PrimeTime spring 2018

Elisa Marques, Ph.D., MBA | Founder, AgFRONT | emarques@agfront.com INDUSTRY TECHNOLOGY Untangling the Helix If You Want to Create Real Value, Begin by Knowing Who Your Customer Is I recently advised a startup company that has big plans to dis- ducer needs to have in order to be success- ful. Fertility counts, calving ease counts, disease resistance counts and feed efficien- cy counts. If you have no bred cow and no live calf, you have no business.

rupt – in a good way – the beef industry. After a lot of back and forth, I asked who they built the

So, there are a lot of moving parts that are important. And, because there are so many traits that count, geneticists have created what we call selection indexes.

product for and the answer was “the cow- calf producer.” Well, there are many types of cow-calf producers. If you build some- thing for everybody, it’s likely for nobody. Cow-calf producers can be: seedstock producers who register their cattle; seedstock producers who don’t register; the commercial producer who behaves like a seedstock producer (doesn’t reg- ister but collects a lot of data); and the commercial producer who behaves like a typical commercial producer. In this article, I will discuss the seed- stock sector and its commitment to creating real value for the commercial producer. As a seedstock producer, you are committed to producing the best qual- ity genetics for your commercial producer. Remember, the commercial producer is looking for a product that works, that gen- erates profit for him or her. Because, as I once heard, if you are not in this business to make money, good luck with your hobby. Building a Product for the Commercial Producer So, let’s talk about creating a product the commercial producer wants. To get there, we must reverse engineer the final product to see what drives their creation. Quality Grade and gain are two of the criteria the commercial producer gets compensated for. The better the quality, the higher the pre- mium. The more pounds, the more money. But those are not the only traits the pro-

How do you build selection indexes? You build them by incorporating expected progeny differences (EPD) and economic weights. How do I generate EPDs? Simple Versus Complex Traits As a seedstock producer, you need to get to the heart of the matter for accurately figuring out what part of the phenotypic expression – what you see – is due to ge- netics or environment. Many of us struggle with the concept of estimated breeding values (EBV) and EPDs. That’s because they are not that intuitive and require understanding the differences between simple and complex traits. Simple traits are those that don’t require too much information other than knowl- edge of a few genes. They don’t get inter- ference from the environment, either. What

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Akaushi Prime Time • Spring 2018

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