome to season two, episode five of The Select Sires Podcast. I'm your host, Ethan Haywood, and today we are here to talk Calf Wellness Index™ (CW$™). We are joined today by Kevin Souza, managing partner of Victory Farms in South Dakota, and Brad Barham, southern regional sales manager of Premier Select Sires. Kevin, Brad, thanks for joining us from two sides of the states here. We're excited to have this conversation today and thank you very much for your time.
Kevin Souza
Thanks for asking.
Brad Barham
Thanks for having us.
Ethan Haywood
Kevin, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about your history, how you ended up in South Dakota as a managing partner of Victory Farms, and what Victory Farms looks like today.
Kevin Souza
I grew up in California, went to college, and got done with college. I was a herdsman at a large dairy and then started my own breeding business. Got into nutrition where I met my two partners now, Dave Nuss and Peter Orrade, and we decided that we should maybe own a dairy together. So we talked Nebraska and ended up in South Dakota. There was an existing dairy for sale, we ended up buying that in December of 1998. Milked at that facility until November 2015. Then we moved into our new facility, which is a 5,500 cross-vent barn, mostly Jerseys, and F-1 crosses, and that's kind of where we're at today.
Ethan Haywood
And it's a beautiful place out there in South Dakota. I only visit you in the summer, luckily, but it is a challenging place and a really good place to examine calf wellness dollars and its effect in the real world and some harsh climates. It's a cool place to go and walk cows there at your place. It's hard to find somewhere where that many really good cows are in that kind of density. So it's pretty fun. And Brad, you're quite involved, even though you work and reside over on the East Coast. You spent your time in California as well. Tell us a little bit about your role with Premier and then your role with genetic advising here at Victory.
Brad Barham
Yeah, my day job, we kind of joke about that, right? My day job with Premier, I thoroughly enjoy working with our sales team in the Southeast, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and then East Tennessee is my current management territory, and that is all things encompassing, beef, dairy, products, nitrogen. I work with each of our sales reps and manage that. I love my team, but my night job, so to speak, is the connections I've established as I've worked in different parts of this country. Obviously, I lived in California and worked for Select Sires out there. Through some of that, there've been different producers like Kevin and others who wanted some more specific Jersey help-type stuff, and that's my background. I grew up in it and just thrive and love that part of the industry. And so, I've been working with Kevin. I actually look back, and I guess, started in 2018. It seems like yesterday, but in 2018, we started doing a little bit more in-depth, sire selection, IVF program, very specific mating program type stuff, and he just wanted to take his herd to another level and needed somebody like me, I guess to help him with it. But anyways, that kind of gives that, and my wife and I that business would be our Redland Genetics Consulting Business. I only give away one or two free hats. So, Kevin has one, but he only wears it whenever he wants to heckle me. So, we enjoy that thoroughly, enjoy working with Kevin and his team there. He has a fantastic team on farm. Just the level and where he wants to take things is exciting. It pushes me. It helps professional growth and personal growth, and we've really enjoyed that.
Ethan Haywood
And the hard work that you guys are doing both at the farm level and the genetic decision level is really having this massive impact on the Jersey breed. You pull up that NAAB active list and you see a lot of Victory in those names. So, it's so cool to know that a herd that is really evaluating things to a deep level, making sure that cows score and milk very well is having that influence on the gene pool. Kevin, as you go through and make those decisions, what on the farm level are things that you're shooting for in your breeding program? What are the genetic focuses?
Kevin Souza
We do a little bit of showing, got grandkids, and had daughters that showed so you know I believe we could make a good-looking cow that is a good commercial cow. If I'm going to be milking cows, 5,500 of them, and I'm going to look at them I want them to look nice and profitable. So, I think we concentrate a lot on health. We want to get milk out of them, fat and protein but we still want those cows to be around for a while which shows because when we started here, I think our herd was about 44% first lactation and now we're at 29%, and our cull rate and death rate has lowered and our breeding has stayed good. So, I always told Brad, when I got involved with him, I said, you tell us what to do and we'll do it, and if we don't, tell us and we'll do it. So, it's been a great partnership, and it's fun to watch when we do our genetic audits, it's fun to see how much higher we are than the industry and how much we've improved internally also.
