 Good. So Carl asked me to talk about how to look at a sale catalog. But quite frankly, if the first thing you do is look at a sale catalog, you're not doing this right. You need to start by thinking through what it is that you want. What do you want the bull to do? And different producers who think that they want to buy a bull have different answers to that, depending on what their situation is. And in general, you want a bull to sire calves that are going to be born in a timely manner. You want to be born easily. You don't want too many calving difficulties. You want them to grow rapidly up to weaning. And you want them to continue to grow rapidly and be efficient in the feedlot. And efficiency here, I'm talking about feed efficiency. You want them to grow rapidly without eating too much. And then in the end, you want them to produce a carcass that is lean and is of excellent quality. And so that's sort of the first set of things that you want a bull to do. But you know what? It may be that you also want to sire some replacement heifers. And so you want this bull also to sire daughters that are going to be pregnant to calf when they're two years old, are going to have a calf every year, are going to give birth easily, are going to wean a heavy calf, and then produce calves that will continue to grow, be efficient and produce a good carcass. And you want these cows to live a long and productive life. Well, that is a long list of things to think about before you go out to buy a bull. And depending on what your situation is, these different things on that list are going to be different in importance. It may be that you're looking for a bull just to sire calves and that you're not really that interested in keeping replacements. It might be that keeping replacements is the only thing that you're really interested in. It might be that you want to buy a bull to produce calves with first calf heifers. Well, then that changes the dynamics of what you're interested in. So before you ever start looking at a sale catalog, you need to sit down and as I said in my Stockman's Magazine article, you need to write a job description. What is it that you want the bull to do? Because if you don't know what you want him to do, then it's pretty unlikely he's going to do what he needs to do for you. Well, how do we identify a bull that's going to do these things? And the answer to that unsurprisingly, I suppose coming from me, is EPDs. And so some more homework you have to do before you start looking at a sale catalog is to study the EPDs in the breed that you're interested in. What traits does that breed report? What are the averages for the EPDs? And remember that in almost all cases, the average is not zero. If you see an Angus bull that has an EPD of weaning weight, for example, of plus 30, you might think to yourself, well, gosh, plus 30, that's good. It's a big positive number. But you might discover that that plus 30 isn't even above average. And so you need to look at the breeds that you're thinking about, go to their websites and take a look at the EPD statistics and just what is zero at this point. And so you can make an assessment as to what kind of bulls it is that you're looking at and what kind of genetic trend has been going on in the breed. How has the breed been changing over time? Because the breeds do change. The traditional British breeds are a lot bigger than they were 40 years ago, for example. And so you need to think through what your baseline is in terms of what these breeds are. So before you ever look at a catalog, you got some homework that you need to do. And that's to study what it is that you need and to study the breeds that you're interested in to make sure you know how to interpret the data that you're getting. Well, let's give just a little bit of background about EPDs. EPD stands for expected progeny difference. It's the genetic merit of an animal as a potential parent in comparison with others. And so if you have an EPD of plus 10 for one bull, you have an EPD of zero for another bull, then you expect these calves, their calves, if this is weaning weight, for example, you expect their calves to differ by 10 pounds. Now, there would have been a time when people would have stopped me and said, well, yeah, but everybody knows these EPDs don't actually mean anything. And I got that from a lot of folks once upon a time and the reason they thought they didn't mean anything is because everybody cheats. Well, since then, a lot of people, including myself, have done a lot of research into whether or not EPDs do what we say they do. And the answer over and over and over again is that they do. I did research on milk EPDs for extended period of time, had 10, 12 years worth of data, and year after year, the calves differed in weaning weight awfully closely to what the EPDs said that they should. Now it varied a little bit from year to year. Sometimes the difference is a little bigger. Sometimes the difference is a little bit smaller. But the difference was pretty consistently close to the expectation. And so what about those folks once upon a time that said, well, everybody cheats? Well, do all the data that go into the EPDs are all the data good data? Probably not. Some people are trying to jimmy the data. That's likely. Some people just are not entering it properly. That's also likely. But the evidence is, based on a lot of research on many thousands of cows in a lot of different states, the evidence is that the EPDs do what we say they're going to do. And so whatever those errors are, they must cancel each other out for the most part. Now this is the place where I also need to remind you that EPDs are used to compare animals. You can't look at that EPD of 10, for example, and say anything at all about how heavy the calves are actually going to be. What you know from that plus 10 is that if you compare that bull's calves to the second bull's calves, you expect