Mary Bowron Named Best Sheep and Beef Vet of the Year
B+LNZ's Wormwise veterinarian Mary Bowron has won the Best Sheep and Beef Vet of the Year Award in recognition of her outstanding contribution to New Zealand’s sheep and beef sector.
Focused on increasing the use of high-quality genetics in the beef industry, the four main components of the programme are developing New Zealand-specific breeding indexes, supporting the development of an across breed genetic evaluation and development of data infrastructure, running a beef progeny test and linking in data from commercial herds.
Cow body condition score is one of the key factors to manage throughout the farming calendar. A breeding cow with a bit of spare energy stacked on her back is more productive, more robust, and better-looking. But where does genetics come into all this? Could your bulls be working harder to produce full-bodied bovine goddesses of fertility?
Right now, there are no body condition score (BCS) breeding values calculated for most kiwi bulls. But outcomes from the B+LNZ Genetics Beef Progeny Test have shown that there could be.
Over 240 sires have been assessed for cow BCS in the B+LNZ Genetics Beef Progeny Test and more than 4,500 cows have had their BCS measured at three time points: prior to mating, at weaning and prior to calving. There was quite a range of average cow BCS scores between sires (graph below). The heritability of cow BCS was 0.26 indicating that around 26% of variation in cow chunkiness can be attributed to genetics. So, there is plenty of opportunity to add extra love-handles to your herd via bull selection.
The researchers also looked at related traits. There was a genetic correlation between cow BCS and the existing rib fat depth trait (measured via ultrasound in finishing animals). Bulls with a higher genetic merit for rib fat depth tended to have daughters with higher cow BCS. However, the genetic correlation (0.29) was not strong enough to consider rib fat depth a good predictor for cow BCS on its own.
This means that rib fat depth EBVs only explains 8% of the variation in cow BCS. Likewise for the eye muscle area trait (4%). And since rib fat depth and eye muscle area are measured in finishing animals which don’t have the demands of calving and lactating, there is a case to be made for adding a dedicated cow BCS breeding value to future genetic evaluations.
