Neogen® Igenity® Genomics With Esch Cattle Company

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Sydni: Hello and welcome! I'm Sydni Lienemann with Neogen and we are here today talking with Don Esch of Esch Cattle Company. Don can you tell us a little bit about your operation?

Don: Esch Cattle Company started in 2006 in in Colorado and we focus primarily on key Angus cattle at that time had Angus and Chiangus but we took our Angus cattle to make more Chiangus cattle.

We started using Igenity for the fact of that we wanted some more genomics to prove up our EPDs. We didn't have a lot of data from our association and not enough cattle getting turned in so the accuracies weren't high enough for my goal for those EPDs.

We started with an Igenity Gold. Really helped our bull sales because when people seen that those those accuracies just just improved by 13, 14 percent.

When they came it just it helped our sales the next year coming through that.

We continued on we started saving heifers off of Igenity's. Not a hundred percent, but I mean, that's certainly one step of the program.

We found a beautiful heifer but, you know what, she had a heifer pregnancy rate of three. Probably weren't going to keep her.

It's a lot simpler to get rid of them early than it is as a three-year old.

Sixty-five dollars at the time was what it cost us for an Igenity Gold. If that heifer had got pregnant, which virgin heifers are pretty easy to get bred, it's the second year that makes it tough, so their stayability factors along with their heifer pregnancy rates are huge.

If that heifer didn't breed, or if we knew that she wouldn't probably have a stayability factor for us, then we could feed her out and she would gross sixteen, seventeen hundred dollars for us.

You know what it's a three-year-old over 30 months. She's gonna be worth fifty to sixty cents a pound. A lot of difference there. That sixty-five dollars was well spent.

If you look at a set of cattle and you don't know what their genotype is, you can't visually inspect that. It is a great tool to find out you have a stayability factor in this cow; the other one might be a full sister in blood to her, she doesn't.

They both looked pretty close to the same. Without having that genotype there you don't know what you have.

The index that comes with that Igentity really does make it really easy for us to put them in order of what it is.

It's a great tool to say, "All right, tag number 170 sticks out on paper." Tha'st just absolutely fantastic.

Pretty easy to walk out there if her feet are good, does it does her other placement look right. It's just something that we want to keep back. On paper she's phenomenal. Phenotype still matters in certain points. They still have to walk the water. They have to have good feet and legs. So, yeah, it's a fantastic tool to rank those animals in the order of an index but then still walk out and say is she gonna make it to the water tank out in the pasture? Is she gonna be able to live in this country for ten years because her udders good?

Those type of things still count, too.

We really love a cow to be here for ten, eleven years we've been able to have that.

Udders and feet are very important to our operation, and that come from big country out east, that if they can't walk, they're not gonna survive.

With Hannah coming on hopefully the next generation is taking an effective Esch Cattle Company.

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