them to differ by 10 pounds. And if you're looking at weaning weight, whether that's 450 and 460 or 550 and 560 or whatever it is, the difference is 10 pounds. Now when I used to give these talks a lot, somebody would always ask about birth weight. And the question was always, well, if you've got a bull with a birth weight EPD of plus 2, how heavy will those calves be? And so I've explained that you can't do that. You can't try to guess how big the calves are going to be. But what you can say is that if you have a bull with a plus 2 and another bull with a plus 0, you expect their calves to differ by 2 pounds. And the person asking that question, and this happened over and over again, would be kind of frustrated and say, well, no, you don't understand my question. I've got this bull with a plus 2. How heavy will those calves be? So I've tried to come up with some other explanation for why you can't do that, why it's only useful for comparative purposes. And that question-answer series would then escalate to him being really frustrated with me because I just wasn't telling him what he needed to know. Well, I wasn't telling him because there isn't an answer to that question. EPDs are used for comparisons. The plus 10 and the plus 0 can be compared. But the plus 10 all by itself doesn't actually mean very much. It only means something in comparison with another. Well, various breed associations now have a wide array of EPDs. And some breed associations have a lot of them. There's a few that only have four or five. But these are traits that appear frequently in the EPD systems. Birth weight, weaning weight, yearling weight, mature weight, yearling height, mature height. These are all measures of growth that appear in multiple EPD systems for different breeds. Every breed is near as I can tell that as EPDs has birth weight, weaning weight, yearling weight, and milk. And then the others vary quite a bit from breed to breed. Carcass traits, a lot of breeds now have carcass EPDs. And they typically would have carcass EPDs for carcass weight, fat thickness, ribeye area, and marbling score. Some also have an EPD for retail yield. Some also have an EPD for tenderness. Reproductive traits. Almost all breeds have calving ease EPDs. Quite a few breeds have a scrotal circumference EPD. A couple of breeds have a gestation length. And increasingly breeds are putting together what are called heifer pregnancy rate EPDs. And heifer pregnancy rate says that if one bull has a higher heifer pregnancy rate EPD than another bull, you would expect his daughters to give birth as two-year-olds more frequently. Expect a higher percentage of his daughters to give birth as a two-year-old than another bull that has a heifer pregnancy rate that's lower. And then several traits that we just called associated with the cow milk production, which is actually a measurement of the cow's influence on weaning weight. Dossility. Quite a few breeds have a dossility EPD. Perhaps you can be argued that several breeds need to have a dossility EPD. Need to make some improvements there. Some breeds have a stayability EPD. And this is basically a projection of whether or not the bull's daughters are going to stay in the herd longer. If a bull has a high stayability EPD compared to another bull, then you expect more of his daughters to have given birth regularly until they are 5, 6, 7 years of age. And then several breeds have a maintenance energy EPD. And they call it different things, but this is the start of EPDs that are selection indexes combining EPDs from various traits. And the maintenance energy EPD is an example of an EPD that says we're going to look at how big the cows are, we're going to look at how much milk they give, and we're going to evaluate them for how efficient they are as mothers. Well, we are starting in somewhat of a new era in terms of EPDs, and that is the era of having selection indexes. And the selection index EPDs, the Angus has quite a few of them, the Herford has quite a few of them, the Gelpe has a few, the red Angus has one that they call maintenance energy, which would be very similar to the cow energy EPD that's available in Angus. These indexes are all combinations of characteristics, and they're based on a concept called the selection index. The selection index has not traditionally been embraced by beef producers very much. Swine producers use selection indexes heavily, but beef producers traditionally haven't. But these EPD selection indexes have been developed in the last few years and are becoming much more important and much more valuable. And for example, the wean calf value EPD, the dollar W EPD in the Angus breed, is a combination of birth weight, low birth weight, high weaning weight, low milk, and low mature weight. The cow energy EPD is a function of low milk and low mature size, mature weight. The feedlot value is just simply a function of growth. So it's looking at weaning weight and yearling weight. The quality grade EPD is a function of marbling. The yield grade EPD is a function of rib eye area, fat thickness, and carcass weight. And then those two EPD indexes are combined to form a grid value index, and the grid value and the feedlot index are combined to form a beef value index. So it's important before you head into evaluating a sale catalog to make sure you have an understanding of the EPDs because the EPDs are the language that are used to evaluate beef animals these days. It's also important as you look at buying a bull to consider genetic defects. This has become a much more prominent issue just in the last few years. Several breeds do a good job of reporting a number of genetic defects. This has become a bigger issue because of fairly popular Angus bull. It turned out to be a carrier for what's called curly calf syndrome, or more properly arthrogroposis multiplex, and that same fairly popular bull turns out is also a carrier for disorder called