Ethan Haywood
And the phenotype that is reflected really, your opinion means a lot to me because you are both such data-driven people, deal with a huge amount of numbers, but you're also a hands-on manager. Like you said, you look at those cows and you're out there looking at cows. So, your opinion means a lot to us as a sire analyst team. Brad, what does the selection criteria look like when we're picking bulls to utilize there at Victory or females that we want to propagate?
Brad Barham
Everything, he wants it all, and that's good. It's kind of funny. If you look hard enough, you can get it all. And some of the specific things we do whenever I go through and mate the herd monthly, it's probably dumb, but we hand mate the herd monthly and when we do that, we always know there are outliers on DPR (Daughter Pregnancy Rate) or milk or whatnot, and just because they're bad on one trait doesn't mean they're a bad overall animal, so we try to patch holes. We have some bulls in there for very specific corrections, and that has done well for us, and we'll get into that later, and when you get into some more finetuning traits. I don't know the exact year, but Zoetis launched their calf wellness stuff and Kevin and Victory were part of that data set and early onset of it. For us to see that data at the beginning, we knew, particularly on the calf rearing side, that it was an area of Victory that he really wanted and we needed to improve upon in order to have the kind of cows he wanted to last a long time. So, we were aggressive on Calf Wellness in sire selection from the beginning, and I think that that's really shown in it. As Kevin said, Combined Fat and Protein at the end of the day, he sells Combined Fat and Protein to Valley Queen Creamery. I don't want to take the foot off the gas there cause that's how he gets paid. We do want his herd to be more than sound reproductively. So we make sure that that never gets out of bounds. We don't necessarily want a +3.0 DPR Jersey cause we understand we're probably sacrificing Combined Fat and Protein. So, we try to keep a lot of the health stuff progressing and in bounds while pushing for the production traits. And when you get into female selection, I think this is kind of funny, but while he is a 5,500 head dairy and it is a commercial dairy if we go to IVF a cow, for example, Kevin has to physically put that animal on a truck and trailer and drive it to the other facility for IVF so first and foremost my comment to him is if she is ugly do not put her on the trailer and we've had a couple of those and he just tells me and it's perfect we move on. We do actively score those cows. We go through them, Select Sires and the team with Herby Lutz and Marc Bolen. We'd go out there a couple of times a year and picture previous donors or daughters of maybe early sires, because we do use a lot of different bulls from Select there. That allows us to see the good, the bad, and the ugly, and know what direction to take. So I do appreciate Kevin's eyes in that, and he's vocal enough about it towards me. It's fun.
Ethan Haywood
It's a very large, well-oiled machine that you guys are running there, and there are a lot of eyes that pass over these cows. And as you mentioned, you are on an individual herd mate. Can you both speak just a little bit about what's the decision-making process for the regular herd? There's a lot of embryos involved. There are some F-1s involved. What does that reproductive program look like from a theory point?
Kevin Souza
Brad mates them and we do what he says, that's how much confidence I have in the program and Brad and Iris, both. My guys are exceptional at following. I mean, on double ovsynch day yesterday, we bred 125 cows. They may use, I mean, in that same line in a palpation realm, they may have to use four different bulls. They do it and they do it good. So, on our end, thankful for that.
