Gearld Fry, a private bovine engineering consultant who spoke at the Tri-State Cow-Calf Symposium, grew up on a family dairy before getting into the beef genetics business and raising beef to sell to his neighbors.
He believes the management of genetics in the cattle industry is suffering as a result of current market forces.
He runs counter to many modern cattle experts by insisting that too much crossbreeding and outcrossing has caused “mongrelized” herds. Chasing heterosis is a short term phenomenon that discourages “genetically dense” breeding stock and leaves no plan for what to do next, he says.
His selection strategy is mostly based on cattle demonstrating better utilization of forage, a finer-textured more tender muscle fiber and improved carcass yield. He looks for old-line breeds like the Devon to accomplish that.
“The industry’s common goal is to make cattle larger and larger, and the bone larger and larger. The larger the bone gets, the coarser the meat gets,” he says. “And we have a lot more connective tissue to deal with. That changes the taste of it.”
“As an industry, we thought we were producing a higher percentage of meat per carcass,” he continues. “In studies, what they found out is we are producing more pounds of beef, but what we had done was just make cattle larger. The actual carcass percentage had actually gone down a half a percent.”
“With some of the projects I’m involved in, we’re doing the opposite of that: we’re bringing the size of our cattle down and adding volume to the carcass. The average is 60 percent of the carcass, and we’re killing a lot of cattle with a 70 percent yield — not live weight to carcass weight, but actual yield off of that carcass.”
He advocates line breeding to bring back traits that he believes have been devalued, such as high milkfat production and a phenotype based on proportional linear measurements.
An advocate of grass-fed beef, he pointed out during the conference that an easy fleshing cow that performs best in a grass-based system is undesirable in a grain-based industry that relies on feedyard finishing.
As a result, he perceives a disincentive to produce a lot of beneficial characteristics in the modern marketplace.
Poor market signals back to the producer for producing a quality product is another problem, he adds.
“We only produce about 70 percent of the beef we consume in America. The reason the cow numbers have declined is because of the unprofitable circumstances the American cattleman is in,” he says. “The incentive should go back to producer — rather than away from him — to encourage him to do a better job genetically.”
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Gearld Fry, a private bovine engineering consultant who spoke at the Tri-State Cow-Calf Symposium, grew up on a family dairy before getting into the beef genetics business and raising beef to sell to his neighbors.
He believes the management of genetics in the cattle industry is suffering as a result of current market forces.
He runs counter to many modern cattle experts by insisting that too much crossbreeding and outcrossing has caused “mongrelized” herds. Chasing heterosis is a short term phenomenon that discourages “genetically dense” breeding stock and leaves no plan for what to do next, he says.
His selection strategy is mostly based on cattle demonstrating better utilization of forage, a finer-textured more tender muscle fiber and improved carcass yield. He looks for old-line breeds like the Devon to accomplish that.
“The industry’s common goal is to make cattle larger and larger, and the bone larger and larger. The larger the bone gets, the coarser the meat gets,” he says. “And we have a lot more connective tissue to deal with. That changes the taste of it.”
“As an industry, we thought we were producing a higher percentage of meat per carcass,” he continues. “In studies, what they found out is we are producing more pounds of beef, but what we had done was just make cattle larger. The actual carcass percentage had actually gone down a half a percent.”
“With some of the projects I’m involved in, we’re doing the opposite of that: we’re bringing the size of our cattle down and adding volume to the carcass. The average is 60 percent of the carcass, and we’re killing a lot of cattle with a 70 percent yield — not live weight to carcass weight, but actual yield off of that carcass.”
He advocates line breeding to bring back traits that he believes have been devalued, such as high milkfat production and a phenotype based on proportional linear measurements.
An advocate of grass-fed beef, he pointed out during the conference that an easy fleshing cow that performs best in a grass-based system is undesirable in a grain-based industry that relies on feedyard finishing.
As a result, he perceives a disincentive to produce a lot of beneficial characteristics in the modern marketplace.
Poor market signals back to the producer for producing a quality product is another problem, he adds.
“We only produce about 70 percent of the beef we consume in America. The reason the cow numbers have declined is because of the unprofitable circumstances the American cattleman is in,” he says. “The incentive should go back to producer — rather than away from him — to encourage him to do a better job genetically.”
