Holstein Association USA

And y- you know, guys, this isn't...

We're not, like, rewriting the Bible over here, right? The, you know, Holstein, the Holstein Association USA's classification program has professional staff doing classification, and their program is explicitly marketed a- as a genetic and breeding decision-making tool.

You know, their classification system also uses regionalized scheduling, including a seven-month area cycle, which is a model ADGA could look at when thinking about efficient geographic scheduling, and Holstein's current employment listings include benefits such as medical, dental insurance, retirement savings, and PTO for employees.

So the question becomes, Danielle, why are we expecting the dairy goat industry's data collection system to operate like a seasonal volunteer passion project?

I think sometimes it's always good to step back and say, well, what are we even running after here? And I think it all first came from direction of the board at the time of how – to your point, Roger, how do we continue to make the Angus cow better? Are there things we can – do from a genetic improvement standpoint to improve fertility, discovering are there haplotypes in play that maybe impact embryonic loss? And could we ever build genetic tools and selection tools to breed around those? And so the dairy industry has been using haplotypes for a while.

So we actually had someone from the Holstein Association that is an expert in those to just come in and share information a little of the history of haplotypes, how they've been using it, just for us to maybe learn and get a little more knowledgeable about them.

I don't know if you guys had some takeaways from haplotypes or any of those presentations.

Yeah, I mean, clearly haplotypes is above my pay grade in a lot of ways as far as understanding, but I thought what I picked up more from him than anything else was they use it more as a predictor of genetic progress than they do, like we think of the recessive gene issues that we had earlier where we really had to try to breed around and get out of those situations.

And so CDCB, with a lot of prodding from the industry, put a lot of time and effort into trying to sort out what was going on in fertility and to give us some more accurate evaluations.

The Holstein world has been fighting the issue of stature and size for quite a while now, and the Holstein Association, the Genetic Advancement Committee, and the Type Committee worked very hard to develop, with Jason and Jeff, a new program that's looking at creating a relationship between type traits and productive life.

A big problem right now with PTAT final score is that it's negatively correlated with productive life.

Holstein wanted to develop a new system that would look at creating a very sound commercial cow that had a longer productive life but was still attractive and, and still looked like a Holstein.

And quite frankly, it's going to give producers a lot of different options of how they breed cattle.

So I look at it as it's a lot of information, but boy, it makes breeding cows so much more fun.

And I, I give Holstein Association a lot of credit here.

We know that PTAT has had a, a high correlation to stature.