Brad Barham
Yeah, I've learned a lot about commercial dairies. Ethan, you'll get a kick out of this. When we first started, I probably had eight different bulls in the cows and I think Josh and Matt wanted to absolutely kill me trying to juggle that. So it's made me learn too that at the end of the day, you've got to be able to execute things and not make it too complicated at the dairy level. So we do limit, there's usually three or four bulls in the sexed semen mix, let's say in the cows. So that it's not way too complex. We use a little bit of Holstein sexed semen to make our F-1s. Those are kind of out of our, we probably use those once you go into your high ranking, JPI™, Cheese Merit Dollars, DWP$®, we look at all three of those indexes. Once you go through those, they get sorted semen. The next tier is young cows to get embryos put in them, and then it sounds bad, but it's the third tier that we put the Holstein sorted semen in. What winds up happening is that it's usually your second or third lactation cows that are better, really good Energy Corrected Milk cows. They've had no problems. They're still there. So we want to make really good commercial F-1s. And that's where we choose to do that. There is still a lot of beef usage at Victory prior to a slight expansion they're doing right now with Valley Queen. I would say there's times that every month I probably rank 35%-40% of the milking herd going to beef semen from the get-go service number one. So conception is king there. We sift through that pretty quickly and want to continue to drive pregnancy rate and maintain that as a commercial dairy.
Ethan Haywood
The focus of finding those three or four bulls to use in the herd that really fit the goals and have a good conception. And it's nice that you guys can couple that with the IVF program because I've seen your semen inventory and you try a lot of different things on that end. And it's really cool how many different particular genetic things you are chasing. And one of those things, as we've talked about, has become Calf Wellness Index. And for those who are not familiar, Brad, could you explain a little bit of what is in this Calf Wellness Index formula? What's the context of that?
Brad Barham
Calf Wellness through Zoetis they look at Calf Scours, Calf Respiratory Disease and Calf Livability, right? So those are the three main things that plague a young Jersey calf and Holstein. Holstein and Jersey have different percentages. I do appreciate that about Zoetis is they look at the breed separately and say, hey this breed has more issues with this, or this breed has, you know, more need to improve this. And so we appreciate them fine-tuning that. When we look at it, I think I'll let Kevin go into some of the changes he's made with calf rearing and how he does data entry, like how they do that. I'd like for him to do that in a second, but those are the three main things. And honestly, that combines into how they do the total dollar formula of calf wellness. When I go to do sire selection, not every stud has Zoetis data so we are very predominant Select Sires both because of you know obviously I work for the company but we do appreciate what Select has done with the program and where and how they collaborate with Zoetis so right now honestly, I try to be above +90 CW$. And I think if you look at the Jersey lineup at Select right now, just the whole active, it's around +70 to +73, I think, is the CW$ average. So we try to be in that upper quartile, you know, that way we keep our foot on the gas.
Ethan Haywood
Absolutely, and Kevin, as we utilize more beef semen, we try and promote longevity within our herds. It becomes important to make sure the calves that we are making survive and thrive because we want them to be healthy, mature cows that last us a long time. Tell us a little bit about “I'm a calf born in South Dakota.” What are some of the conditions I might run into as a young Jersey calf?
Kevin Souza
Depends what season you're in. You know, we deal with two extremes. We deal with humidity in the summer, which is hard, and we deal with cold in the winter. So, when we started looking at the Calf Wellness traits and we started running the numbers, the first time it was pretty evident that the higher CW$ sires, the calves were doing better. As a dairyman, you're looking at it going, “Ah, okay.” When they ran it the second time, you're like, “Wow.” And when they ran it the third time, it's like, “I'm all in.” I mean it's helped our program. We've done some things differently. We feed our calves three times a day. We feed them a high 28:25 milk replacer. Trying to do that for the first 21 days is like a fresh cow. We try to spend as much as we can on them. We raise them in hutches. I have great calf people. When we went into this, trying to manage our heifer inventory, I knew if we were going to manage it tightly, we had to raise the right heifers. We couldn't have 5-10% of those heifers that were duds. So we've invested in a scale, we weigh at birth, we weigh at weaning, we weigh at six months old, pre-breeding, and springers so we can get an Average Daily Gain across that timeframe to see how our program is working. And we're lucky enough, the old facility is a free stall barn, so we're lucky enough now that we have all our heifers inside of a barn all year long, which helps also.
