Santa Gertrudis Source February 2025

Let’s Get Bull-Season Ready B efore those bull sale catalogs start flooding mailboxes, it’s an important business deci sion to take time to evaluate your cow herd and current bulls so you’re prepared when it’s time to buy your next herd sire. This article outlines key steps to help you assess your cow herd and make informed decisions that will drive your operation’s long-term success. BY KELSEY POPE, CONTRIBUTING WRITER

“Using a bull without any known EPDs is risky, given that you have no idea what his genetic potential is. Using a bull that might be cheaper, but that does are drivers of profit for you, can end up either slowing progress or eroding progress that you have not excel in traits that

Evaluate your current cow herd performance. The first step any cattle producer should take before adding bulls to their battery is evaluating their current cow herd and last calf crop. Looking at your last weaned calf crop can tell you a lot about your herd and herd sires. Did they grow and perform how you ex pected under the environmental and manage ment conditions? Along with knowing these constraints for your calves, ask yourself questions about your cow herd: Do my cows meet my operation cri teria?; Did I have a good pregnancy rate?; Did body condition hold up?; Are they nursing well? The answers to these questions will help determine the priorities for bull-buying deci sions that will have a multi-generational im pact. If you are building your herd by keeping replacement heifers, then the decisions you made three to seven years ago were impact ful in the development of your core cow herd today. If you answered “yes” to all or most of those cow-evaluation questions, the likely next step is to find similar criteria to your past bull buying decisions and look for seedstock pro ducers with similar genetics. If you’re not happy with what you see in the pasture, you are probably ready for a change. What areas need some improvement: better maternal traits, carcass traits, feet, milking ability? These decisions will help guide you when those piles of catalogs come in the mail. But where do you start? Understand the different indexes breeds use and how they can help identify bulls that fit your goals. To start making some changes, determine if the bulls you’re currently using are working for you or if you’d consider exploring new ge netics for traits like growth and maternal abil ity to add heterosis performance to your herd.

You can begin by evaluating bulls on their phenotypic appraisal and what you’re look ing for to complement your herd. Qualita tive traits like color, horned/polled and defect carrier status may be important to consider. However, data in the form of expected prog eny differences (EPDs) should be highly con sidered to improve upon traits your calves may be lacking. The difficult part is that EPDs can be confusing and overwhelming. It wasn’t long ago when EPDs were some what generic across breeds and uncomplicat ed with indexes including birth weight, wean ing weight and yearling weight. With more data and research from breed associations, selection indexes have become breed specific, yet more difficult to convert to a common base. However, they can be useful tools for multiple-trait selection and genetic outcomes for your future progeny and profitability. Ra tios and accuracy are important factors in EPDs today because they provide insights into the reliability and relevance of genetic data for making informed breeding decisions. Ratios help assess relative performance, and accu racy ensures that the EPDs used in breeding decisions are based on reliable, sound genetic data. Both are key to making effective, long term improvements in cattle genetics. To simplify your herd-sire selection strat egy, go back to the objectives you’ve defined in improving your cow herd, identify static EPD indexes that will help you reach your objec tives and use that information to sort through data. Producers looking to buy bulls to use on heifers will still be looking at high calving ease, low birth weight bulls that work across breeds. Producers looking to add growth to their calves can look at weaning weight and yearling weight EPDs. Many seedstock pro ducers will organize their catalog and sales with bulls categorized in sire groups or EPDs to make shopping straightforward.

made.” — Matt Spangler

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SANTA GERTRUDIS SOURCE

FEBRUARY 2025