| Project: COL00607 |
Department: Animal Sciences |
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PIs: Enns, RM
; Crews, DH
; Frasier, MF
; Engle, TE
; Umberger, W |
| Title: Livestock Management Systems |
| Begin Date: 07/01/2009 |
Term Date: 06/30/2015
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Most recent project status:
Revised
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| Objectives: The primary goal of this project is to continue development and enhancement of a flexible, user-friendly decision support system that can be utilized by commercial and seedstock producers of beef cattle to improve profitability through improved selection of breeding animals and better design of mating systems. The use of this decision support system will provide producers with the ability to evaluate selection and mating alternatives to ultimately produce better performing offspring. Our specific objectives include: 1. Improvement of methods for integration of costs/incomes of production, genetic prediction technologies, and underlying biological systems (such as the interaction of nutrition, reproduction, selection and mating) into the tool. 2. Identification of producer-specific economic data critical to proper model parameterization and prediction of profitability differences. 3. Development of methodology to account for value of production and genetic improvement given the time-lag for realization of those improvements. 4. Improvement of underlying biological models including incorporation of heterotic effects and alternatives for marketing animals post-weaning 5. Validation/parameterization of deliverable products The output of this project will be an on-line decision support tool for the beef industry. The tool will allow the producer to evaluate the effect of selection and mating decisions on profitability of the enterprise. The system will also allow the producer to evaluate various marketing endpoints including weaning, post-weaning and harvest. |
| Approach: We will use a multi-pronged approach to performing the research associated with meeting the objectives of the project as these areas require expertise from various disciplines and industry groups. The team will rely on the expertise of the participating economist to identify weaknesses of the current tool and to develop methodologies for incorporating appropriate methodology to account for the time-value of profitability changes resulting from genetic improvement. This will be the primary focus to satisfy objectives 1, 2, and 3. As new external research is published describing the interactions of the system, such as genotype by environment interactions, these results will be evaluated for potential incorporation into the system and will be secondary to improving the economic component of the tool. To meet the needs of objective 4, the team will primarily rely on previously published research given that these effects and alternatives require substantial animal resources and historical performance information. The estimation of heterotic effects typically comes from designed crossbreeding studies; however, many of these studies have not reported the influence of heterosis on threshold traits such as heifer pregnancy and stayability. The statistical methodology to evaluate animal differences in performance of these threshold traits has only recently become computationally feasible. As such, determining the effects of heterosis on these traits will require additional research likely using field data from the cooperators of the CSU Center for Genetic Evaluation of Livestock. Given that the Red Angus Association of America has indicated interest in funding research using the tool to develop indexes for their constituency, their database is a likely candidate and includes information on over 2 million animals. Validation and parameterization is continually ongoing. The key to successful validation is compiling sufficient animal and economic performance data. The CSU Beef Improvement Center has been collecting such data since 1986 and will serve as the validation population for the cow/calf component of the model. This facility is especially appropriate for these validations in that it is operated as a self-funded entity with operations funded totally by ranch income. In recent years (since 2000) this facility has been retaining ownership on steers through the feedlot and will also serve to validate the post-weaning addition to the decision support tool. |
| Keywords: Selection,
Beef cattle,
Livestock management,
Management systems,
decision making,
simulation,
computer analysis,
economics,
profitability,
sire selection,
stochastic processes,
risk,
predictive models,
validation |
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