Beef Improvement Ontario

BIO EVALUATED CATTLE: PERFORMANCE BENCHMARKS

July 23, 2002

Benchmarking is the process of conducting a comparative analysis of your cattle performance with averages of the entire population. This is a very powerful tool because it identifies the strengths and weaknesses of your cattle.

BIO recognizes the importance of benchmarking and has reported percentile scores for every trait and every animal that is genetically evaluated. This gives a snapshot of the genetic level of that animal compared to the population – within breed and across all breeds. Genetics is one key component of beef production, but management is very important. For this reason, we have provided actual performance benchmarks for cattle evaluated with BIO’s performance programs.

The Benchmark Data

These benchmarks show the performance levels of cattle evaluated by Beef Improvement Ontario in the past 3 years (born 1999 to 2001). The result is a stable, reliable picture of cattle performance in Ontario.

Benchmarks for BIO’s 3 main performance evaluation services are provided: Herd Recording (Herd-gene service and Herd-Link software), Bull Evaluation Program, and Heifer Development Program. BIO’s database was analyzed to produce these benchmarks for the past three years. This reflects the current population of cattle in Ontario.

You will notice that 3 levels are presented for each performance measurement:

Bottom 25% - At this level, 25% of the cattle are lower than this number, and 75% are above.

Average – At this level, half of the cattle are below and half of the cattle are above this number

Top 25% - At this level, 75% of the cattle are below this number and only 25% are above.

How can I use this information?

This is really valuable information to have at your fingertips. Use it to:

	Compare your herd average performance to the rest of Ontario
	Evaluate performance of potential replacement females to the rest of Ontario
	Evaluate the performance of bulls compared to the rest of Ontario
	Identify areas of weakness in your herd that you can focus on to make adjustments to your management and genetics.
	Identify strength areas that you can use to market your cattle
	Identify the characteristics of several breeds when planning a crossbreeding system

To view the on-line Benchmark Tables, make sure you have the Adobe Acrobat reader installed first. Then click on the links to the tables (i.e.: All Breeds.pdf) and your Acrobat reader. should automatically display the tables to the screen.

Click on the Adobe Acrobat icon (on right) to download a copy of the latest version of the reader (6.5Mb approx. 25mins to download). You may also visit Adobe's web site at www.Adobe.com for more information.