When the Red Angus Association of America (RAAA) was founded in 1954 as the nation’s first performance registry, it started a string of innovations and firsts that set the tone of the organization to this day. It was the seven families—McDaniel, Forbes, Chiga, Givhan, Hetzel, Gayden and Perry—who were able to come together and form the RAAA with a common vision of a breed based on objective selection and a commercial focus.
To put it in the context of the time, the reds were considered genetic defects by the American Angus Association, and performance was still just a theory, so these seven families were really using Angus’ castoffs to implement a philosophy as much as start a breed.
Let’s begin with something as simple as the RAAA’s first board. It was coed, with two of the seven original board members being women, and one of them a junior! This was simply unheard of at the time, and the RAAA has had strong women leaders on the board for the majority of its history, including three presidents and four of its CEOs/executive secretaries. It is only right that the first woman to have her portrait added to the Saddle and Sirloin Gallery was one of Red Angus’ founding members, Sally Forbes.
Being the first performance organization incorporated, it is a given that the breed would have a long list of firsts. A requirement from the very beginning for registration was submission of a weaning weight. From its onset in 1954, RAAA has had open and unrestricted AI, which was revolutionary among the existing beef breeds at the time, and it would not be enacted by the other British breeds until the early 1970s.
At the RAAA formational meeting, they also outlawed the use of nurse cows, which was a prevalent practice at the time for showing cattle. Just as an example, Pennsylvania State University would have been the most active university showing beef cattle in the 1950s, and they would typically exhibit a large show string comprised of Shorthorns, polled Herefords, Angus and steers.
To “fit” the show cattle, they maintained approximately 45 Holstein nurse cows for the beef unit. Although hard to fathom today, having nurse cows was just standard operating procedure for purebred breeders at the time.
The original Red Angus certificate also had a place for yearling weight, but when RAAA was formed, the industry had not yet decided if it should be adjusted to 365 or 400 days. When Performance Registry International standardized it in a subsequent year, RAAA had a board meeting already scheduled for the following week to adopt the new standard and be the first to collect yearling weights.
Although the RAAA was set up as the antithesis of the show ring, the founding members decided early on that exhibiting cattle had value to promote the new breed, but only in a way that demonstrated the association’s groundbreaking philosophy. In 1956, this resulted in the first show to use performance data in the show ring and even develop a system of how the objective data should be weighed by the judge in arriving at their placings.
With a commercial focus from the beginning, RAAA is believed to have been the first breed to promote planned crossbreeding when it came out with a program in 1961. This was followed by a certified F-1 program in 1970, and in 1980, RAAA opened its herdbook to allow for the recordation and registration of various percentage cattle.
This promotion of crossbreeding continued in 1999 when RAAA partnered with the Limousin and Simmental Associations to run a crossbreeding advertising campaign. In more recent years, RAAA has developed the “Premium Red Baldy” program with the American Hereford Association and the “American Red” with the Santa Gertrudis Breeders International.
Of course, RAAA’s most consequential move to support crossbreeding was when it partnered with the American Simmental Association in approximately 2013 to form International Genetic Solutions to produce across-breed EPDs for a number of breeds. This allows the genetic predictions of the various participating breeds to be on the same base and scale, which makes them directly comparable when designing a crossbreeding system.
RAAA’s ongoing goal of having the best objectively described cattle in the industry was enhanced when it became only the second breed to use the animal model to calculate EPDs in the 1980s. However, it kicked into an even higher gear starting in the mid-1990s. This started with the implementation of the industry’s first total herd reporting program in 1995, which requires the production of every cow and the performance of every calf raised through weaning to be accounted for on an annual basis.
When a producer does not report this information, the female in question is inactivated. Having complete contemporary group performance data through weaning allows RAAA to assume the data will have a normal biological distribution. This allowed RAAA to implement a series of data filters to remove data with properties that were not heritable.
With the goal of being “the maternal common denominator in progressive commercial producers’ crossbreeding systems,” RAAA went about building the genetic prediction tools to help achieve this goal. This included the release of the industry’s first female reproductive EPD in 1995: stayability. In 2003, the first female reproductive sire summary was released, which also included heifer pregnancy, and in 2004, the first mature cow maintenance EPD was released.
RAAA was an early adopter of carcass EPDs, releasing their first ones in the spring of 1996, and they were the first to take the approach of utilizing ultrasound as a correlated trait to increase the accuracy of the carcass predictions. Regarding the breed’s carcass and feedyard traits, RAAA hired a commercial marketing specialist in 1994 to help build pull-through for Red Angus bulls by improving the value of the Red Angus influenced feeder and fed cattle. This was the second program of its kind in the industry, with Gelbvieh having the first.
The flagship of the commercial marketing program was the Feeder Calf Certification Program, which was audited and approved by USDA in 1995. It has the distinction of being the first USDA Process Verified Program in the country, and it provided a pathway to enter Angus branded beef programs through a genotypic method.
RAAA was also one of the pioneers in value-based marketing. What little value-based marketing there was at that time keyed off the weekly plant average for the various value components. The system Red Angus worked out was based on grid pricing, in which value signals were largely fixed, and in this sense, it was the first of its kind in the industry.
For the past 68 years, RAAA and its members have been industry leaders in terms of blazing a path of objective selection and commercial focus. With a newly adopted strategic plan and funding allocated for an aggressive research program, look for the breed to continue to lead the industry through its science-based approach. — Dr. Bob Hough, WLJ correspondent
