It takes two. Cattle breeders know that, but for decades
they’ve focused all their
herd-improvement efforts on the bulls.

“We’ve been looking at the males for 42 years,” said
Robert Stewart, a
Tifton, Ga., beef cattle scientist with the University of
Georgia
College of Agricultural
and Environmental Sciences. “It’s about time we looked at
the females, which are as
important or more important in cattle breeding.”

First Heifer
Evaluations

This year, for the first time ever, Stewart and many others
in
the college and
cooperating organizations evaluated heifers (female cattle that
haven’t yet had a calf).
They studied them for their carcass and breeding traits in a
program called HERD: Heifer
Evaluation and Reproductive Development.

“This is the only heifer-evaluation program we know of
east of the Mississippi
River,” he said. The Georgia HERD program is modeled after
some in Ohio and Missouri.
But because of the climate in the Southeast, the Georgia
scientists had to change how they
fed the heifers.

Replacing Heifers
Critical

Stewart said replacing heifers is just as critical as
selecting bulls. But many cattle
farmers don’t know how to effectively evaluate them. So Stewart
formed a 26-member team to
help address the problem. The HERD program objectives:

• Educate members of the beef industry on feeding and health
  programs that result in
  heifers reaching target weights for breeding purposes.
• Evaluate heifers for performance, frame characteristics,
  reproductive traits, carcass
  traits and disposition.
• Verify the genetics and source of good heifer
  characteristics for later use.
• Show what teamwork between farmers, scientists, county
  agents and the Georgia Beef
  Association can produce.

First Year a
Success

Overall, Stewart and Patsie Cannon, the research coordinator
who partnered with Stewart
to oversee the project, are pleased with the first year.

In all, 39 farmers entered 234 heifers in the program. At the
end, they sold 142
heifers, including 71 born in December 1998 through February of
’99. The other half were
born in September through November of ’98. At an April 25 sale,
31 buyers came from Georgia,
Florida and Alabama. They paid an average of $883 per
heifer.

The program involves county agents as decision-makers and
workers, Stewart said. Many
agribusinesses are partners in the program, too. “(HERD) has
the potential to have a
very positive effect on both purebred and commercial herds
across
the state,” Stewart
said.