Selecting for the suckler cow of the future

Neil McGowan NSch, Farmer and Nuffield Scholar, Incheoch Farms, Perthshire

Where the River Isla tumbles over the Highland Faultline, as it leaves the bonniest of the Angus Glens, there’s a wee place called Incheoch. This is where we, the McGowan family, farm 200 suckler cows and 1,100 ewes. We have been in the bull and ram business for generations and we’re proud of the thrifty, robust Lleyn ewes and Luing cows which suit our environment. We complement them to fit our market with Texel and Simmentals. The heart of what we do is to breed Functional, Efficient and Robust breeding stock.

Going back 10 years ago, we had marketed grass-fed, performance recorded dams, rams developed steadily for fertility and longevity for our on farm ‘Working Genes’ sale and to bulls sold through the Stirling bull sales. They were fed to the nines, pampered to have their hair looking right and calved out of season to be in the right spot in the sale. This didn’t sit well, so I set out on a Nuffield Scholarship to try and figure out how to develop an on-farm bull sale.

I dressed it up as a project looking at ‘Selection for Feed Efficiency’. I thought a bunch of herds could bring bulls together, measure feed intake and sell them coming off test, all reared the same. A lot of the discussions I had then became about cow efficiency and I am going to share some of these stories and how we have put them to use at home.

The first time I attended a BCBC Conference was to hear Dr John Basarab, the feed intake guru, speak. I caught up with him in Alberta during my Nuffield tour. ‘What happened to looking at input?’ There has got to be some ‘limiter’ to production, we can’t keep selecting for output with an open cheque-book on inputs. Dave Nichols called milk and growth ‘Goldilocks’ traits, as the saying goes this porridge is too hot, this one too cold and THIS one is ‘just right’. If you are going to put some selection pressure on one trait and it’s correlated to another one you need to be at the very least keeping an eye on it! That was the kick up the backside to start measuring to get a reliable mature weight EBV.

In Kansas, I visited the Leachman co-operator breeders. Gary Rolland showed me the Stabiliser cattle and over lunch I wanted to get down to the bottom of what he was doing with feed efficiency. He was sitting over the table from me holding a burger in one hand and I asked him again about feed efficiency. He bangs on the table with his other fist and says “Well it all comes down to this. A cow is only good for two things. One she eats a lot of stuff nothing else will eat and two she tastes damn good. Lose either of these things and all you got is an inefficient hogg”. He took another bite of his burger, while I watched the first bit of my project crumble to the floor.

Why cows?

The Working Genes sale is a big day at Incheoch. We run an online silent auction where bidding is done quietly on devices and the bulls are out in paddocks. We aim to make the sale a fun, family event, with the sale concluding in an old stable, with a display of ribbons, rosettes and pictures of bulls from the past. We also display a board (Figure 1). This keeps me grounded as to why we have cows on our farm. For us it means more calves weaned. If we can keep a dozen more cows and they all wean a calf then we can sell another pen of steers in the spring, bringing in cashflow that mostly goes in the bank. So, more calves weaned come from more cows fitted in for winter, more pregnancies and less losses.

This gives us a breeding goal:

• Moderate cow size
• High Fertility
• Calving ease

I’ve always wanted to travel to America to see the speed of progress made in the herds of thousands of cows and try to work out how we could replicate that scale at home. One of the most impressive programs I saw was with Greg Golden at Cole Creek, on the banks of the mighty Yellowstone River. With 4,000 acres and 170 cows and just ONE focus over the last 50 years – MATERNAL. He spoke about fertility, longevity, foot and udder structure and early puberty and his advice to me was “Just remember – this job is ALL about the cow! She is in charge of your cost per unit of production and the bull is just a bi-product, he is only there to pass on the cow’s genetics.”

A Nuffield Scholarship takes about 2 years of study and 8 weeks travel, I spent a lot of those 2 years lost, intellectually, emotionally but mostly just physically! For anyone thinking of going travelling like that, my advice is that it doesn’t really matter how fast your car goes, just buy a really good map. The same for breeding programs – direction trumps speed of gain, think back to Greg Golden with 170 cows, 1 direction, 50 years!