Ethan Haywood
I love your program. I love how many data points there are, and it gives us so much to look at as management teams when you have that many data points and collect them consistently and you have an awesome crew doing it. When you were looking at the quartile analysis from Zoetis, what did you guys see between those? Typically when they do these analyses, it's the top 25% versus the bottom 25% for a given PTA. What were the differences that you saw in the Calf Scours and the Calf Livability and the Calf Respiratory Disease?
Kevin Souza
It's in the 60%, 61%-62%, Brad, I'm thinking.
Brad Barham
Yeah, I think scours was the biggest eye-opener, which is kind of funny. Like we all have this assumption. If you have Jerseys, everybody assumes that they're going to get scours on day seven. Right. It's like this. That's what they do. And to some degree, that is true however we've seen and man they've got the data on it, it is not all get scours right and it's kind of wild when you get into like right now if you look at Zoetis Calf Scours over 105 or 110 even because we've got some in the 115 range which is very extreme. It is amazing, absolutely amazing the difference on farm that that animal performs, it's kind of wild. Scours is the biggest one, respiratory in my opinion gets a little tricky and I don't find it ironic that that's why Zoetis maybe has it at a smaller percentage in the formula it's a little more tricky. But we do see it. Whenever they do the audit, it is evident. Kevin swears to me that he does not change the protocols in who they give Draxxin to or not, that they stay the course on that. And then ultimately, livability, right? Like at the end of the day, do they die or do they survive? And all three of those do show up, but particularly I would say scours and livability are two very big indicators and I don't know if we've got time for a joke Ethan, but Kevin, I was in Japan on a trip for Select Sires actually helping out with that and on that Tuesday morning we got a really good genomic result on a heifer and I had Kevin go find her right, if we have a good one hey please go find this heifer make sure she’s alive. So, in DairyComp step one, she's alive in DairyComp. Step two, she has no notes in DairyComp, which can be one of two things, right? Great or she doesn't exist. So Kevin went and found her, I think it was a couple weeks later, right, Kevin? We had another question, and he went to go find her, and somehow she got out of the hutch and was running down the road. So we're looking to add events on escape, like ones that are really good at escaping, because we feel like that's probably another level of goodness that this calf has. But ironically enough, she actually is a really, really good DWP$. Very good on calf wellness type stuff. And when you look today, we looked yesterday, actually no events in her life, none. And we see that very often. And I think it kind of reiterates for us to continue to watch that trait or those fears and make sure we push it.
Kevin Souza
And it's funny because that calf is in a group of calves, which everybody has problems with groups. She's in a group that had a little bit of a challenge, and she just, I mean, you drive by and she stands out. I mean, her rate of gain coming out of the hutch at 84 days was 1.71.
Ethan Haywood
Awesome, yeah you love when those high genetic ones start displaying the phenotype early and just start killing it, it's the best. Running a facility your size with all the moving parts that you have preventative maintenance is a big portion of it so to be able to kind of do preventative maintenance on our genetics is such a cool aspect and really a next level management in my mind that you're setting yourself up for success. And part of that, too, as we've mentioned, is the sire selection. There's a lot of bulls that you have utilized that are high calf wellness, as well as some bulls in our lineup from you that are high calf wellness. Do either of you want to speak to a couple of those bulls that you think stick out in this space?
