The Angus breed has long been championed for its maternal capabilities. While every breeder’s definition of maternal will vary slightly depending on region and personal preferences, there are usually several characteristics that are commonly on the wish list for the ideal female. 

Most want a heifer who will breed early, calve on schedule every year without difficulty, nurture a healthy calf, while also having good foot conformation, teat and udder quality, and favorable docility. Essentially, we tend to want a female that can do it all, and having genetic selection tools to select for those traits will provide breeders the opportunity to continue to strive for the ideal female. 

For decades the American Angus Association has been dedicated to providing genetic selection tools to meet the various needs of seedstock breeders and commercial producers. At the end of the month, the American Angus Association will release three new expected progeny differences (EPDs): functional longevity (FL), teat size (TEAT) and udder suspension (UDDR). The addition of these new selection tools will increase the ability of Angus breeders and their commercial customers to make improvements in maternal traits within their herds. 

Functional longevity 

Cow longevity is a major factor in ensuring a herd remains profitable and sustainable. Ensuring females will remain in the herd and produce a calf year after year will contribute to the long-term success of the herd.

The FL EPD will aid in identifying sires that will produce daughters that remain in the herd and produce a calf every year. The unit of the FL EPD is the number of calves produced by 6 years of age, with a higher EPD meaning that on average, a sire’s daughters are predicted to produce more calves by the age of 6 compared to the daughters of a sire with a lower EPD. 

Similar to many maternal traits, FL has a low heritability (0.09). Even with the low heritability of the trait, the FL EPD can be used to make genetic progress in your herd and across the Angus population. 

The data used in the calculation of the FL EPD is production records submitted by members on their females through Angus Herd Improvement Records (AHIR^®). The base of this data comes from Inventory Reporting, which is the optional whole-herd reporting program of the American Angus Association. The dataset includes 8.7 million records from more than  2 million females from the United States and Canada. Data included in the evaluation are from females from ages 2 to 10 years old born after 1990 who calved as a 2-year-old female. 

Teat and udder 

Quality teat and udder conformation are essential to a productive female in any beef cattle operation. Even though beef cattle are not producing milk as the end product, these traits have an influence on the growth and survivability of calves and longevity of cows in the herd. 

For the purpose of characterizing teat and udder conformation, the American Angus Association has established scoring guidelines for TEAT and UDDR. Both scores are on a scale from 1 to 9, where a score of 1 represents a very large and misshapen teat, or a very pendulous udder; while a 9 indicates a very small teat size or a very tight udder. 

These scores should be visually assessed on females within 24 hours of calving on the combined weakest quarter, and one person should score all the females within the same management group. A female can be scored every time she has a calf, which will result in multiple scores over the course of her lifetime. Under these guidelines, Angus breeders have collected more than 180,000 records for both teat and udder on more than 112,000 females from the USA and Canada so far.

This commitment to data collection has led to the development of the TEAT and UDDR EPDs. The EPDs predict the expected differences in teat size and udder suspension scores of sires’ daughters when raised in similar environments. The EPDs are expressed in units of teat size and udder suspension scores, with a higher EPD indicating smaller teats and tighter udder suspension, respectively. 

However, it is important to remember there is not necessarily an ideal teat or udder score, so breeders should aim to find an optimum that works for their herd rather than chase the extremes of the traits. The traits have a high genetic correlation (0.77), and both teat size and udder suspension are moderately heritable at 0.32 and 0.28, respectively.  

Moving forward

A longtime goal of the Association has been to enhance the tools available for cattlemen to characterize maternal traits. While the definitions of the ideal maternal female may vary, establishing tools to select on maternal traits provides the opportunity to make directional change in genetic improvement across the breed. 

The movement of these three EPDs from the research phase to being included in the weekly World Angus Evaluation (WAE) is a monumental moment and a major move forward to securing the future success of seedstock and commercial producers. Alongside the release of these EPDs, they will also be incorporated into the $Values bioeconomic indexes.