1,200 miles down the road amongst the corn and hoggs in Iowa is Steve Radakovich with his Angus based composites. His breeding goal was not to make mistakes, he was on the same wavelength as Greg, speaking about adaptability, fertility in a short breeding season, not too much milk, moderate size, low maintenance and longevity – My story was coming together... Then as I was leaving Steve said “You know Neil, this job is all about the bull!” He went on to explain that:

• You can cull the cows you’ve got but that’s expensive
• Pick heifers but once you’ve culled the outliers (big and small), sorted on temperament and structure you haven’t got a lot left to play with
• Bulls – bulls are where you make progress but on the cow’s terms because there’s not a lot you can see in the bull that makes any difference!

So, it is the bull but the bull is about the cow, or about the program. At home we need to stop comparing our bulls on terminal traits and feeding regime, we need to sell them out of the paddock at home, and to date have had 7 home bull sales. Some of our Simmental cows were not a good fit for their environment and we found it difficult to calve them at 2 years old and rebreed at 3 years old. We sold a lot of them and culled hard. We have used homebred bulls and sourced bulls from 2 year old calving systems. We have put a LOT of heifers into the program, pregnant within 6 weeks as a yearling and rebreed in 9 weeks while nursing as a 2 year old. By doing this I think we have changed the maturity pattern of our cattle, they are smaller framed and easier fleshing. Our fat EBV’s have risen. We’ve also started to talk about frame Score to help us, and our clients, identify the cattle that fit our farms. There are no fixed targets but if we have got FS 6 cows and are happy with them, we are looking for a bull between 5 and 7 to go with them and not a FS 9. It helps us to pick the right one for our cattle.

A ballerina called Anna Pavlova was once asked after a performance ‘What were you trying to say in that dance?’ she replied, ‘If I could have said it, I shouldn’t have to dance it’ and I suppose that’s what ‘art’ is. On my travels I met Kit Pharo, a cowboy from Colorado and he introduced me to the phrase – SEXUAL DIMORPHISM. Kit has made a name for himself breeding very low input cattle which were bigger bodied than I expected. I was struck by a certain cow, my grandfather would say she had ‘maternal character’, and dad would call it ‘balance’. Neither of them could really say what it was but they could breed for it in an Anna Pavlova sort of a way, this cow had it – she was sweet-headed, slender-shouldered, wide-hipped and moved gracefully. I asked Kit what the bull looked like that bred a cow like her, he showed me a bull, a son of her’s, which he was using widely. He was exactly the opposite – heavy fronted with a big crest. Kit said, “Of course he is, that’s Sexual Dimorphism.” He explained it like this as 3 ladies or 3 men sitting on a bench, they are tight at different ends, they are opposites. It is the same with the bull. Fertility is all about Reproduction, which is all about Hormones, and that’s all about the difference between a bull and a steer, and that is why a cow has to look like a cow and a bull has to look like a bull – Sweet cows and Rugged bulls.

I travelled to New Zealand and was really taken with the Hill Country Angus cows. I was still thinking about Feed Efficiency but people kept asking me the same question, what’s the knock-on effect for the cow? I met with a guy from AbacusBio in Dunedin, who had torn the remaining tatters of my project to shreds. He wanted me to meet a beekeeper in Christchurch, I had no idea why. I had been travelling nonstop for 3 weeks, it was approaching Christmas, and I was ready to go home to see my family. On the drive to Christchurch, which takes longer than you think, I needed to stop and clear my head, and as I was driving through Timaru, a kind of industrial town, a lot like Arbroath, I see this statue of a horse and decided to pull over right at the side of State Highway one and I read this story:

