Sandy Grant admits she’s no bull-buying expert, but as far as the people at Beef Improvement Ontario (BIO) are concerned, she represents the future in bull selection for Ontario beef producers.

Grant was one of the first people to use BIO’s web-based, interactive sire selection service to find a bull tailored to the needs of her herd this spring. It’s not surprising that this 73-year-old grandmother of 15 was so quick to try the latest in genetic technology. She has used BIO’s Heifer Development Service in the past, tracks her animals on their HERD-LINK recording software, and now is one of the first beef producers to try BIO-Mate, the sire selection service.

She is also unlike many Ontario beef producers in that she knows her herd and knows where she needs to make improvements, according to Brian Pogue, BIO’s breeding and marketing consultant.

Tracking cattle performance through the Heifer Development Service and the HERD-LINK software is one thing. But the final leg of the BIO Triple Crown – selecting bulls from a computer screen online prior to putting a bid in to buy them – may lift some eyebrows. To Grant, it makes perfect sense. When it comes to buying a bull, she freely admits she can use all the help she can get.

As far as she is concerned, BIO-Mate and HERD-LINK are the cattle buyer’s equivalent of checking under the hood before buying a car. "Through HERD-LINK, they tell me which cows are doing the best and which heifers I should keep as replacements, which makes it so much simpler than just thinking, ‘Well, that’s a nice looking one but I don’t know what’s inside her.’ I’m interested in the genetics. If you don’t have that on a piece of paper, you don’t know what you’re getting and you don’t know what you’re producing."

Grant has a small herd, 40 head of mostly Simmental-Limousin cross animals, which is about all she can handle on 150 acres, 5 minutes north of suburban Mississauga. She calves in March, weans her calves at 6 months, and sells them pre-vaccinated and pre-conditioned at auction in the fall.

For the past few years, she has shipped her replacement heifers to BIO’s Paul Hamilton at the Heifer Development Centre where they were fed and looked after, coming home bred in the spring. But the bills for this service started to add up to the point where Grant decided to hold on to the heifers and breed them at home – which is why she needs a second bull. Her Blonde d’Aquitaine bull of 3 years will continue to service the cow herd.

Last fall, when the pasture ran out, the heifers were put on hay until snowfall and then supplemented with cracked corn until spring.

From her records, Grant had a pretty good idea of the characteristics she wanted in a heifer bull. Her first concern was to improve the carcass characteristics of the cattle she sells to feedlot buyers. Grant reads the beef trade publications that get stuffed into her mailbox and has seen that the industry is demanding more from carcasses, particularly when it comes to marbling.

Other factors played into her selection, too. While she can still climb fences near her barn, Grant knew her own physical limitations had to play a role in her choice of a bull. "I’m getting old and I don’t have the strength that a man would have to pull," she says in reference to calving. "I can pull, if they’re not too stuck. Otherwise, I call the vet. So I want a small calf."

When she drove down to a BIO open house near Guelph earlier in the year, her list of characteristics looked something like this: calving ease; low birth weight; good growth rate; good milk; polled and AAA for marbling. Steve Miller, an animal breeder from the University of Guelph, punched her requests into the web-based BIO-Mate program. The computer scanned the traits of the 1,400 bulls tested at BIO’s test stations over the winter and spat out some sires that matched Grant’s list. She circled her top 3, which were conveniently being put up for bids at the annual Pick of the Crop bull sale in Listowel in late-March. As things turned out, she bought her third choice, a composite ½ Red Angus, ½ Gelbvieh bull from Liahn Farms near London.

Even though BIO-Mate is a free service during this introductory phase, it still hasn’t taken off with bull sellers or buyers. This spring only about 10 bulls were purchased after being discovered online. Yet Pogue and Marc Lazenby, BIO’s marketing and business development manager, remain optimistic about the potential for this software.

This spring was the trial run and Lazenby says the BIO board is still looking at how it will market the program in future years. The plan is to charge for the service at some point, but they have not decided when to do that, how much to charge or whom they would bill.

Pogue believes the program will get more use once BIO starts to market it in Ontario. Lazenby meanwhile thinks BIO-Mate would be a natural for A.I. studs, and they’ve already had some interest from one U.S. breeding company. "Someone from the A.I. stud could go to a farm and say ‘Of the 50 bulls we have, this one is the best one for this cow or this group of cows,’" he says.

Back in Ontario, Pogue wishes all bulls were sold with an eye to what processors will demand in the future. He feels too many Ontario beef producers are still stuck churning out cattle that aren’t meeting industry needs. "One of the things we’ve heard from retailers, in particular, is that they need smaller carcass weights," he says. However, many people continue to sell heavy steers…"because he’s so heavy he brings in a nice gross cheque," says Pogue. "But how much profit did he generate and did the 1,600-pound steer generate any more profit than the 1,300-pound steer?"

The packer knows he wants a700- to 750-pound, AAA carcass with 64% lean meat but many producers remain skeptical about their payback on that type of carcass. Pogue thinks it can be done. "I’m convinced that there is an opportunity to produce that kind of carcass and make some profit, in particular if you use bulls that excel for growth rate and feed efficiency, as well as meeting all the carcass criteria," he says.

Eventually, Pogue expects we will see a time when carcass data will flow back from processors through sources like the Ontario Corn Fed Beef program, producing clear signals about the most profitable changes cattle producers need to make to their cattle herds. At that point, Pogue says, BIO-Mate will be ready to help them choose a bull that suits their herd while helping them produce the carcass weight, quality and yield the industry demands.

Sandy Grant is already looking forward to seeing the calves from her new BIO-Mate bull next spring. The folks at BIO are probably just as anxious, for there is nothing like success to sell a new program.

Andrew Douglas