In reviewing large commercial datasets, experts are seeing certain patterns beginning to emerge – particularly as it relates to a cow’s ability to stay in the herd. These trends are important to be aware of to identify challenges as well as opportunities.

The days of just making dairy replacement females as fast and furious as possible have taken a back seat to making just enough of the “right” replacement heifers to minimize rising raising costs and maintaining the proper heifer inventories for replacing milking cows that leave the herd.

Fertility is the number one trait linked to profitability for cow-calf herds. It’s also of low heritability and sometimes difficult to assess, depending on your record-keeping system.

Phenotype is what puts pounds on calves, beef in bellies and dollars in bank accounts. While significant genetic progress has never been more attainable, optimizing an environment to fully take advantage of that careful genetic selection remains a challenge for many producers.

As it always is, the 2025 edition of the Beef Improvement Federation (BIF) Symposium – hosted June 9-12 in Amarillo, Texas, by West Texas A&M University – delivered boatloads of cutting-edge research results and practical applications of genetic tools.

We see a lot of variation in cattle, even when we utilize full siblings within sire groups. We wonder why there is so much variation from the lightest calf to the heaviest calf, and from the highest-quality grade to the lowest-quality grade, and from the calf that stays in the herd until she is 14 to 17 years old versus the one that falls out at 2 years old.

“Today we have a third of the number of cows we had in 1960, and we’re producing more milk,” said Christine Baes of the University of Guelph during her keynote presentation at the 2024 Dairy Cattle Reproduction Council annual meeting. “That’s a pretty good sustainability story, but when you Google ‘sustainability and dairy cows,’ you see headlines about cow flatulence. Why is that?”