Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

Some herds have been bred through many generations at a high standard, while new entrants have to make their own mistakes. I know a herd in the top 1% in the country, son is on top of his game but the father has focused on breeding for the last 40 to 50 years previous. U could say he's reeping the rewards but both are on top of their game and time has helped

I’m not explaining the same thing to you for the 3rd time green dairies. You don’t like ebi and that’s fine. It works great for me and plenty others. I’m very happy with the herd of cows we’ve bred using ebi, especially in the last 5 years

I'd be considered senior in my role in Pharmaceutical engineering and I'm not on near those conditions.

Can you forward me the link to your job when you leave it?

interesting debate on evidence and from my point of view I started off here with the 30 odd cows my parents had built up from the time they got married.i built up to 80 over the yrs to where I am today.

They bought in good calves and heifers over their time and had a good British fr type cows for the time in late 90’s they were probably around the good 5000 litre mark.yes they had a few bangers as well but overall not a bad start.

Now when I was using Ai in the beginning I just looked at yield and by mistake I somehow also have managed to have a very fertile herd.bought fr bulls from a man in the same county as myself who is massively into the whole breeding thing more so than I ever would be.now I have a herd averaging 7000 litres with solid of around 3.9 bf and 3.5 pr.

I’m 45 yrs old and anytime I’ve had heifers for sale and a young lad comes it’s immediately ebi and nothing else.they’ve swallowed the gospel of high ebi and nothing else.anything less than 200 and she’s only fit for the cull cow ring in the mart or factory.i had a cow here a couple of yrs ago,her ebi was only around 70.she was the best cow I ever had.she was doing 10000 litres a yr and her solids were grand.if I had enough of them I’d be delighted instead of on paper gobbledygook of high ebi.

does that not go against the theory of genetics? bad trait might skip a generation so would using oman grandsons be a mistake?

The ebi is an index made up of different traits. It's very useful because it allows farms to focus on the traits they are trying to improve within their herd.

Some people clearly don't understand that.

Animal breeding is just about improving the average of every generation in the traits you want for your herd.

it's a waste of time talking about individual cows it's much more important that the average production/performance of the whole herd is improving

Our local vet's old joke about high yielding herds, was that a 2000 gallon herd was a herd that had one cow 5 years ago that produced 2000 gallons.

There is no breeding plan that will give exact results every mating, because nobody can predict which genes will end up in the offspring. If you mated the same bull to the same cow over 5 years the offspring would not perform identically