The Moos Room™

00;00;11;03 - 00;00;37;08
Brad
And welcome to The Moos Room, Brad again here. Today I wanted to talk about a topic that's been kind of on my mind a little bit lately. In this pulled genetics. I've been talking to a lot of farmers, and it kind of comes up in both the beef and dairy world when we're working with beef on dairy calves, a lot of these beef on dairy calves are are pulled Angus.

00;00;37;11 - 00;01;09;12
Brad
Some of the pulled her foods that we use and it's been increasing in our herd as well. So I want to talk a little bit about pulled genetics, what the status is kind of in the dairy industry, what we're doing in our herd as far as pulled genetics and and what we're seeing, because I think it's going to be increasing into the future as either consumers or farmers, start thinking about more humane treatment of animals and especially calves, I think pulled genetics.

00;01;09;12 - 00;01;34;27
Brad
Certainly the wave of the future probably for many people within the dairy industry. And there's lots of different places that pull genetics is being pushed throughout the industry, and we see it more and more even on AI company websites. Starting to push more for pulled genetics within our organic herd. Our milk buyer is organic Valley and they're dairy cattle.

00;01;35;00 - 00;02;01;25
Brad
Animal welfare standards. In 2023, they wanted herds to begin their breeding program to include some pulled genetics. And there's not really a recommendation as far as what percentage of pull genetics they want in your herd. They just want herds to start, including pull genetics into the herd. And we've actually been doing that for a number of years in in our dairy herd.

00;02;01;27 - 00;02;34;12
Brad
So let's talk a little bit about pull genetics if people aren't quite sure. So obviously pull genetics refers to dairy cattle that are born naturally without horns due to inherited genetics. So instead of demanding them or disputing them, basically, farmers can breed for these cattle that simply never grow horns. So pulled means naturally thornless and horned is. Obviously they're genetically programed to grow horns in which you have to buy them or horn them.

00;02;34;12 - 00;03;03;28
Brad
And we've talked about many different pin mitigation things having to do with this biting, and how a lot of people don't like to do it. It's could be very painful. Obviously, methods to reduce pain have been increased a lot in the last few years. It's still painful, but if you didn't know, the pulled trait is actually dominant, which means that a calf inherits even one pulled gene from their parent, it could be pulled.

00;03;04;01 - 00;03;27;06
Brad
However, this genetic inheritance is a little bit nuanced, depending on whether the Am animal is homozygous pulled. So both genes are pulled or heterozygous pulled. So you have one pull gene and one horn gene that comes down. And we'll start talking about some of the bulls as we kind of look through the breeds and see what what we have.

00;03;27;08 - 00;03;56;04
Brad
So you have a homozygous pulled or pea. So all of those offspring will be pulled regardless of the mating partner heterozygous pulled. You have about one half of the offspring are pulled when mated to an horned animal. Basically, if you take a, heterozygous pulled bull and breed it to a horned cow 50% of the time, you're going to get pulled in 50% of the time you're going to get horned.

00;03;56;06 - 00;04;30;13
Brad
And I think that's where the confusing part lies in with farmers is sometimes they're like, oh, well, I'm breeding to pull bulls and I'm not getting any pulled animals. What's going on? Well, you're probably using a heterozygous pulled bull and not all of the time you're going to get pulled animals. So what happens if you breed a. So a big P little pea heterozygous pulled to a heterozygous pulled 25% of the time you're going to get true pulled 50% of the time you're going to get pulled in 25% of the time you're going to get horned.

00;04;30;16 - 00;05;17;15
Brad
So anytime you use heterozygous pulled bulls, you still have the chance of getting horned animals. The only either true way to do that is getting a homozygous pulled animal or chance really is is how it works. So if you take even a true pulled homozygous pulled bull and breed it to a heterozygous pulled animal, 50% of the time, you will get true pulled in 50% of the time you'll get pulled animals, and those genetics may cause horns into the future, so it's not really as easy as what you might think it is kind of like we talked about last week with E2 genetics.

00;05;17;17 - 00;05;48;17
Brad
How long will it take to actually get a true pulled herd? That can be actually a long time, a long time. So where did actually pull genetics come from? The earliest American recorded pulled Holstein was a bull called Prince from 1889. He was, bred and owned in Massachusetts. So there have been some herds that have developed, pulled across time.

