Crossbreeding Dairy Cattle With Beef Semen

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- My name is Pedro Carvalho.

I'm a grad student at Penn State University working under Dr. Tara Felix.

And today we are here at the Livestock Evaluation Center where we have been researching ways to improve beef production from Holstein steers.

In the last few years there was a shift and an increase in the looking at alternatives to improve beef production from Holstein steers, and because Pennsylvania research's heavy in the dairy industry, we are also trying to evaluate and create some EPD informations on the crossbred Holstein and beef breed steers.

We have been researching ways to improve beef production from Holstein steers utilizing hormone implant technologies and also different corn processing methods.

- My name is Dr. Tara Felix.

I'm an extension specialist with Penn State University.

Over the last two years, we've seen a dramatic increase in the sale of beef semen to dairy herds in the U S.

For example, from 2017 to 2018 beef semen sales to dairy herds jumped from 2.4 million units in 2017, to over 4 million units of beef semen to dairy herds in 2018 alone.

We use genomically enhanced EPDs or expected progeny differences, in order to determine what are the best genetics.

However, when we look at those expected progeny differences on a beef animal, they are only on that sire's beef progeny.

They do not correlate necessarily 100% to a Holstein crossbred, because 50% of those genetics are coming from the Holstein dam.

And that's where we're really struggling, is how do we find that genetic information?

How do we find that match?

That's going to make the best beef animal in a beef dairy crossbred system.

- I'm Bailey Basiel and I'm a first year PhD student with Dr. Tara Felix and Dr. Chad Dechow.

I'll be working with these crossbred beef steers on the genetic side.

So trying to determine on how to maximize their genetics to improve their feed efficiency and their growth and their overall profitability.

We're hoping to have quite a variety of crossbreeds on our study throughout the next three years, we will have Holsteins crossbred with Wagyu cattle, Angus, Simmental, SimAngus, Charolais and Limousin.

- One of the challenges we have to deal with, with that Holstein steer is the fact that, that animal is what we call a flat muscle breed.

Because of its flat muscling genetics, Holstein animal has very narrow stake shape.

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What we're trying to get to with these crossbred animal, prove upon the flat muscle genetics of that Holstein steer that make it very narrow through the backend with a lot of height and not very much breadth or depth.

By breeding the beef genetics onto that Holstein animal, we're attempting to increase the width and the breadth and the depth of that animal.

Structurally turn that animal from dairy type flat muscle genetics into that nice round full body beef type genetics that we're looking for.

One of the issues that we've gotten feedback on from the packers in the industry is that the crossbred animal brings with it a great deal of variation.

When you take an animal that we're trying to produce 80, 90, a hundred pounds of milk a day with, and cross it with an animal that we really wanna focus muscling on, we end up with a high degree of variability that from a packer point of view is undesirable.

And that's a challenge for the packer, and therefore it changes what the packer is willing to pay for a crossbred animal.

Therefore, what we're attempting to do is to find the best genetics, the best beef genetics to use in a Holstein Crossbred System, such that we get animals that the packer wants that are desirable and economically still relevant to the beef industry.

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These animals are on a 62 mega cal NEg.

And the reason that we do that is so that those animals can gain very quickly because pushing up that average daily gain improves that feed conversion and improves a return then to the feedlot.

Each of the animals in the pen is tagged with an individual RFID or Radio Frequency Identification Tag in their ear.

When those animals enter the feed bunk, the feed bunk reads that RFID tag that's unique to that individual animal, and records the feed intake for that animal so that we can measure individual feed efficiency on every animal within the pen.

This feed efficiency then can be used to calculate the economic return to that individual animal, despite its pen feeding scenario.

In this case, we can determine which are the best genetics to breed to the Holstein dairy cow economically, when we compare those animals in a feed lot system.

This project is funded by the USDA's Critical Agricultural Research and Extension Program.

And so the end goal would be to determine that sires genetic ability to make beef out of that Holstein dam's crossbred calf.

And so the end goal would be to come up with a terminal index for a beef sire when bred to dairy cows.

And those terminal indices can be used as a combination of expected progeny differences for a combination of different traits that are desirable for maternal characteristics or feedlot characteristics.

And ultimately that would be the goal of the research is to try to get to a terminal index for a beef sire.

That's going to be used on a Holstein dairy cow.

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