[inline_image file=”d28be53b24ae53e9959ae0ff1b2389ee.jpg” caption=”Cattle gather around a Select Sires AI trailer. Photo courtesy of Select Sires, Inc.”]
Many advances in artificial insemination (AI) technology and heat synchronization have helped increase conception rates over the past few decades, and research is continuing to make progress in protocols that can be helpful to commercial producers. Improvements in tools that enable more cows to conceive to AI breeding and enhance ranchers’ breeding goals can improve efficiency and profitability in the beef industry.
Dan Busch of Select Sires MidAmerica did his undergraduate work and received his master’s degree at University of Missouri, working with Dr. Jordan Thomas, beef production specialist. Busch has stayed in touch with the faculty and their research. “They developed the new 7 & 7 heat synchronization protocol that increases pregnancy rates another 10 or 11 percent and we’ve been using this program in the field now. We used it very heavily this past fall, and are seeing good results,” Busch said.
“For this to work, cow herds must be well managed. It won’t solve all problems, but is a tool that can help achieve a little higher pregnancy rate.” It works best if a producer has already been doing AI and heat synchronization several years and already has cows grouped a little tighter in the calving/breeding season.
Producer feedback on this new protocol has been good. “They are seeing very good estrus response, and now the pregnancy results are coming in from fall breeding—looking better than the average of what they typically saw with the old synch programs,” he said.
There are also many genetic tools that ranchers can use today, and combined with better AI performance, these can move a cow herd more quickly in the right direction. “These tools are now available for both commercial and purebred operations. When looking at growth and carcass traits, these new tools are very good predictors, on the performance side. In a commercial cow herd, however, fertility is still the No. 1 driver of profitability. You’ve got to first have a calf!” he explained.
“There is genetic technology available to test for fertility, though heritability of reproductive traits is low. We have some tools, however, that enable us to select a little for fertility, but much of it comes down to overall herd management—like selection for females that breed early in the season or settle to the AI breeding (rather than later, to the cleanup bulls), and retaining females out of those early-breeding cows,” Busch said. It takes management to make the genetic tools work for you.
“Last fall we did a webinar series for our employees and Jordan Thomas sent me a Power Point he put together that looks at what he calls the snowball effect of selecting for reproduction—selecting females that breed in the first 21 days versus females that breed in the second 21 days.”
This enables a rancher to capitalize on the heritability of fertility and improve the fertility of your cows, over time. Some producers and AI reps across the country wonder if the beef industry has been pushing performance and carcass too much, and sacrificing on the cow side and fertility.
“We need to find the right balance, to maximize performance and carcass but still have females that breed back successfully, in a short time frame,” he said. These new AI tools can help producers move in that direction.
“Synchronization and AI help us achieve this, but if we can have the desired genetic traits come along with it, we can continue to improve on both sides.” It is always a work in progress.
The breeding decisions we make today, such as bull and cow selections, are important because we’ll have to live with them for the next 10 years. With the daughters you get from that bull, you may not know for several years if they will be what you wanted.
“In the Angus breed they have the heifer pregnancy EPD, which is a good tool, but it takes a while. Once a bull is 7 or 8 years old and has daughters in production, this is when we know whether the EPD was correct or not when he was a young bull,” Busch said.
The tools and technology for better beef production and better cow herds have come a long way. “With sex-sorted semen we can now make even better use of some of those older bulls if they are still around and have good semen quality. We can produce a sex-sorted product and make more heifers, if that’s our goal,” he said.
At this point, the 7 & 7 Sync protocol from University of Missouri is the newest helpful technology, though there’s also been some recent work at Texas A&M. “They’ve done something similar except they don’t put the CIDR in early. They’ve seen improvement in pregnancy rate also, but not quite as much as we’ve been seeing with the 7 & 7 protocol,” Busch said.
Thomas has also done a lot of sexed semen trials. Getting as many pregnancies as with regular semen is still the biggest challenge. “There’s enough variability among bulls that it’s still difficult—some bulls work well for this and some not so well, for a sex-sorted product,” Busch said.
“We’re also working in the dairy industry, which helps us evaluate beef bulls. When young beef bulls come in, we do fertility evaluation, collect semen from Angus and Sim-Angus bulls, and send their sexed semen to large dairy herds that use it to create male calves from a certain percentage of their dairy cows.”
The top cows are bred to dairy bulls to produce replacement dairy heifers, but there are only a certain number needed. The other cows can be bred with beef semen to create male calves that will be worth more to go into a feedlot.
“By using young, unproven beef bulls for this, breeding high numbers of cows, within two months we know the fertility of that semen, compared to proven bulls.” This also opens up a new market for seedstock producers, to send semen to dairies that utilize this kind of program.
“I work with a herd of 5,000 dairy cows that is using only 40 percent dairy semen and about 60 percent beef semen. About 30 percent is sex-sorted heifer semen and most of the rest is sex-sorted male beef semen,” he says.
There is a lot of opportunity for sex-sorted semen in the commercial beef industry as well.
“We can select which cows we breed with sex-sorted semen to generate replacement heifers, and use more of a terminal cross on the rest of the herd, to have more pounds of steers to sell,” says Busch. There are many ways to use these new tools today. — Heather Smith Thomas, WLJ correspondent
