Breeding objectives: The genetic business plan for your herd
Randie Culbertson, ISU extension cow-calf specialist

A business plan is often used as a road map to achieve success. It allows the operation to articulate the business mission and helps to define the company's goals while identifying potential opportunities and challenges. Developing a comprehensive business plan requires understanding the business landscape and markets while providing the business with a strategic plan for sustained growth. A business's strategic plan is crucial for financial planning and management. A business plan provides a roadmap for how a business should allocate resources efficiently and manage cash flow. A business plan should serve as a dynamic tool able to change and evolve to adjust to changing markets. Typically, a business plan is credited as a strategic tool for long-term success.A breeding objective achieves similar goals as a business plan but on the genetic level of your herd. A breeding plan should establish a roadmap for reaching the genetic goals of your herd while simultaneously considering your resource advantages and limitations. The general goal of a breeding plan is to breed the “best” animal. It also defines your goal for the best animal and how to achieve that. Breeders at all levels should tailor their breeding objectives to meet the unique needs of their operations or customers. When the time comes for you to put pen to paper and start to formulate your breeding objective, start by asking yourself about the current performance of your herd, how you want the herd to improve, have a plan to measure change over time, and what resources do you have available. A breeding objective should establish the following:

  • Describe the traits that affect profitability the most and how important each trait is. As you establish the performance level of your herd, you should identify the traits that have the largest effect on profit and establish how important each trait is to the profitability of your operations. The traits that affect profitability will differ between operations. If you sell your calves at weaning, traits such as weaning weight and milk may have a larger influence on profitability. This contrasts an operation that retains ownership and where yearling weight, feedlot performance, and carcass characteristics may have a larger influence on the bottom line. As a result, these different operations develop different breeding objectives.
     
  • Breeding goals should be specific, measurable, and attainable. What do you want to improve in your herd, and how will you do it? Stating that you want to increase weaning weights is great but not very specific. How do you intend to improve it? Will you only focus on using bulls with higher weaning weight EPDs? Or do you also want to increase the milk potential of your cows? Or both? And what effect will increasing weaning weights have on calving? Have a plan for measuring what you want to improve because if you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

    Make sure your goal is attainable. Taking a herd with below-breed average weaning weights to the top 1% of the breed in one year is neither a reasonable nor attainable goal, but making incremental improvement over 5 to 10 years is achievable. Keep in mind the effect of genetically correlated traits. If you improve one trait (i.e., weaning weight), other traits will also change over time (i.e., birth weight, mature cow weight). Your breeding objective should have a holistic view of your operation and should not solely focus on a single trait for selection but consider all genetically correlated traits that contribute to profitability. For example, you may choose to increase weaning weight, yet still want to maintain calving ease.
     
  • State your desired level of trait improvement and how long you expect the changes to take.Two things to remember here: genetic change in cattle is slow, and the trait's heritability will affect the rate of change. The higher the heritability of a trait, the faster the genetic improvement. Most weight traits are moderate to highly heritable compared to reproductive traits, which tend to be lowly heritable. Weaning weight has a higher heritability than milk, which would result in a faster genetic increase in weaning weight than the rate of change for milk potential for the herd.
     
  • Finally, keep your resources in mind. Establish a breeding objective that meets your operation’s resource availability. Increasing the milk potential of your cow herd to increase weaning weight could have unintended consequences. By increasing milk potential, the maintenance requirements of the herd would also increase. Failure to meet these maintenance requirements would result in open cows. Although you may have increased your weaning weights with higher milking cows, you could run the risk of loss in cow numbers due to reproductive failure. So, as you put together your breeding objective, keep in mind the available resources to maintain the improvement you are making to your herd.

Making genetic improvements in your herd is a long game. Cattle have a long generation interval, especially compared to other livestock species. Because of this, making genetic changes in herds can take years. Establishing a plan for how you want to make genetic changes to your herd is critical for success. So, as you start to sort through this spring’s bull sale catalogs, have your genetic road map on hand to help purchase the right bulls to meet your breeding objectives.


Source: Iowa State University