Waste Not, Want Not
An open cow is an inefficient cow.
January 3, 2025
Waste is waste. It doesn’t matter whether you are considering a cow-calf operation, a field of soybeans or a nail factory. University of Tennessee (UT) Extension Beef Specialist Troy Rowan told attendees at the Applied Reproductive Strategies in Beef Cattle (ARSBC) symposium in Athens, Ga., Sept. 4-5, there are three words that apply to all: inputs, outputs and waste.
The geneticist wasted no time in naming the most wasteful part of a commercial cow herd: “An open cow is the world’s most wasteful animal. We give her 100% of the inputs, and we get 0% of the outputs.”
According to UT economists, Rowan said, it is year seven or eight before a cow becomes profitable.
“If she misses a calf, she’s got to stay around until she’s 11 or 12 to even sniff profitability,” he emphasized. “Miss two calves and she’s never, ever going to be profitable. She can stay around until she’s 20 and you’re still going to lose money with that cow.”
While failing to breed is usually the most common reason a cow is culled, Rowan said, “Anything that makes us cull that cow before she becomes profitable is waste.”
Fig. 1: No. 1 reason cows leave the herd
That includes bad feet, bad udders or a bad attitude.
“Developing heifers is expensive if you want to do it right,” he reminded the audience. “A cow that is on a 365-day calving interval is the biggest driver of efficiency and overall profitability in a commercial herd.”
New tools
“The good news is that we can take genetic approaches to help make these cows stay around longer,” Rowan noted. “So much of this is management, but many of these traits are heritable, and we have selection tools that allow us to move the needle on cow longevity. The most straightforward of these is stayability.”
The American Angus Association just rolled out its Functional Longevity (FL) expected progeny difference (EPD), said Rowan, adding that he considers it a risk-management tool.
“Our goal in genetics, with traits like longevity and fertility, is to mitigate the risk of bull selection,” he said, noting this is especially true if you keep your own replacement heifers. “We get to reap the benefits of good decisions, but we have to live with the bad decisions for a long time.”
Hold on, though. Fertility and longevity are only moderately heritable traits — somewhere in the range of 5% to 10%. That still leaves the management part to you.
However, Rowan said, “An EPD is the only way to move the genetics of the population forward on a trait like stayability because of its delayed expression. It’s not expressed in bulls.”
The FL EPD, Rowan explained, is an estimate of the percentage of a bull’s daughters compared to those from another sire that will end up staying in the herd. “A 10% difference in stayability would mean we’d expect that higher EPD value to indicate 10% more daughters reach the end of their payback period compared to a bull with the lower EPD.”
“The thing that stayability does is it is a function of accountability to stay in a herd, not get culled year in and year out. That means it’s going to encompass all the different pieces of longevity. It’s not a purely fertility-driven measure. If a cow has poor foot or leg structure and gets culled, that’s going to go in as a stayability fail. A cow that gets culled for her udder, disposition or lack of performance, that’s a stayability fail. There are a lot of potential drivers that are combined into stayability, but ultimately it gets at the economically relevant phenotype of cow longevity.”
Once again, Rowan urged the audience to stop the waste. Use those EPDs.
Editor’s note: Becky Mills is a freelance writer and cattlewoman from Cuthbert, Ga.
Featured in the 2025 Angus Beef Bulletin
Topics: Management , Genetics , EPDs , Industry Insights , Selection , Events
Publication: Angus Beef Bulletin
Issue: January 2025
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