hydrocephalus. And so it's important to evaluate the situation relative to genetic defects. What is the testing policy for the breed? Are the bulls in the sale tested? And we have genetic tests now for a wide variety of these genetic defects. The tests are generally fairly inexpensive. On the order of $25, $30, they're generally fairly quick. They take only a few weeks. And so as you head towards buying a bull, there really is no reason if the pedigree suggests at all that there is the possibility of a genetic defect. There's really no reason not to make sure you understand by buying bulls from people that have a genetic testing program. So let's take a look at a catalog, and this is a sale that happened not too long ago. It's off Angus Valley, big Angus herd in the state. They sold a lot of animals on February 12th. 400 bulls, 165 females. Certainly the possibility was there to buy a lot of animals. Well, I think it's important to look over the information that's provided in the sale catalog and not just go straight to the animals themselves. And so this is a catalog that gives you a lot of good information. Affordable genetics for the cowman. I'm not really sure what that means. Affordable is in the eye of the beholder, obviously. But personally, I have to like the fact that they use the word genetics at least to describe what they're doing. But take a look at the information that's up and down the list here. They give some information about how to get there, about where to stay. So this is a set of owners that are interested in making sure that the customers are comfortable. They give the opportunity to view the animals. Now this is some fine print here, but Shaw Fangus Valley retains one-third, and I can't read it terribly well, but one-third revenue-sharing interest in the seaman. And so make sure you read these things carefully to make sure what it is that you're buying. You're not buying 100% of the bull here. You're buying a substantial share of the bull, but not necessarily all of it. It tells how the bulls are developed. And that's important because if they were not managed properly prior to the sale, then the chances of them getting into your herd and doing what it is that you bought them to do is certainly diminished somewhat. That's about possibility for delivery, some terms of the sale, and here's an important piece, genetic recessives. Have they been tested? And in this herd, important genetic defects in the Angus breed are arthrogryposis multiplex and neuropathic hydrocephalus, and they have been tested for that. The CAC, that is for what's called Fonkafe syndrome, and it indicates that some of the animals in the sale, maybe carriers for Fonkafe syndrome, and you just need to look at the registration number to see which ones that is. So they are testing for arthrogryposis, and they're clean, they're testing for hydrocephalus, and they're clean, they're testing for Fonkafe syndrome, and most of them are clean, and the ones that aren't are identified in that way. They talk about the sale order they're going to use, and this is a big sale, and so they organize it in such a way that is going to be convenient to purchasers that are interested in certain bloodlines. So here's a sale catalog that does a good job of providing some information that talks about sending in phone bids, so that would be an important consideration for some people as well. They explain the performance data, and in this case they also explain the bloodlines that are being used, and they group them up in the sale catalog by the bloodlines. So that's a good convenience for the purchasers, and they go through and define what all the EPDs are. That's an important consideration, and I read these over, and they do a good job of defining them. The words aren't precisely the words that I would use, but the words are certainly appropriate, and they have explained what these EPDs are very nicely, and so that tells me some important things. These are people that value the EPDs. These are people that understand what they are, or are at least in communication with somebody that understands what they are, and so that's a good sign to me as well. A lot of times the sale catalog is going to list some reference animals. In this case they list a reference animal here, which is a bull that has a number of progeny that are in the sale. Now this catalog is really big on pictures, and it has his damn pictured, it has another cow here that's part of his pedigree pictured, and page after page in the sale catalog has a lot of pictures in it. You certainly need to remember as you look at pictures that the animals are going to be pictured in such a way that are beneficial to the appearance of the animal, and that what you are looking at is not terribly heritable. Now you may like what you're looking at when you take a look at this bull, and you certainly want to evaluate whether or not they are structurally sound, whether or not they are reproductively sound. If you're interested in purchasing them as a purebred, do they have any characteristics that would make them less than desirable as a member of that breed, but again remember that what you're looking at in terms of the size, the confirmation of that animal, what you're looking at isn't very heritable because that is highly influenced by the environment and the management. Now in the page for this reference sire they give you a pedigree, and they give you some EPDs. Now, let me talk just a moment about pedigrees. I'm not alone in the fact that I like to look at pedigrees. I grew up liking to look at pedigrees. I was taught from a very young age to be interested in looking at pedigrees, and I can remember a very long time ago, probably more interested in herford than I was in Angus, but being able to recite back the history of prominent members of that breed. So I value pedigrees from that standpoint, and from the standpoint of marketing of purebred animals, the