00;05;48;20 - 00;06;12;02
Brad
The pulled jersey kind of originated in Ohio somewhere around the late 1800s as well. Actually, the highest availability of pulled genetics in the world is really in the Norwegian Red breed. Norwegian Red has put a large emphasis on pulled genetics in their breed, and a lot of the animals that you can find in that breed are certainly pulled.

00;06;12;05 - 00;06;38;17
Brad
So it's been around for a long time. There's an interesting history book that I've actually read. It's called Pulled Pioneers from Ron Eustice. You can find it online if you're interested in the history of, pulled animals. It's about 300 pages long. It is quite interesting. It lists a lot of the pulled genetics from many of the breeds here in the US.

00;06;38;17 - 00;07;05;02
Brad
So it's quite fascinating to see what it was. And I really kind of was exposed to pull genetics even when I was younger. There was a Jersey bull named Fair Weather Opportunity. And it was always a question. He's got this P behind his name. What does that mean? Well, he was pulled and he was born in 1986, son of Highland magic Duncan and used quite extensively throughout the Jersey breed.

00;07;05;02 - 00;07;28;25
Brad
So that's kind of where I kind of became familiar with some of the pull genetics, even though you really didn't know what that meant back then. You could get a few, maybe one animal in your herd was pulled if it sort of happened that way. But now pulled genetics is becoming more dispersed throughout the industry. So let's look at some of the breeds and where we stand for pulled genetics.

00;07;29;01 - 00;07;51;27
Brad
So I downloaded the NAB bull list of everything that's active. So we have genomic bulls. We have proven bulls and we have international bulls in all of the list. It is kind of frustrating because it is difficult to find pulled bulls. It took me a little bit to put all of this spreadsheet together to try to find pulled bulls from many different bull studs.

00;07;51;29 - 00;08;14;24
Brad
Obviously, if you go to certain AI company websites, they probably have sections that just list their pulled bulls for numerous breeds. So it's easy if you want to look at certain AI company websites. However, when I wanted to find all of the bulls in that available for AI, it is difficult to parse all all of the bulls that are pulled.

00;08;14;24 - 00;08;35;21
Brad
There's really no good list of that, and it's kind of frustrating. I wish we would just make a list of all the pulled bulls and not. I basically had to look through all the names of the bulls and find the bulls that were P or P at the end. To figure this out wasn't easy, but I think I probably got it mostly correct.

00;08;35;24 - 00;09;09;01
Brad
So let's look at some of the breeds. So let's start with Jersey. If you look at the the Jersey breed today, there's about 80 bulls that are pulled. So heterozygous pulled that are available. There's 40 bulls that are homozygous pulled. So big P big P. So what about their genetics. If you if you look at the Jersey breed population that's available for ie 15% of the bulls are actually pulled.

00;09;09;04 - 00;09;37;09
Brad
So a really high percentage within the Jersey breed is is pulled today of of what's available. Now. If I look at average genetics, the average net merit of the jersey heterozygous pulled is $310. The homozygous pulled 191, and the average of all of the other bulls in the list 210. So actually the pulled bulls rank quite high within the Jersey breed.

00;09;37;09 - 00;10;02;20
Brad
The highest hold jersey bull is a bull named Baloise from ABS. It's 564 net merit. Obviously a lot of genomic bulls. I'm not, I use some genomic bulls. Not very many. I like my proven bulls, and we've had those debates before, but there are some good proven bulls still today that are are pulled. And I've used some in the past.

00;10;02;20 - 00;10;30;22
Brad
And we'll talk about that in a little bit. The highest proven homozygous pulled is a Jersey bull that is with CRV genetics from the Netherlands. So a Dutch Jersey bull. And there are some Jersey bulls from many different bull studs that you know you like Canada on the list. A US bull studs, there's Danish, Jersey bulls, you name it.

00;10;30;22 - 00;10;58;15
Brad
They're all lots of places. So you can find lots of different Jersey genetics in pulled if if you want. So what about Holstein now. So out of all of the bulls, 5400 bulls in in this list that I downloaded, 8% of them are pulled, which is actually I was surprised that 8% of the I bulls available in the US are pulled from the Holstein breed.

00;10;58;15 - 00;11;33;10
Brad
So that's that's quite good. There are about 270 bulls that are heterozygous pulled and they average about 399 net merit. There's 189 homozygous pulled bulls and they average 317 net merit. So they're actually quite high for net merit. Lots of different pulled bulls here in the US. The top heterozygous pulled bull that's proven is called Bowman's Monument. He's from ABS global.