Brad Barham
I'll say this to all people. This isn't like a Victory specific thing. You literally get what you breed for. Like if you breed for something, you will get that. And that's why the genetic audits, whether it's performed by Select Sires or Zoetis, that's why I love them. Because at the end of the day, it's like, oh, well my reproduction is not good. And it's like, well, if you breed for negative reproduction, you're probably going to be stagnant there at best. Right, likewise, if you breed for milk, you'll get milk. So if you manage the cows correctly, that's a big part of it, obviously. But it's kind of wild. We're really just now getting into proven sires from when the calf wellness traits began. And I guess one of the ones I'll start with would be 7JE1965 BLIZZARD. He from an early onset was a good calf wellness bull. He had a lot of the other traits that we're looking for. He was outcrossed to a lot of what we had in the Select lineup. So we were very aggressive with him and I think we're very happy with that. If you go look, he now has more data in his set and that was validated. And he's +167 CW$, which is just fantastic. Right. So he's probably one of the early onset bulls that revalidated for us that it really does work. Right now, there comes a point where I have to stop using a bull. We do still understand that as a young sire, you only want a certain amount. So 14JE2107 JX CABAL {5} would be a bull that I finally had to stop using because of the number of calves that we will have. But at +210 CW$ and a lot of other things the bull does too and Productive Life. We've been aggressive there. As we make selections on females in the IVF program to make the next generation, sometimes we make sires with that, sometimes we make good heifers naturally. Victory has been able to make some headway and make some really good calf wellness sires to put in the lineup at Select. I'll let you go into that, Ethan. You probably have written some down. But I do think some of the top 10 or 12, a good portion of them, are from Victory.
Ethan Haywood
Yeah, no, it's like you say, what you breed for, the result is not an accident, especially when you focus as carefully and are as selective as you guys are there at Victory. I think over half of our top 12, six or seven of our top 12 CW$ sires that are available at the time of recording here carry the Victory prefix, and were bred by Victory. So it's not an accident that you guys are pushing the entire industry and the entire breed in that specific trait. And these bulls like 614JE2239 SCHEFFLER, 7JE2266 HARMAN-P, 14JE2182 JX CHANCES {6}, 7JE2207 BIRKDALE {5}, those are bulls that are not just good at calf wellness; they are good at a lot of other things, too. And you guys are integrating that calf wellness with production and type and fertility and milk quality and other health traits to try and make the all-in-one bull that is something that you guys would want to utilize which we appreciate as fellow breeders that we have those opportunities to use those pretty cool bulls out of here.
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Brad Barham
Thank you I think the Jersey program at Select, we work really closely with Herby Lutz, and we understand that there's a fantastic partnership with Jerseyland Sires. And we all three each need to do something a little different in order to have a robust lineup, and I think that has worked. You'll fairly naturally see that some of the Victory bulls may not contain 7JE1758 JX THRASHER {6}. Not that JX THRASHER {6} is not a fantastic bull. He is. But we did pretty consciously try to have some things to be able to put out to the world that have some usability, too. And I think some of the Jerseyland herds are able to utilize that, too, just like Kevin's able to use Jerseyland’s Sire group. So I think it's a good complementary group of breeders and programs that funnel into our system at Select.
Ethan Haywood
Absolutely, and a lot of our listeners that are clicking on this particular episode of the podcast are calf focused, and we know there's a huge genetic component, but also a huge management component. As you guys have grown throughout this process, is there anything else that sticks out to you that you changed within the management side of calf or heifer raising or in the selection side that you think has helped as well that people might be interested in?
Kevin Souza
I mean, I think on our end, we're raising Jersey calves in hutches in South Dakota, which isn't common. So a lot of guys will send them south. So we kind of learned on our own. We use some products that cost a little bit of money up front. We put in some calf monitoring tags now. Very, very, I mean, the data, we're just starting on them, but it's really catching calves early on, and the Jerseys seem to, seems the earlier you catch the Jerseys, the better response you get. We've used some transitional milk or colostrum in the first 21 days. That's really helped with scours. And to me, it's nutrition. I mean, we feed them three times a day. We feed them high energy all year round. One summer, we tried to back off the energy. Where I buy my milk replacer, he says, “Well, you don't need all that fat in the summertime.” Okay, it'll be cheaper. We lost about a tenth of gain that summer. I said, don't ever ask me to do that again. So they need energy, summer, winter, and all year long. And now we're transitioning into our big decisions are when do we go from sand to straw because our mornings are in the forties and fifties and the days are in the eighties so and my guys over there Josh he was just behind me a minute ago I mean, those guys are invaluable. They watch that stuff. I mean, it starts from the top, but those guys are great. And that's what we've kind of done. The bottom line is that genetics helps a lot, but you still have to feed the calf. You feed them good nutrition and you get gains on them. You just don't have problems.