pedigree is important. If you can say that this animal is the son or the grandson of some famous superstar bull that has value, that is associated with the value that is assigned to a purebred animal. So I don't want to diminish the importance of pedigrees from a marketing standpoint because they can be extremely important when you're selling purebred animals. I do, however, want to caution you about the assumptions that you make about pedigrees in terms of genetics. They are somewhat limited in value. Now you might say, well, how could that possibly be? Because the parents of the individual animal contributed all of his genetics, and that's true. But here we're looking at a three-generation pedigree, the parents, the grandparents, and the great-grandparents. So each of the parents contributed half. Each of the grandparents contributed a fourth. Each of the great-grandparents contributed an eighth. Do you notice here that these numbers are getting quite a bit smaller? The contribution of members of the pedigree past the first couple of generations is fairly minimal. You also have to remember that the sire, while it contributes half of the genetics to the calf, the actual performance or the actual appearance of the sire is a single record. Now the EPDs that are down here, what are they based on? They're based on thousands, tens of thousands of records on all possible relatives of this animal. The sire represents one point in that. The weaning weight EPD is probably, in this case, a function of several thousand relatives of this bull. Again, from a marketing standpoint of purebred animals, the pedigree is important. From a genetic assessment standpoint, the pedigree in all honesty isn't that important, and the degree that it is important is expressed completely in the EPDs. Now what I just said to you may run counter to the way you at least recall being taught about the value of a pedigree. It's interesting, but the EPDs that we have are a much more complete picture of the genetics of an animal than simply looking at a sire or a Greek grand sire or something like that. It's important to remember that. Okay, so they tell you some other information about the reference sire, give you his EPDs. This bull has maids to him, has 100 progeny for sale in this sale, may well have a lot of other progeny. They are not listing the accuracies that are associated with the EPDs. On a bull like this, and I haven't looked it up, but on a bull like this, his accuracies may be fairly large because he has a lot of progeny performance that is out there someplace. Well, here's lot number one, and I think it says here somewhere that lot number one is also the picture on the cover of the catalog. Lot number one presumably is one that they were careful about choosing which one was going to be lot number one, and take a look here at the information that they provide. A birth weight EPD, a weaning weight EPD. They say that the weaning weight EPD is in the top 1%. Pay attention to the fact that they didn't say what top percent the birth weight EPD was in. But the weaning weight EPD is in the top 1%. Here's a milk EPD, it's in the top, I think if I can read it, 3%. The yearling weight EPD in the top 2%. And take a look at those numbers. If you hadn't done your homework ahead of time, if you hadn't gone and looked up what the average EPDs are for the breed, what do those numbers mean? And the answer is they don't mean a heck of a lot, unless you know what it's being compared to. Now, they give you some information there by saying it's in the top 1%. Okay, so that 67 is quite a bit higher than average. That 30 for the milk is quite a bit higher than average. The 110 for the yearling weight is quite a bit higher than average. The 2.3 actually is not even better than average, and you want the birth weight EPD to be smaller, obviously, in order to keep down calving difficulty. Now, in addition to these EPDs, the birth weight, weaning weight, yearling weight, and milk, they also give you the carcass EPDs. The carcass EPDs. And again, notice that there's no accuracies. Well, this is a young bull born in 2010. And so the accuracy on a young bull is going to be fairly low. Maybe as low as .05, probably in this case is somewhat higher than that. But the accuracies are probably going to be fairly low. Now, they've given you some of the growth EPDs. They've given you some of the carcass EPDs. Are there other EPDs available for the Angus breed? And the answer to that is yes. There's several reproduction EPDs. The Angus has a good set of the index EPDs. These are the ones that they've chosen to provide for you. How do they decide which ones to provide? Well, they have a limited amount of space. Probably some of it's based on what they did last year and the year before. But they are not giving you the entire picture of the EPDs. Can you go into the Angus website and find some more information? And the answer to that absolutely is yes. You can put in registration numbers and get EPDs for animals that are in the sire summary. And so, at the very least, you should be able to go to the sire summary and evaluate EPDs on some members of this bull's pedigree. Now, the other thing that they provide for you here is the actual performance values for this bull. You weighed 78 pounds at birth, weighed 1,037 at 205 days, weighed 1651 at 365 days. That's very impressive. 