00;11;33;10 - 00;12;04;11
Brad
He's 782. Net merit. So we can still get some pretty high ones. Another one Windstar Mendel P. He's got some daughters about 1800 daughters. He's 653 net merit. So quite high. However one of the most I would say popular and reliable pulled bulls in the world is a bull called luster P, and he has almost 26,000 daughters in his proof 406 net merit still today.

00;12;04;13 - 00;12;40;12
Brad
And he's a quite popular bull, and we've used him quite significantly in our herd here in Morris as well. But luster P I've really liked this bull. He's got good production, good conformation, good fertility. It's maybe a little bit above average on size just because he has a king boy in his pedigree, but overall a pretty flawless bull and probably I would suspect that a lot of farmers have used him because of his pulled genetics.

00;12;40;12 - 00;13;07;28
Brad
So really a great bull out of Pennsylvania handled by the select sires now. But luster P popular, popular. We'll talk a little bit about our luster p daughters that we've used here. There's quite a few homozygous there. There's some with quite a few daughters, seven, 8000 daughters. So homozygous pulled bulls are coming. I've used one homozygous pulled bull.

00;13;07;28 - 00;13;36;01
Brad
He's only got about 75 daughters now called lustrous from Star Genetics. A little bit lower net merit. But I used him because he was some somewhat out cross in our herd. But there is actually quite a few poor old bulls in the Holstein breed. Well, what about the other breeds? If I look at Ayrshire, there's five pulled bulls out of 50, so about 10% are actually pretty good for net merit.

00;13;36;01 - 00;14;09;20
Brad
About 150 average net merit. The one bull that has daughters that's pulled is from Canada called her P net merits. 338 so pretty. Quite so really high brown Swiss. It's nine brown Swiss bulls that are pulled out of 130 average net merit. Of these nine brown Swiss bulls, 334. Actually really good, really good. And their range? There's some US bulls, a Canadian bull, Swiss bull, some French brown Swiss bulls.

00;14;09;20 - 00;14;43;19
Brad
So many different brown Swiss ones from all over the US. Bulls average about 317 net merit. But these brown Swiss bulls average 334 net merit. The rest of the brown Swiss bulls are averaging to 11, so the brown Swiss pulled bulls are actually averaging higher for net merit than the rest of the bulls. Guernsey A few Guernsey bulls that are pulled in the list here I have for four of the bulls are pulled.

00;14;43;21 - 00;15;15;24
Brad
Unfortunately most of them are negative for net merit, but that's a discussion for another day. Probably one of the popular is the one bull that has daughters. Spring Hill, Java is the name of that bull is a Canadian bull. But some pulled guernseys available, and there's one milking Shorthorn that's pulled. Got 300 daughters, -194 net merit. So you can see there's some actually pretty decent pulled genetics out there in the dairy world.

00;15;15;29 - 00;15;40;12
Brad
And you can find these genetics. So what about our herd and why did I start breeding for pulled genetics. Well we actually started breeding for pulled quite a long time ago. I think it really had to do with not really wanting to do this, but animals anymore. Nobody really likes to do it, you know, it's a painful process.

00;15;40;13 - 00;16;05;09
Brad
It takes a long time when you're trying to put lidocaine in those animals. It can be difficult to make sure you get an adequate nerve block. There's just a lot of things that go into it and pull genetics. It's just just easier, just easier. It's much more beneficial to breed for pulled genetics. As far as cost and labor of having to de horn them.

00;16;05;12 - 00;16;35;18
Brad
So it's much, much better. So we really started using pulled in our herd way back in 2010. So 15 years ago with Jersey, a bulb called eclipses. Probably not very prominent within the Jersey breed, but pretty decent at the time. I'm. I think we had one pulled bull out of that time. I've used another one, from ABS global called viable in 2016, 2020.

00;16;35;18 - 00;16;59;21
Brad
I was using a bull called Salsa pea. So I've kind of used these on and off. But then really in 2021, 2022, so about 4 to 5 years ago, I really started using a lot more pulled bulls in all of the breeds and all of the breed. So we started using Jersey, used to pulled bulls for quite a few years.

00;16;59;24 - 00;17;28;13
Brad
Kawhi and Castrol and actually they're still pretty good for net Merritt. Castrol is for 19 for net Merritt. But he's not available anymore. You can't get semen from this pulled bull. And I suspect because it's his poor other profile he's -2.1 for utter depth. So I would guess that the reason you can't get him is because he transmits deep utters even though he is pulled.

