Breed associations play many roles. These include maintaining a herdbook, promoting and marketing, rulemaking, governance and social functions. However, in today’s industry, one of these organizations’ most important responsibilities is breed improvement.
As the science of improving livestock has progressed, this has largely involved objective selection tools that provide the means to make genetic improvements as each breed and its members define it. This often includes complex interactions between boards, committees and scientists. Generally, two distinctly different types of committees are required: a breed improvement committee that helps set board priorities and a technical committee that can work with scientists for the best possible outcome.
This article will set out how these entities can best work together toward the ultimate outcome of a more profitable and sustainable livestock industry.
From boards to scientists
Boards at breed associations serve as the policymaking wing of their corporations. They are political bodies tasked with the ultimate decision-making authority within the confines of their bylaws. However, time has shown that as a political body, they do best in prioritizing breed position, rulemaking, budgeting and other policy decisions on what is best for the association and breed.
This puts directly in their purview the areas where genetic predictions are needed to best move their particular breed forward. Ultimately, boards make the best decisions on breed improvement when they are made in the context of long-range planning. This allows them to make long-term investments needed to achieve objective prediction priorities.
Breed improvement committees act as bodies to help boards develop priority needs for genetic predictions—a process that spans a longer period of time than can be allotted during a normal board meeting. This allows for broader grassroots stakeholder input into developing priorities and helps develop leaders for future boards and committee chairs. Breed improvement committees are sometimes large structures. This is as compared to technical committees, which as a best practice comprise a small number of highly scientifically competent people.
However, whenever it comes to implementing policy with regard to the genetic prediction process, the system functions best when boards rely on qualified scientific and technical people to carry out these policies, including staff, highly qualified committees and scientists. Political bodies, such as boards’ responsibilities, come down to approving whether a genetic prediction is desired by their organization and, if so, funding its development and implementation.
Other decisions that are political in nature and not scientific include the base of a genetic prediction. Whether the breed average for a birth weight EPD be -2, 0 or +2 is purely a political decision, as it does not change the ranking of the sires. However, when boards move into areas that will re-rank sires, then they are no longer making policy decisions, but scientific and technical decisions based on politics and not science. This is an inappropriate function of a board, as this type of action often results in less-than-optimal benefits for their customers and the industry.
When boards make the policy decision to move forward with a new objective genetic prediction or the improvement of an existing objective prediction, they should seek out only trained, highly competent scientists and staff to oversee the process of development and validation. Sound statistical procedures and analytical methods should be required in all work, and some formal application process should be developed to ensure this occurs.
Ideally, this includes results reported in peer-reviewed literature. Whether published or not, results should be able to withstand the scrutiny of both peer scientists and a technical committee, which is typically a group of technically competent and informed breeders. A thorough understanding by scientists of the organization’s data and data collection methods is essential for model development. The technical analysts must have a strong understanding of the sources’ impacts on nongenetic effects and biases that are often unique due to each specific organization’s policies.
Technical committees
Scientific findings that result from research must pass technical review by both the scientific community, as well as a highly specialized technical committee. In general, technical committees are made up of association members that have at least a “journeyman-like” understanding of the technical aspects of genetic evaluations, such as the definitions of EPDs and the basics of how they are calculated.
Ideally, this would involve some advanced academic training in animal breeding and genetics and require that prospective committee members have an excellent sense of all aspects of their own herds and the breed’s overall performance for the trait being investigated. This includes a clear understanding of the impact of bias on predictions. They should also have a customer base adequate enough to comprehend the impact of each EPD on commercial cattle operations’ production and bottom line.
In general, then, technical committees are made up of producers who have academic training and manage herds of critical mass in terms of herd size—e.g., deal with large equal opportunity contemporary groups. In addition, they should have large quantities of life cycle data per cow and bull and data on their herd over a significant length of time.
Their job is then to be flexible enough to accept change when new methods are proposed but balance that with the ability to suspect something may not be right when it exceeds their limits of credulity. This includes being able to read and interpret data analysis tools, such as plots, and being willing to put the work in to study a change impact analysis across a wide range of information, including looking at large lists of individual animals.
Committee members must have the integrity to assess the impact of a favorable technical change on their own animals’ values—positive or negative—without it interfering with their judgment in terms of the technical quality of a new prediction. Ultimately, members of technical committees are required to distill their judgment down to simple terms that others can understand and be able to make decisions—based on all of the above—as to whether a developed genetic prediction is ready for implementation.
Summary
Ultimately, when all these entities work together—boards, breed improvement committees, staff, scientists and technical committees—the best outcome will result in the development and improvement of new genetic predictions for a breed. It is ultimately the board’s decision to add a genetic prediction and to fund the research, development and validation of the prediction decided upon. It is then essential to have a highly competent technical committee that can help ensure the new prediction’s quality. — Drs. Bob Hough and Bruce Golden, WLJ correspondents
