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A Pound of Gold is Worth More Than a Pound of Lead


Spring 2015

Recently, a Gardiner Angus Ranch (GAR) customer harvested a group of steers that contained sons of GAR Progress and GAR Sunrise along with a third sire group. The third sire will be referred to as a "Reference Sire". The carcass EPDs available at the time of sire selection, the carcass measurements after harvest and the average values of the carcasses from steers in each group are depicted in Table 1.

GAR Sunrise and the reference sire had less carcass data submitted to the American Angus Association (AAA) prior to sire selection. Hence, the accuracies associated with the EPDs for carcass weight (CW) and marbling (MARB) were lower for these two sires. Likewise, because the $B calculation includes these two breeding values, the relative reliability of the $B indexes for the reference sire and Sunrise would also have been lower at the time of the customer's sire selection.

Steers sired by GAR Progress and the reference sire yielded similar carcass weights, but a higher proportion (100%) of the carcasses from Progress progeny graded in the upper two-thirds of the Choice quality grade or as Prime and received a premium ($13/cwt for CAB; $28/cwt for Prime) compared to those carcasses from the reference sire group (27% CAB). In fact, 17% of the carcasses from steers by the reference sire graded Select and received no premiums on the value-based grid.

Read more, see the charts and see why "it's good to have more gold"!

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