April 2, 2019
A change in Fertility Evaluations for April 2019
An update from the CDCB: In April 2018 evaluations, larger-than-expected variation was observed in CDCB fertility traits (daughter pregnancy rate {DPR}, heifer conception rate {HCR} and cow conception rate {CCR}). Several recent AI bulls in all breeds showed a reduction in their traditional Predicted Transmitting Abilities (PTA). In earlier years, young bulls had unexplained increases or decreases averaging about 0.5/0.7% in April, but the changes were on average higher than 1.0% last April. Despite the drop in the mean for recent bulls, when comparing April to the previous run (December 2017), the individual bull rankings were still fairly stable having high correlations (0.98). READ MORE