About a century ago, Alexander Roberts was a farmer who retired near to town and dabbled in breeding racehorses. He bred a 50 Guinea mare with a one-race, unplaced racing record to a nondescript stallion of ‘Sound English Breeding’. Not much of a start to any story, save for a little ounce of breeding, the mare’s great grandmother was a touch of class. The resulting gangly colt foal born in 1926 seemed to disappoint enough to be sold as a yearling, at a sale where the top price was 2300gns, he made 160gns, unseen to Australia on the back of that little ounce of breeding. Rejected by his new owner on arrival to Sydney, he was kept at the insistence of trainer Harry Telford. Eventually making it to the practice track he gained his name from a play on a Chinese dialect word for ‘Lightning Strike’ – ironically because he was so slow! BUT as a 3 year old this horse, Phar Lap started to race and started to win and kept winning. With 35 wins in 25 months, including 4 in 8 days at the Melbourne Cup Festival in 1930, including the cup itself under a record handicap weight, the best was yet to come. They sailed him to Mexico, where only 10 days off the boat he ran in the richest race in the world, against some of the biggest winners in the US, he won, hands down, in record track time. Phar Lap died just 16 days later in 1932. Years later the clerk of the course in Mexico was asked “which was the greatest horse in America of the 20th Century – was it Man O’War or was it Secretariat?” He replied, “Neither, I saw Phar Lap.”

There I was sitting at the side of the road in Timaru, trying to read the end of the story and I canna see for tears. I had just realised who I am. I am not a farmer, or a Scotsman or a Nuffield Scholar, I am a Breeder and it’s what I want to do. And it’s not about the $15 Million equivalent winnings; it’s about the Roberts and Telfords – the men who saw the potential in the little ounce of breeding and had the faith to follow it through and bred a legend.

Then it hit me, we are not breeding racehorses! Phar Lap was a legend because whenever he finished a race he finished it first. He pulled up a couple of times. BUT in our business first finished isn’t everything, it’s certainly better than last but somewhere in the middle is just fine. What is REALLY important is getting across the finishing line EVERYTIME. Consistent, mid field finishers. If we can get every pregnancy, born alive, sucked and healthy, weaned, grown out and sold AND the cow can do this Time and Time again, then we are on to a winner. Consistent mid-field finishers – It’s not as exciting as racehorses but it’s a different job.

In the beef sector we are stuck with the Phar Lap model of breeding. He had this classy mare; we market sons of Show Champions and Grandsons of Record Prices but what we need to do is fill that pedigree full to the brim of consistent mid-field finishers. There is a yearling Luing Bull running around at home just now, 11 out of 15 cows in his pedigree are Incheoch cows and have 115 calvings between them. They are all Consistent Mid-field Finishers. The late Larry Leonhardt of Shoshone Angus said: “When you are looking at that bull you need to imagine the cows in his pedigree as a group standing in a pen because that is what he is going to breed you.”

In the far south of New Zealand, Peter Black at the age of 80, running 1200 stud ewes along with his wife Marion, including a flock of 600 pedigree Texels. He told me about a Gene Marker for Footrot Resistance, he says the science isn’t perfect, but it’s OK and if we don’t do something about a trait we’re just saying it’s alright to live with it, and that is unacceptable to Peter. Nuffield introduced me to a Baroness, policy makers, geneticists, breed association CEO’s and breeders. The only people that can actually do something about a trait are the Peter Blacks of this world who are the ones opening the gate to put the bulls in. If something needs changing, don’t wait for a policy change, or blame the market system, or the breed society, if you are the breeder you are the one in charge. At home I wasn’t happy with our calf wean weight / cow bulling weight ratio, so, we did what Willie Falloon at Pinebank Angus told me, “Punch in the data, sort it on a spreadsheet and work up from the bottom until you get to a cow that you can’t live without. Draw a line and cull below it. Do that for 10 years and things will change.”

Luing cattle weren’t performance recorded when I started my Nuffield, we were the first herd and now the breed has 70,000 cumulative calving records.

Progress is slow – but we’ve started.

Conclusion

The cow of the future looks a bit like this:

• Eats lots of stuff nothing else will eat, and she tastes damn good.
• She has some sort of ‘limiter to production’ – in a Goldilocks kind of a way.
• It’s all about the bull – on the cow’s terms
• She’s a sweet cow, and her father is a rugged bull
• Her pedigree is full of consistent mid-field finishers
• We’re in charge – just get on and do the right thing and breed her!

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Nuffield Farming Scholarship Trust for having the vision to send a shepherd with a poor sense of direction into the wide world and thank you to my sponsor, the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland for picking up the bill for getting me home again.

The figures referred to in this paper can be found in the full Digest PDF, available to members in the Members area.