1,037 at 205 days. That's a lot of calf at 205 days. What does that number mean? Does that mean he's going to sire calves and weigh 1,000 pounds at 205 days? I really doubt it. Remember, these are single values. These are single values. A lot of people look at the actual birth weight, 78 pounds. Look at the birth weight EPD. Which of those two is the most important? Which of those two is the most important? The 2.3 birth weight EPD or the 78 actual birth weight? And there are those that would say, well, heck, that bull's actual birth weight was 78 pounds. That tells me what I need to know about what kind of sire he's going to be. But that is ignoring the reality here that the 78 pounds is this one bull's birth weight, actual birth weight, whereas the 2.3 is a function of this bull's birth weight, the birth weight of all of his siblings, the birth weight of all of his cousins, the birth weights of all the members of his pedigree. The accuracy value on his birth weight EPD, while it may not be very large, from a genetic standpoint, is still a lot bigger than the accuracy of his actual birth weight in terms of predicting genetic merit. And these other values, 1,037, I would hazard a guess that this guy got a little bit extra feed before he was 205 days old to have that kind of a 205-day weight. I don't know that for an absolute fact, but I think I'm pretty confident ground to say that 1,037 was influenced by some creep feeding. Those numbers, while interesting, and I understand why they would put them in here, from a genetic improvement standpoint, those numbers really don't mean very much at all. Now, they're interesting and they're big numbers, but they are not in any way, shape, or form as valuable as the EPDs are for actually assessing the genetic merit of this animal. Now, they're selling some heifers, and they bunch them up a little bit, but they also provide for the heifers, they also provide the EPDs. And you'd say, well, heck, the EPD on a heifer ought to be not very accurate, and that's true, these are young animals, but the EPD on any young animal doesn't have very high accuracy. They don't start accumulating a high accuracy until they've got quite a few calves on the ground. Now, here we've got a set of calves that are all from the same flush, I presume. They're full siblings to each other, so they have them advertised together. Rather unsurprising, their EPDs are alike. Does that make sense? Well, what do we know about them from a genetic standpoint? They haven't performed themselves except for their own individual birth weight, their own individual weaning weight, their own individual yearling weight. So their EPDs are based on the information that's available from Sibs and from their pedigree and from all kinds of cousins. And if they are full Sibs to each other, they have the same pedigree, they have the same cousins, they have the same siblings, and so their EPDs should be alike in this case. But it's nice of them to group them up for you here, so you can see the actual information. Again, the EPDs and these animals are all alike. The actual performance values are somewhat different from each other, but then that should be expected, because management can influence these things by quite a lot. I'm going to jump out of this, and we're going to take a look at some catalogs. Here's a Hurford catalog from a sale that was just a couple days ago, and they also do a good job of giving you some information. They talk about the importance of performance testing, they talk about possibility of insurance, they give you considerable detail about terms and conditions, and they also have a reference tire. Now they give you a pretty complete set of EPDs, and they give it to you relative to where these are for the entire breed. And so this is actually quite valuable, because in addition to the actual numbers, if they give them to you relative to other members of the breed, you can look at this and see whether or not these animals are above or below average. So they have a number of reference tires and then some bulls for sale. They give you the EPDs, you can use the information from the reference tires to assess whether or not these bulls are above or below average in the EPDs. They give you a pedigree, the same story on the pedigree. The actual performance and the actual pedigree aren't nearly as important as the EPDs are in terms of assessing genetic merit. North Dakota Cemental Association, their sale was in December, and they give you a fair amount of information about what they're doing. Now this is multiple breeders and not a single breeder, so that affects what's going on here. Let me go through it a little bit and see if I can't get to some actual performance here. And here once again they give you a set of EPDs. It's important that you've already done your homework again to make sure you know where these EPDs are relative to the averages of the breed. So what's the bottom line here? Do your homework before you go. Before you ever look at a sale catalog, you need to understand the breed that you're interested in. You need to understand the EPDs for the breed. You need to understand the genetic defect situation. You need to do a good job of writing a job description for the bulls that you want to buy. And after you do that, you need to study the catalog fully, have a good idea of what you're going to do before you ever get in the car to drive there. Don't go to the sale until you've done all these things unless you're planning on leaving your checkbook at home. Do those things first, then put your checkbook in your pocket and then go to the sale. So, questions? I've got a stupid question here, but if I was a breeder and I had some really above average bulls, why wouldn't I put in my sale what the average for the breed is so you can see how good my bulls are instead of making people do their homework? Well, and I agree with you. And the different catalogs that I've looked at have done people's work for them to varying degrees. And I certainly, if I were writing a sale catalog, particularly if I thought it was to my advantage, I would put some additional information about the average EPDs for the breed into my catalog. Now, you'll notice the one catalog had, in some cases, bulls identified with a graph as to whether or not they were above or below average for that breed. But it wouldn't take a whole lot of space to put in just a small table giving the average EPDs for the breed that your animals are representing.