New sire summaries available

An incredible six-year stronghold of O-Bee Manfred Justice-ET holding the top position as the highest Net Merit Holstein bull came to an end with this April's sire summary. Known to many in the industry as O Man, he now ranks fourth on the Top Net Merit list with a score of 773. And that Net Merit score is quite impressive given the fact he has 45,257 daughters in 7,967 herds around the globe.

It isn't like the apple fell far from the tree this April. A pair of O Man sons overtook their sire for the top spots on the list. Sons Freddie at Genex and Man-O-Man at Accelerated have scores of 905 and 779, respectively, for Net Merit. Look for more O Man sons this August and in forthcoming USDA sire summaries as Freddie and Man-O-Man are just some of the early sons.

To view the complete Hoard's Dairyman Bull List, turn to pages 293 to 296 in the April 25 issue or go to April 2009 Bull List. under Dairyman Extras.

Genomic evaluations trumped a few additional daughters

January was a quiet sire evaluation just as it’s always been for most Holstein and Jersey proven bulls that had a majority of their first-crop daughters past the first lactation. For this group of bulls, representing about 80 percent of the active A.I. population, the sire summaries found on pages 101 to 104 of the February 10 issue are essentially the August 2008 sire proofs along with new genomic information. Put another way, for each domestic bull or cow, either the August lactations plus genomic information or the new lactations were used, whichever had the higher reliability.

The remaining 20 percent of bulls that had changes in their traditional proofs fell into two groups, notes Animal Improvement Programs Laboratory (AIPL) scientists who work on genetic evaluations.

• Younger progeny test bulls with a substantial number of daughters providing first-lactation production and health trait information. These newcomers did not have genomic information added to their January genetic evaluations because some computer programs needed to combine the data were not ready by mid-December.

• Bulls with foreign daughters, in which case the Interbull multitrait, across-country evaluation became official. These bulls did not have genomic data added to their proofs.

For future genetic evaluations, AIPL plans to include all new phenotypic information in genomic calculations.