Ethan Haywood
Right. Good management makes a big difference. Genetics makes a big difference. But if you want to be the cream of the crop, like you guys are striving to be, then you've got to have both. And you've got to push the foot down in the accelerator to both of them, which is something that we can see is happening and really appreciate.
Kevin Souza
I told a fellow breeder one time, I said, we talked about calf wellness traits. And he's like, I don't know if I believe it. And he goes, we did some things different on our management and our calves got better. And I say, well, wouldn't it even be better if you had that management change plus the genetics then you get two for one you know so that's the way I look at it.
Ethan Haywood
So as a kind of tying into that, what would you tell a fellow dairyman that's on the fence about either genomic testing or using CW$ as a part of their selection criteria? You know, maybe I can make it up by just feeding them another time a day, or maybe I can make it up by just doing something a little different. What would you tell him or her?
Kevin Souza
I think you have to have both. I mean, we've seen it here, so we buy into it. And we are very, very anal about records. I mean, Brad will tell you, I enter everything into a cow card, which I've learned from a dairyman I used to work with. I mean, bad information in, bad information out. So we can look at this stuff. So for me, if a dairyman wants to try it, test for it, use those bulls, have good records, and then see what it does on your farm. I mean, for us, it's a no-brainer. It’s worked and that's how we were able to find out through records and genomic testing and all that.
Ethan Haywood
Right. Brad, you're kind of on the receiving end when a dairy person decides that they want to try and collect some more data or make a decisional process. If I'm on farm, who do I reach out to, to try and make that type of process?
Brad Barham
I know my team in the Southeast, for example, at Select, and really Select Sires’ cooperatives nationwide, we have a lot of specialists that look at that, that just thrive on the genomic data. What Kevin asked me to do is like another level, but it's great, and I think Kevin mentioned it, trash in, trash out. But if you have good data in, it's great data out. And it's a matter of what you can do with it. If you're going to genomic test and not really use the data, you're wasting money. And I think that's what a lot of people mentally run into. But if you're going to go into it, it is fantastic to utilize. And when you get into cows, and you're figuring out that second lactation and on top cow that, are they performing? Are they good? Do I need another calf out of them or not? Phenotypic data and just looking at them is not going to give you a great answer. It's going to give you a good answer, but you're missing a lot, a lot of it, and I do think that that's where DNA testing throughout the whole herd really, really enables you to take another trajectory. I think if even Kevin's herd, you’ve been 100% genomic testing since ’17 or ’18 roughly?
Kevin Souza
Yeah, I think so at the beginning we were just hand picking and when I told Brad, “Hey we're going to do them all” I think was probably a gift to him because he's like “finally” and what we've done with that data. I mean the payback has been I mean I can't tell you how many times it's paid itself back, but it's information now that he could make honest decisions especially if you're gonna manage your heifer inventory as tight as we did before our expansion which we will do again after the expansion. It's unbelievable how we did that, but our genetics grew. Most guys' genetics grow fast, but they're just breeding heifers, right? You're playing the numbers game. I'm going to make 1,000 heifers. I only need 800 of them and hope to God there's six good ones. Well, we're trying to make 1,000 good ones because we need 1,000 good ones. And that information helps Brad a lot.
Ethan Haywood
Yeah and in that decision making process, you both mentioned it. I feel like it's common to dip your toe in the water by trying to test the ones you think are going to be high and going to rank well. But that data on the middle ones and the lower ones is just as valuable, if not more valuable to you when you're deciding who to breed, who to use as a recip, who to cull, and what the heck to do with some of these brown Jersey heifers that are all looking at you in the pen.