00;17;28;15 - 00;17;54;17
Brad
And then I used luster P a lot for about two years. Used quite a bit of luster P then I've switched to other bulls called hand ski hold. And then, you know, these were heterozygous pulled bulls and just last year I started using a bull called lustrous from St genetics. He's homozygous pull. Kind of just wanted to start using some homozygous pull just to get pulled animals in the herd.

00;17;54;19 - 00;18;19;15
Brad
And that is the quick way all of those calves born from lustrous are going to be pulled. It's just how it is. And that is probably the quickest way to trance. MIT pulled into your herd and grow it quite quickly. Now I've also used some Swedish Red and Danish red bulls that are pulled, one called Fitbit Fan of Fuzzy, and we have daughters of all three of those bulls.

00;18;19;15 - 00;18;42;22
Brad
So in other breeds as well you can get some pulled genetics. So let's talk about my frustration with pulled. It hasn't been easy. Like I said it might take a long time to get pull genetics in your herd. So currently I have 12 cows between Holstein and Crossbred that are sired by Luster Pea. Do you know how many are pulled out of those 12?

00;18;42;22 - 00;19;05;19
Brad
Two. Two of the 12 are pulled. That's it from Luster Pea. I had some pretty bad luck. If you do your Punnett square on pulled, it doesn't work out. I should have had way more pulled than what I should have. And maybe it was all the bull calves that we got, but I use sexy semen so who knows, who knows?

00;19;05;19 - 00;19;34;18
Brad
But two out of the 12 are pulled for the cows. I have currently six heifers sired by Luster Pea. Only two of them are pulled, so out of 20, roughly 20 Luster Pea daughters have four that are pulled. So 20% of the luster peas were pulled. I should have probably had a little bit higher percentage than that, but I guess that's how genetics works.

00;19;34;18 - 00;20;03;21
Brad
And with our jersey, I've got two salsa peas, two kestrels, so not really a high percentage of pulled by using these heterozygous bulls. So that's one of the reasons why I switched to homozygous pulled was to try and go faster with pulled and move quickly to try to get more pulled. So how can you introduce pulled genetics into your dairy herd?

00;20;03;22 - 00;20;34;24
Brad
Obviously it depends a lot on your management, what your genetics strategy is. How how do you select for bulls? Is it? Net a TPI, you name it or some of the other index from different breeds. And how fast do you want to make the transition. Do you want pulled now or do you want to do it gradually. So if you use heterozygous pulled bulls then basically half the herd will be pulled the next generation.

00;20;34;24 - 00;20;57;23
Brad
But you have to use all heterozygous bulls and then you keep reading to heterozygous pulled. You'll start getting a higher percentage of pull, but it might take a few years. I figure ten generations probably or more before you get an entire pulled herd. However, like I said before, if you want to move to pulled more quickly, then you want to use homozygous old bulls that only sired pulled animals.

00;20;57;23 - 00;21;27;16
Brad
Obviously you might sacrifice a little bit and genetics or reduction in total merit for your animals, but you'll have pulled genetics a lot faster. So I see pulled is only increasing in the dairy herd. Kind of one of those things that people are starting to think about a lot more just because of pain management. Nobody really wants to deal with pain management, labor and the time and the cost that it takes to do this.

00;21;27;16 - 00;21;59;05
Brad
But obviously I think consumers and animal welfare people might see hold is a good thing for dairy herds. So that might help us drive some of our situations, just like our milk processor is suggesting that we use pull genetics. There are many animals that are pulled or transmit pulled that are top genetics. Obviously, historically it's been maybe not that way where most of the top genetics are horned animals and it still is today, but the genetics is increasing.

00;21;59;05 - 00;22;21;29
Brad
The total merit is increasing for pulled animals. So I think it's only going to come down to we're going to be using more pull genetics into the future, and I think you'll want to look at that. So with that, I think we'll end there today. Hopefully you learned a little bit about pulled some of the bulls that's increasing in these numerous dairy breeds.

00;22;21;29 - 00;22;48;04
Brad
And I think it's going to only increase into the future. And there's some good bulls out there. So don't be afraid to use some pull genetics. And with that do you have any comments, questions or scathing rebuttals? Feel free to let me know at the newsroom. That's almos r o m at view, or find us on the web at U of M Extension Live Star or, and Rock dairy with that.

00;22;48;07 - 00;22;54;10
Brad
Hope you have a great spring. Thanks. Bye.