M Bar said:
Grant,
picking easy fleshing, problem free animals when they are 6 months old with a creep feeder in the pen next to the cooler room is extremely difficult. I am by no means bashing this type of management, as it has proven for years a tremendous means to sell animals, heck, I don't even know if these young heifers have ever been fed creep or been in a cooler, but it appears that they are definitely not straight out of the back 40. If you took these ladies and get them bred, and take a look next year, you just never know. If one comes up open, that gets the picks down to 3 possible heifers. If one requires assitance, C-section, or a sling, or a nurse cow, then your choices are down to 2. These girls are going to be shown by their perspective buyers and it appears that they will all have pretty impressive show statistics, but I sure ain't smart enough to figure out which one will make me the most money without studying their pedigree, and analyzing them as they grow out.
Troy,I will agree that picking easy fleshing trouble free animals when they are 6 months old, with a creep feeder next to the cooler room is difficult. ... but not necessarily impossible. There are some things that are not affected by feed or pampering of any kind, and most of these are structural. I will try to explain a bit of what I am meaning by this...
First of all, let me say that I am no expert, and I am only stating a few things I have noticed in a lifetime of chasing cows and more recently trying to change the shape of my cows so that they are easier fleshing and more trouble free.
(1) When I look at the cows in my herd that are the easiest fleshing females, I have noticed that they have consistently had a more prominent jaw and a wider muzzle than the harder doing females I own ( I still have some of these as well, however, overtime, they will be replaced or changed by using successive easy fleshing sires on them.) They also have a well proportioned head, with some width between the eyes, yet not excessive. It is hard to explain this without examples, however, of these four females, I think # 3 represents this the best. I just looked at the pictures of these heifers again, and while we have to remember that these are just pictures, it appears to me that # 4 has the poorest jaw and head, and #2 is poorer in this regard, than #1 and #3. I would like to stand behind #2 as well, just to see how much thickness she has in her heart and start of her rib. From this picture, I am left questioning if she has enough, which also leads me to wonder about her ease of fleshing. It may be just the picture and/ or her coloring,I am not certain.
(2) Rib shape is important, but probably not as important as chest floor width and smooth transition from the shoulder through the heart region. I think this makes perfect sense, in that the heart and lungs are two of the most important organs in the body and if they are restricted, the entire animal suffers. Ribs should spring out from the backbone and arch well out, providing lots of room for the digestive organs to work. They critters were placed on earth to eat roughages, and in order to do this the most efficiently, they need some volume through their middle. If you have a super thick topped female that is tight through the heart, she will still be a hard doing female, and she will look even worse than ones with less thickness and the same weakness in the heart area.She will look like she was built by a committee.
(3) Depth of rib is important, but let's not go overboard in seeking it. Like everything else in life, optimum is best. If you draw a horizontal line from the elbow on the front leg, that is also the bottom of the rib cage. Anything below that is not muscle, as there is only a very small layer of muscle on the bottom of the rib cage. If you have ever butchered an animal you will understand what I am referring to. We want some depth below this line, however, if it is excessive, it will lead to animals that carry too much waste, which results in excessive trimming at slaughter. Some cow calf producers will say that all that matters is whether a cow is able to stay in shape. I maintain that, yes, this is very important, however, we need to remember the end buyer as well. When I went to school, we were told that it cost 8 Xs as much to add 1 pound of fat to an animal as it did 1 lb of muscle. There is some truth to this, however, I think there are some major differences between different animal types in their ability to convert feed, into either muscle or fat. That is what we should all be trying to find, is the ones that do this the best. Another thing we need to remember is that when we try to breed animals for change in one area of the body, it usually results in changes in other areas as well.
4) the forearm I mentioned is a good place to get evidence of muscling in an animal, as is the stifle area.There is very little fat deposited in these areas so you can get a visual idea of muscling by looking at these areas, no matter how much feed an animal has had. I like to see evidence of muscling in females in both of these areas. It should not be as prominent as in a male, much the same as it shouldn't be in people ( women vs men). Muscling is usually antagonistic to maternal traits, and usually a heavy muscled female is less fertile, and milks less than females with adequate muscling. Of course there are some breed differences in this regard. If you are old enough to remember the original Limousin females that were imported from France, most of them did not look like todays Limo females. I think easy fleshing females do have to have some muscle expression, not only to stay in condition, but also to produced well muscled offspring of both sexes.
5) as I have argued on SP in previous posts, I do not believe that the only way to get efficiency in your animals is by downsizing frame. I will agree that there are many big framed inefficient cows that need to meet the kid who asks " do you want fries with that". There are also big framed cows that are extremely easy fleshing. I had a vet here a couple weeks ago to ultrasound about 75 females. We have a couple cows that will not fit in our working chute, and the vet said that they were extremely fat. He suggested that they be put on a ration where they would lose at least 200 lbs, before they calve next spring. I told him that they were on a diet all last winter, and had only had grass since spring. These two cows are huge, and they are also tanks,with tremendous thickness and depth yet they are fertile,and milk very well. As I mentioned before, one of these cows weighs in excess of 2100 lbs in normal summer rig, produced an average of 27 grade 1 embryos in 6 consecutive flushes and bred back on her first heat following the last flush. I can live with cows like this much quicker than those that look like a rail fence with a rug thrown over them. I will be the first to say, that the commercial producer does not need cows like the two cows I mentioned. I do believe that as a purebred breeder, these cows offer unique genetics that can be useful in assisting us to reach certain goals. I think it would be a travesty of we allowed unique genetics like they possess to vanish from the gene pool. We have allowed this to happen far to often in the past.