At first glance, the title of this month’s ‘Jack’s Insights’ may rankle some feathers and perhaps cause you to wonder if I have gone off the deep end in my retirement. So, let me state right up front: This column is not about Impossible Burgers, Beyond Beef, or any of the other meatless fads trying to mimic the taste, texture or other great aspects of beef in our increasingly vegan society.
Jack Whittier, director UNL Panhandle Extension District and Panhandle Research and Extension Center
Rather, I will describe a beef-production system recently published in a relatively new scientific journal in the animal science academic world called Translational Animal Science or TAS (Volume 4, Issue 4, October 2020). This journal is a companion journal to the Journal of Animal Science (JAS) published by the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS), whose stated mission is to “translate basic science into industry innovation”. Stay with me on this, I promise to get past the “university jargon” and explain what I think is a pretty innovative beef-production system which incorporates at least 10 production technologies or practices developed in the past 10-15 years and puts them together in an innovative way.
The title of the article is “Evaluation of Performance and Carcass Traits for a Five-Cohort All Heifer, No Cow Beef Production System Demonstration Herd”. Five faculty and two graduate students at Colorado State University published the article. The fact that I happen to be one of those five faculty members may explain why I use the phrase “pretty innovative beef production system.” Let’s get to the point of the research.
Thirty-five years ago, two brilliant animal scientists, Cal Ferrell and Tom Jenkins, at the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center at Clay Center, Neb., published a paper explaining the energetics of a conventional beef-production system. They reported that 70% of feed inputs go to the cow-calf segment, while 30% are used in the stocker and feedlot segments. It is also true that 75% of all nutrients consumed in the cow-calf segment are devoted to maintenance requirements. So, upwards of 50% of all nutrients in conventional beef production go to cowherd maintenance.
With this energetics conundrum in mind, in 1987, two deep-thinking professors at Colorado State University, Rick Bourdon and Jim Brinks, simulated energetic efficiencies of several nontraditional management systems. One of these simulations included harvesting the beef females shortly after they produced their first calf. This became known as the “Single-Calf Heifer System”.
In this system, by the time the first-calf heifer was less than 30 months of age she would have produced a calf and a carcass - thus eliminating all the subsequent years’ maintenance of mature cows, while producing a replacement female (i.e. her calf) to continue in this accelerated production system.
While I was still on faculty at Colorado State before coming to the Panhandle, a group of us, using the above concepts, further discussed and developed what we termed the “All Heifer, No Cow” (or AHNC) beef production system. A crazy idea remains just an idea until it is tested.
Fortunately, one member of the CSU group discussing and developing this AHNC idea was a brilliant and renowned scientist named George Seidel. This is the same George Seidel whose early, crazy accomplishments included helping lead development of embryo transfer, in-vitro fertilization, fixed-time artificial insemination and sexed semen in livestock. Besides being a renowned scientist, George also operates a ranch west of Fort Collins where he runs a couple of hundred beef cows and is always interested in testing new ideas. Thus, the five-cohort AHNC beef production system demonstration herd was initiated.
Now, I will briefly describe this AHNC system and some of the results of the demonstration herd. A total of 272 heifers were enrolled in the demonstration AHNC system via five annual cohorts over a six-year period. Each year, approximately 50 yearling heifers were fixed-time artificial inseminated to X-bearing sexed semen to produce heifer calves. The yearling heifers were resynchronized and non-pregnant heifers were again inseminated with sexed semen, then followed by natural service bulls. Following natural gestation period and calving at about 24 months of age, their calves were weaned at about 90 days of age.
As calving time approached, the dams were transitioned from a forage diet to a finishing diet and harvested at about 30 months of age. The heifer calves were developed and started through the AHNC system as yearlings, as replacements to the way their dams went through the system. With this system, in order to have an annual income, two herds are needed that are 12 months apart in age from each other. One herd is being bred approximately the same time dams and calves from the other set enter the feedyard.
So, what were the results? I realize that not all who read this column will be very conversant in each of the descriptions of the results, and of course, there are many other details and considerations involved in a beef production system like this one, but here are the outcomes:
• Pregnancy rate at 30 days after fixed-time AI with sexed semen was 51% and 93% after all breeding opportunities.
• With the AHNC system, 61% of females replaced themselves with a heifer. Additional yearling heifers to each cohort from other sources were added as needed to maintain approximately 50 females in the system.
• During finishing, average daily gain was 4.2 pounds per day with dry matter intake of 32.8 pounds per day.
• Carcasses averaged 810 pounds, 20% of the carcasses were classified C maturity as evaluated by dentition, and 62.4% graded USDA Choice. Average yield grade was 2.6. There was no difference in sheer force values between A and B maturity vs C maturity carcasses.
• The overall conclusion by the authors was the AHNC beef production system can effectively produce female calves and quality carcasses for harvest.
As a follow-up to this research, an evaluation of the biological and economic efficiency of the AHNC system was published Journal of Animal Science in January 2021 by a subset of the original authors. Using a dynamic computer model, a series of what-if scenarios were tested. Under the parameterization and market conditions used in the follow-up evaluation, the AHNC beef production system failed to achieve profitability under any scenario that was evaluated. However, this review did not account for the potential increased genetic benefit from a decreased generation interval and the reduction in feed energy in comparison to a conventional cow/calf system.
So, what’s my insight about all of this? Clearly, further research should be done to compare overall feed energy used in the of AHNC beef production to feed energy in conventional cow-calf based beef production. Moreover, the level of intensive management in AHNC system will not fit all production environments – likely very few.
Nevertheless, it is interesting, at least to me, that several basic science concepts and technologies were incorporated into the industry innovation described here with the All Heifer, No Cow beef production system. Moreover, isn’t that what the quest for knowledge to improve lives and provide food for a growing world population is all about, anyway? Something to think about. Have a good month.
February 08, 2021 at 01:37PM
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JACK'S INSIGHTS: Beef Production Without Cows? - Scottsbluff Star Herald
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