The next big beef sires, part two: semen providers on the sought-after traits

• This article is the second in a three-part series about beef semen providers, including the bulls in demand, buying trends, and the processes in identifying the top sires.

Beef semen providers say data, pedigree and phenotype all play a part when it comes to bull selection, but the traits in demand are changing over time.

Damien Thompson, Genetics Australia, said intramuscular fat was a focus about 12 to 18 months ago, and this was reflected in some of the sires the company had offered.

Several other sires, including Millah Murrah Tiny Dancer, Baldridge Grindstone, and Allendale True Blue, also ranked well for net feed intake.

"People are definitely putting a bit more attention to it, it's not a major trait of of selection pressure yet," he said.

"When we found True Blue, that was a real feature.

"It's very hard to get very feed efficient animals with high IMF. He's a complete package and very good commercial heifer bull with with calving ease, growth and carcase quality, but that feature there was something that really caught our eye."

While bulls with larger birthweights still had their place, he was noticing demand for sires suitable to join to heifers.

"From our point of view it creates a lot of flexibility into what markets they can go in to," he said.

"The beef on dairy market is something that is developing all the time and so bulls can go into that at the right time as well.

"Larger birth weight, there's definitely, definitely still a market for it. You still need that in a breeding program to really add that growth and power early on.

"But it does limit you slightly and particularly when you look at the commercial market, which is our highest volume beef AI market, most of those are just first-time heifers."

Fletch Kelly, ABS Australia, said there was a "golden triangle" for sires that included pedigree, phenotype, and data.

"If you've got a good-looking bull with a safe, predictable pedigree with good data, he's going to be a winner every day of the week," he said.

"I think a lot of people still select animals with their eye, however, the data component, particularly with the accuracy now with genomics and that how predictable the data is, means that people are looking for both."

Sires that ranked particularly high in some traits but did not tick all the boxes for phenotype were typically only used by a few select breeders.

He was noticing breeders were aware of net feed intake, but he thought it was yet to be informing bull selection.

"I certainly think that the new EBVs around mature cow condition score and mature cow height that Angus Australia released a few months ago, they are traits that a lot of people are paying attention to now," he said.

"Traditionally people selected on animals with high fat and they thought that was an indicator of good doing ease in a tight year, but we now know that that is factually incorrect and that it's a far better predictor of doing ease to select on mature body condition score rather than actually just selecting on fat EBVs."

Jack Laurie, Breeder Genetics, said clients were choosing balanced datasets rather than extremes in any one trait.

"That's probably been the biggest swing in the last 12 to 18 months, people aren't necessarily chasing individual traits as much... they're wanting all traits to be pretty good," he said.

He also noted there was increased interest in some of the newer traits, such as net feed intake.

"I think there is more interest in those hard to measure traits - the issue is that they're hard to measure, they are lower accuracy, we have to rely on programs like the Angus Sire Benchmarking Program and other progeny test programs to feed that data in," he said.

Other trends he had noticed recently included a shift away from US genetics.

"The Australian and American production system are very different and we've probably seen the consequences of that in different genetics in the last five to 10 years," he said.

"We're getting more and more different as time goes on - we're now at a point where we're probably chasing different types and it's making it harder to identify those US bulls.

"The average US bull versus the average bull here are very different, the average steer is very different to here, carcase is very different.

"We're probably seeing a bit of a shift away from US bulls, we're seeing more Australian bulls hit the market."