Not Your Average Steers.
What sets Longcore Cattle beef apart? There is a lot that goes into creating a perfectly finished market steer. None the least of which are nutrition and environment. However, what separates Longcore Cattle from the average beef producer is our dedication and investment into cutting edge genetics that result in higher performance and carcass quality. Allow us to explain what this looks like.
The Basics.
We raise three breeds of registered cattle. These are Angus, Simmental, and Hereford. Each of these breeds have their own national breed association. The majority of the cows in our herd are “registered” meaning that they have documented pedigrees and are assigned Expected Progeny Differences statistics. These EPDs are the driving factor for carcass quality improvements in the past decades.
You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure.
Expected Progeny Differences (EPDs) can almost be compared to stats for baseball players. They indicate how well an animal is expected to perform in certain measurable categories. These categories include things such as growth rates, milk production, marbling ability, ribeye area, and feed efficiency. The numbers are generated from the submission of performance data by registered breeders like throughout the nation. A few times per year, we will submit data on each individual calf and the job done by their mothers. Utilizing ultrasound technology, we also are able to collect carcass quality data from live animals. This data is judged in light of contemporary groups to account for the wide variety of environment and management practices throughout our nation’s beef industry. Using this mountain of data, the breed associations assign numbers to attribute positive and negative traits to individual animals. Here’s an example of an EPD profile of one of our cows:
The traits are listed along the top. The EPD values are the top set of numbers. The third set of numbers is the dependability of the EPDs, which reflects the amount of data accumulated that support the predictions. The bottom row is a percentile ranking of how this individual stacks up against the rest of the breed population. These percentiles make it very easy to see the strengths and weaknesses of this cow at a glance. She is in the top 15% and top 10% of all Simmental cattle for marbling and ribeye traits, while also being an outlier top 1% for shear force (indicator of tenderness). Meanwhile, she has her weaknesses of calving ease and milk production.
I hope you are beginning to see how we can use these numbers to our advantage. When selecting a bull to mate this cow to, we take these numbers into consideration and pick a bull that should build upon her strengths and improve her weaknesses. On a whole herd level, we can also identify standout individuals to perhaps use in our embryo transfer program (more on that below).
The New Frontier.
In the past decade, a new technology has greatly influenced the way we identify great cattle. This is the world of genomics, or genomic mapping. Each year we will collect blood samples on a group of calves and submit them to the lab. From the blood, DNA sequences will be run and compared to known DNA markers for traits. Whether or not an individual possesses these markers determines if their EPDs for the trait goes up or down. This is another avenue to submit data and it enhances the predictability of our stats, especially on young cattle in which little data has been submitted on. The technology is getting more accurate every day.
Not Just a Numbers Game.
Perhaps we should pump the brakes for just a second. By reading all the above, you’d probably think that we make all breeding and management decisions with a calculator. However, breeding cattle solely using EPDs is almost certain to lead you astray eventually. Heck, there is still a subset of cattlemen out there that scoff at using EPDs at all. And they say this because cattle also need to pass the “eye test”. There is a certain structural design that makes good cattle good cattle. This phenotype is desirable for cattle to live healthy, productive lives and it is also always more enjoyable to walk through a group of eye appealing cows than a group of homely ones. We never turn a blind eye to what our cattle look like and in our mind, trying to achieve this balance of both phenotype and genotype is where cattle breeding becomes an art.
Only the Best.
At Longcore Cattle, around 75% of our calves will be the result of artificial insemination. Artificial insemination is the manipulation of a rod through the cow’s cervix while she’s in heat to deliver semen directly to the uterus. The advantage of A.I. is that it allows us to use high genetic caliber bulls in our herd from throughout the country. Each year we are studying the numbers and progeny reports to identify sires we want to bring into our herd to improve our traits such as growth and carcass quality. Semen is collected on these bulls, frozen in liquid nitrogen, and shipped to our farm. We then just have to thaw and perform A.I. and around 80% of the time it will result in a pregnancy. When we say bulls from all over the country, we mean from all over the country. Here’s some we are using this year:
Maximizing our Best Mommas.
In a traditional beef reproductive setting, each cow has one calf per year. In a full cow lifetime, that might mean ten calves total. Here at Longcore Cattle, we utilize embryo transfer to rewrite this rule. By reading above, we hope that you can see that not all cows are created equal. Some rise to the top when evaluating genetics, phenotype, and performance records. Once identified as superior, we might incorporate these females into our embryo donor program. Embryo transfer involves superovulation of a cow’s ovaries, so that instead of dropping one egg to be fertilized, she drops many. We then breed her via A.I. to a superior bull that we think would match well with her. The embryos develop in the uterus for a week and then we flush them out with a catheter. We can then find them under a microscope and evaluate their viability. Meanwhile, we will have synchronized heats on a group of surrogate (or “recipient”) mother cows. We take the good embryos and implant them directly into these surrogate uteruses and around 60% of the time the pregnancy will stick. We can also freeze the embryos in liquid nitrogen for implantation at a later date. In this way, these superior cows can have a handful or up to dozens of progeny in a single year, leading to a marked increase in our calf-crop quality. Lucy, for example, has almost surpassed 30 calves!
The End Result.
It is our hope that all of this work leads to a difference you can see and taste. The emphasis we place on genetically selecting for yield grade, marbling, and shear force enhances the predictability in which we produce a carcass that is limited in the amount of waste trimmed off, bountiful in the amount of intramuscular fat, with incredible tenderness.
You can count on us for transparency. You can count on us for customer service. And more than anything, you can count on the fact that we are doing our homework.