Brad Barham
The upper end is actually easy. I would tell people commercially, you don't genomic test to find your high ones. You genomic test to find your low ones and where you make those decisions. I think there's avenues that people want to want to cull, you know, maybe you cull off 10%. That's great if that's what you need to do. You can look at a place like Kevin's, okay if they have pneumonia twice and they're middle to low they don't need to stay here right. There's things like that you can really learn from and in his embryo program you know we have a hard cut off on the Jerseys even as virgin heifers if they're not at a certain level genetically, embryo and then beef semen so you know it gives you flexibility to make those better decisions all along. That otherwise most programs is going to be, hey, I'm three units of sorted semen, all heifers. And that's fine, too. It's just that you're not going to make the rate of gain genetically that a place like Victory would be doing now.
Ethan Haywood
Kevin, you are a busy guy. There's a lot of things going in and out of that office. We can see whether it's keeping fans running, multiple parlors running, keeping feed in front of cows, manure suckers running. You've got a lot going on, and Brad has alluded to both the businesses that he's involved in. That genetics becomes a team effort that a dairy producer today is so busy. And Brad, you've told me this that they care about genetics and want to focus on genetics but you have so many other things going on that there's such an advantage to bringing in teammates on that genetic portion and people that want to represent you and represent your best interests like Brad does. So it's really exciting for all of us to be involved with teams that have the ability to do that and just encourage producers that are interested in getting this data, but maybe not making the most out of it to reach out to people that like Brad or his team who have context of what these numbers mean and can link us up with people like Kevin that can say this is what we physically are going to do with this data and make sure that we're profiting off the data that we're paying to generate. So it's such a cool system and integrated program that you guys have there. And it's very far reaching within the breed. Is there anything else that you would like to share where you see the future of the Jersey cow breed going with our listeners?
Kevin Souza
Financials on a dairy raising heifers, I mean, it's to me, it's like an insurance policy, right? We need them. We just don't need to raise too many of them. And we used to, I was a heifer hoarder. We would, we had 1,500 more heifers than we needed. We have 1,500 less heifers. We maintained our herd size and we've upped our production and our genetics have jumped. They're an asset, but they're also a liability. I mean, we're paying for those heifers for two years or 22 months in our case before they come in. So I think, like Brad said, when you're making the right heifers to make them come in, we have to make sure we're just doing the right ones. And I think that information without genomics, I mean, we could probably do parent averages. We wouldn't be as good. And I think that's where I look at genomics as a cost, but then there's the return for us. I mean, it's been more than enough payback for us on that end of it. And Brad, I mean, kudos out to Brad and Iris. I mean, especially on the genomic side. If these two weren't watching genomics, I'd have a whole list of conflicts. So to me, that's been our jump over the hill thing to get where we are now is because of them helping us. And my guys here, Brad and Matt, 20 years with me. If it wasn't for them, we probably couldn't do this either.
Brad Barham
That is actually one of the biggest things, like we talk about, oh, we have the DNA on them, and Victory's like maybe 2% wrong on calf identity. Like, it's fantastic. There are places that are not at 2%. I think the national average is 15%-20% misidentified. And you get to thinking about that and you think you're breeding the best animals. But until you know, you really don't know. You're going to be struggling with that. We've seen that from a Select Sires standpoint, working with other herds and they begin genomic testing and there's some things to change in the maternity pen, right? That kind of stuff from a management perspective. And there's a lot of good things that come from it.
Ethan Haywood
In the competitive environment today, that's what it's going to be is those who are excelling genetically, but also using that to make decisions for management on the farm, whether that's how we're feeding and managing calves or that's how we're tagging and managing our maternity. Absolutely. Well, Kevin, Brad, thank you both so much for taking the time to be here with us today.
Brad Barham
Thank you, Ethan.
Ethan Haywood
We hope that you have a safe finish up of harvest and things continue. And we'll be looking out on that top JPI list for more Victory males and females. Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. Join us again next time here on The Select Sires Podcast.