And getting there, defined as producing an eating experience that will encourage a consumer to buy it again, means genetics and management must be tightly linked. “When we first opened the plant,” Minnie Lou says, “it was my job to call a guy and tell him how the carcasses were. I'd have rather told him his kid was sorry than that his calves weren't up to par because he took that really personally. His cows weren't as good as he thought.”

Once the rancher got over that shock, James says, “he was ready to sell them all and start over. And you had to say, ‘Stop, wait a minute. You can't afford to do that.’”

But you can take some steps to improve your cows. “Even if it's just getting individual weaning weights on those calves and tying it back to a cow, that's a place to start. If you just load them up in a trailer and haul them to the sale barn and get a group weight on those calves, that doesn't tell you much about the performance of that cow.”

James says the key is to analyze multiple traits. “That's one thing we learned in the meat business — how much true variation in value there was in a calf crop, let alone across breeds and management techniques.”

In fact, there was so much variation that James says the plant learned early on that it didn't want to buy a ranch's entire calf crop. “That was one of the key things I learned in analyzing literally hundreds of thousands of cattle and 35-40 traits. There were certainly higher-value cattle in there, but you couldn't afford to pay higher value for the whole calf crop.”

The lesson learned is that to optimize the value potential of every calf in your herd, know its market potential. “We paid for everything on an individual animal basis, so if you sent me cattle that were of less value, you got paid less for them,” he says. Those cattle that couldn't compete on the rail would have returned more money at the sale barn where the cash market averages out value differences, he says. “It was those kinds of things that helped us to understand how that value variance makes a huge difference.”

Analyzing traits

So which traits to analyze? From a cow-calf perspective, James says, you still have to start at the ranch.

“Nothing makes a commercial cowman more money than a live calf and fertility,” he says. “Then, once you've got a live calf from a cow that can stay in the herd for a long time, how do you improve? How do you begin to hone in on things such as growth, energy or feed efficiency in the cow and then down to the quality parameters we have to have for the consumer to buy our product? All of that has to be in a package for a cow-calf man to make money.”

To that end, James encourages commercial producers to decide which traits are important to them, and then develop a genetic plan. “We see so many cow herds that have what I call ‘one for everybody.’ They'll have numerous different kinds of bulls and multi-colored cows and all kinds of variation within that cow herd.” You can work with your bull supplier, he says, to develop that plan and get started in emphasizing the traits that will pay you the most.

That's easier to do now that more comprehensive EPDs are becoming available for traits that go beyond simple performance. But true genetic analysis for a wide range of traits is still hard to get for most.

That's changing, James says. Cattlemen have talked for a number of years about tracking and tracing and looking at multiple traits. But outside of niche programs, the industry doesn't have the infrastructure in place to do it, “We're now, slowly, developing that infrastructure.”

Two big pieces still need to fall into place, he says, before widespread genetic information will be available to a large part of the commercial industry. “One of those is to understand all the markers that affect the things we've talked about from a genetic standpoint. We're still a ways from having that infrastructure in place where you can come to us and say, ‘here's the genetics I need, can you build those for me?’ But it's coming, and we're going to see that happen very quickly.”