Reprinted with permission April 2005 Holstein World

It’s the technology issue of Holstein World and we’re celebrating modern genetic advances by highlighting new products and services. As dairy producers, you gain the benefits of these new “tools” because they have been created to make day-to-day work easier and more efficient. One new service guarantees sire proofs on marketing bulls that approach 100% accurate identification. Can it truly be? It is. And with the new program that Alta Genetics has developed, they’ve raised the bar for young sire proving systems everywhere.

Predictions…assumptions…reliabilities. They are the “buzz words” of sire summaries. It’s a given fact that proof numbers are formulated to help producers make intelligent decisions when it comes to breeding cows. It seems that every year, there are more facts and figures presented, measuring all kinds of traits. Even though these are very useful, if one isn’t a mastermind of genetics, these four-time-a-year sire summaries can provide too much information. Even more frustrating than learning new numbers every three months is watching them dramatically change at times. Is there any way to minimize the chance of a sudden jump or drop? How much confidence can be put in the actual numbers themselves?

The team at Alta Genetics started to think about ways to improve the accuracy of proofs on their sires. If a bull’s numbers were solid, than his proof should hold true and be used with confidence. “Before the Alta Advantage™ program became a reality, reliability was the only measure of how stable a bull’s proof would be over time,” explained Paul Meyer, Director of Marketing for Alta. “Reliability is calculated based on the number of daughters in a bull’s proof, what lactation those daughters are in, frequency of milk recording and the distribution of daughters across herds. Unfortunately, the current method for genetic evaluations has no way of accounting for the misidentification rate on an individual sire’s daughters.”

The possibility of misidentified daughters in proofs was a far-fetched idea, right? Wrong. Through studies conducted by Alta, it was found that less than 75% of daughters listed on a sire’s proof are actually his own! Theoretically, if one in every four daughters is not really who she’s supposed to be, wouldn’t that affect the reliability of a proof? At that rate, a bull’s proof numbers may not be a true reflection of his positive or negative abilities.

“We had the opportunity to evaluate how we spent our progeny test dollars,” explained Advantage Consultant David Hill. “The trend was that lots of larger herds were going off test. This was critical to us because we wanted to continue proving bulls in large herds that represented a ‘real-world environment.’ We felt we needed to get involved with these herds to set up an accurate identification and tracking system and keep them onboard as active young sire proving dairies. And just like every profitable dairy producer, we had to evaluate the services we were providing and how we could make them more efficient and cost effective.”

Dr. Nate Zwald, the Alta Advantage Program Manager agrees with David. “We wanted to build on our relationships with large, well-managed herds.

Our thought has been to develop strong ties with our customers to help them succeed with their business, and we consider our producers as Product Development Partners. They have confidence in our programs and in turn, we provide them with services including reproductive consulting and general management advice.”

In the summer of 2000, the first Alta Advantage herds were signed on and ready to receive semen. “Our goal was to select the best managed, large herds to use as young sire testing places. If we provided the semen and kept a managerial hand in tracking information from semen usage to calving dates, we felt we could increase the accuracy of sire proofs,” said David.

Timeline
The current Advantage program involves 170 herds, with an average herd size of 750 cows, and a fairly widespread geographic distribution. Ten bulls are sampled each month, with semen distributed at a minimal cost to participating herds, and used within a four-week period. As a result, all calves from an individual young sire should be born within a six-week window. Each calf has a tail-hair DNA sample submitted to a private testing company for sire verification. If a calf’s sire does not match original records, tests are done to try and identify what her sire truly is. If a positive match is not found, her sire identification is changed to “unknown.” As they get older, all identified daughters should freshen within a similar period of time.

“Timing is everything with Advantage,” commented David. “With all daughters calving in within a matter of weeks, we are able to evaluate a bull extremely quickly and then make a decision of whether or not keep him in the facility. We also know, without a shadow of a doubt, that on sires we market, every daughter in an Advantage herd that’s being evaluated for the original proof is actually his.” Nate stresses the benefits of having large progeny test groups as a result of Advantage for evaluations on low heritability health and management traits. “We have limited information to begin with and if it isn’t accurate, it’s worthless. Large contemporary group sizes are vital to being able to accurately sort out the true genetic differences for these traits. With a large group, we can be assured that the cows included in that group were under the same management conditions, and therefore are left with true genetic differences between the cows.”

The collection of data from breedIng to calving allows the Alta team to measure reproductive performance that normally wouldn’t be monitored. “We get extremely good pregnancy data from our Advantage herds,” David said. “With that, we can make additional evaluations Conceptplus and Healthplus Health information are examples of early benefits harvested from Advantage. Both pregnancy and milking speed data are already included in Healthplus and we expect over time to add other herd health traits such as predisposition to DA’s, metritis, ketosis and cystic ovaries. The beauty of this is that we’re able to provide real information to our customers as to what keeps cows in herds longer… and that’s the bottomline on profitability

Jess mentioned that she’s seen a big difference in the consistency of cattle since starting on the Advantage program. And with the team approach, Oakwood Dairy has an office full of goals and charts measuring the progress of the herd. In that sense, every person passing through the office can visually track improvements. With 1300 cows milking, Jess’ chart of “pounds of milk sold per cow per year” now reads 26,000. There’s also a chart to track breeding and pregnancy goals per month, so that the herd can maintain a high enough pregnancy rate to eliminate buying outside cows.

“We also use the AltaMate program at Oakwood. I pick the proven bulls based on criteria we have set (+500M +.8FLC +.8UDC). Using 80% Alta semen, between young sire and proven semen, has helped streamline the number of salesmen on the farm, which helps me spend my time more efficiently. Using proven sires here along with the Advantage sires gives us a real benchmark to compare the bulls.”

A former Holstein Classifier, Todd Doornink of Baldwin, WI, milks 1700 cows and has been involved with the Advantage program since 2001. “I got involved with Advantage because Alta pays credits for DHIA testing, and I really wanted to get our herd back on test. We’re currently using approximately 100 units per month of bulls. I am very much interested in maintaining a high type herd and the Advantage program helps me to do that.”

“As for workload, the Advantage program has actually helped make my work more efficient. The Alta team helps with herd identification of each calf, so in that sense, it’s been great. I also really enjoy working with such a great support staff that covers every aspect of evaluating data, and are on call to help with pregnancy goals.”

Getting a Proof
The first two exclusive graduates of Advantage received preliminary proofs in February – Dixie-Lee Whitie and Ronland Jolly. Obviously, as time goes on, the number of sires that graduate each time will increase. However, it’s important to remember that with such early and complete information received on every Advantage bull, Alta has the information to make earlier decisions on whether or not to release a sire. Oakwood Dairy has a group of 2-year-olds that’s comprised of 50% Advantage daughters, most of which will be included in August proof numbers.

Bulls graduating over the past few proof rounds already have between 55 and 60% of their daughters in Advantage herds.

The Bottom Line
Alta Advantage was put into place as a futuristic approach to progeny testing bulls. One consideration was to be able to correct a specific problem of misidentification in bull proofs, but the bottom line is that it’s led to so much more. Besides the increased benefit of working as a team along side dairy producers, Alta representatives are gathering additional information never compiled before. For instance, Advantage herds collect enough data to help with the compilation of real pregnancy information for both proven and young sires. Conceptplus and Health Healthplus are the first examples of what’s possible with Advantage.

“We have a vested interest in helping our customers succeed,” explained David. “Alta Advantage provides lots of information that’s 100% accurate. You can’t ask for more than that!”

Accuracy Article in PDF format (click)

Alta Advantage News (click)

Posted Feb 22nd

<< Back to Top