OLDS - The next step in analysis of Olds College’s first-ever herd of Red Angus cattle is about to happen.
The herd of 10 heifers was acquired from generous donors back in October.
By the end of December, a feeding trial to compare the herd for feeding efficiency against the college’s existing beef herd had been completed.
Also by then, DNA samples of the herd had been taken.
The plan now is to send those samples away to be analyzed for genetic information because currently, the college doesn’t have the expertise in-house to do that work.
“Those samples will be submitted any day now,” Sean Thompson, manager of the college's Technology Access Centre for Livestock Production said during a recent interview. He predicted it will take three to four weeks for them to come back.
“Immediately there probably won’t be a lot of applications until we get to breeding season, where we might use that information for selection of sires, for example,” he said.
“We’ll basically get a genotype of them and that gives us quite a bit of information to use for trait predictions, siring and mother verification as well as prediction; so estimating expected progeny differences we can use as breeding values for the future."
The donation of the Red Angus herd has been a rare, exciting opportunity for the college to do research and analysis on a purebred cattle herd for academic purposes and for producers, he said.
He called the donation and the research undertaken a success so far.
Over the next five years or so, Thompson anticipates expanding the Red Angus herd from the current 10 to 25 or 30 breeding females.
“We’re establishing the baseline for genetics performance and from here on, we’ll be tracking progress through as many, I guess, data processing and management techniques that we can," he said.
