Background

Te Mania Angus is built on a gene pool already 85 years in the making. It provides Angus bulls, semen, embryos, elite stud cows, ET recipients and commercial females for the premium beef industry.

The Te Mania Angus philosophy is to breed sound, quiet, highly fertile cattle with calving ease, high growth rates and exceptional carcase quality which will enable its clients to meet strict market specifications and optimise value.

With national and international markets, Te Mania Angus is backed by Team Te Mania, a coalition of 40+ beef cattle herds across SA, Victoria and NSW for progeny testing its cutting-edge genetics and fast-tracking commercial production.

Te Mania Angus holds two annual bull sales – one on-property at the Mortlake, Victoria, headquarters each autumn, and one at Walgett, NSW, each spring. Semen is retailed through AI resellers.

The Mortlake property is 2,600 hectare, with an annual rainfall of 610mm. There are 3,500 head on the property, with cattle running in large contemporary groups to achieve more effective progeny data which can then be compared in one environment.

The Te Mania Angus herd has been performance recording since the early 1950’s and was one of the founding herds to join Breedplan in 1971. Today, performance recording is the backbone of the breeding strategy and management program at Te Mania Angus.

Performance Recording

Australia’s beef industry must demand more from its seedstock sector when it comes to the application of genetic technology.

The pig and chicken industries have made significant genetic gain in the past 50 years. For example in litter sizes in the pig industry and weight gains in both industries. On the other hand, the beef industry has lagged behind in the adoption of the very technologies which made this happen (EBVs). Consumer demand for pork and chicken has risen at the same time at the expense of beef.

Objective measurements have made a huge difference to the genetic gain of the Te Mania Angus herd.

With the use of performance recording, Te Mania Angus has dominated the breed’s EBVs for many years – with more than twice as many Angus Group Breedplan trait leaders as any other stud.

Te Mania Angus runs cattle in large contemporary groups which increases the chance of having more effective progeny data for each sire being used, more effective progeny, means more accuracy and more accuracy means more genetic gain. Genetic gain comes from defined goals, animal selection and mating allocation.

All the mating’s at Te Mania Angus are computer generated. We use a program called Total Genetic Resource Management (TGRM) to mate each animal. All the cows in the Te Mania Angus herd are mated to sires to increasing profitability and to reduce inbreeding. The iterating computer program makes tens of millions of calculations to statistically compute the best mating’s over the entire herd to all the sires available to Te Mania Angus in the world that have Australian Angus EBV’s.

There is still some confusion between phenotype and genotypes of animals out in the industry, which is holding back progress in the cattle industry.

One of the core problems within the industry is that many commercial breeders are happier to choose their breeding stock by eye – subjectively, rather than using performance information to help make these decisions objectively.

Seedstock suppliers need to offer these traits and work closely with their commercial clients to improve the acceptance of performance data.

There is a huge amount of information and research which has been done, literally tens of millions of dollars has been spent on genetic tools for the industry but there is a real problem with their uptake. The tools are sitting in the cupboards of our research institutions.

Team Te Mania

Team Te Mania was formed in 1995. It is a national alliance of 43 progressive commercial beef producers who are testing and utilising the best practices in beef production and sharing the latest genetics from the same performance-based gene pool.

Team members lease their bulls from Te Mania Angus and obtain semen at cost price. In 2014 Team Te Mania submitted 3000 carcase records to Angus Group BREEDPLAN, the largest single entry since the Beef CRCI in the early 1990’s. A further 700 records were added later in the year.

It is understandable that there is a reluctance by processors to make carcase feedback available due to its commercial sensitivity, but it is invaluable to breeding higher quality animals. The beef seedstock industry needs to push to obtain similar valuable feedback.

Stud breeding is really about identifying economic traits and then working on a genetic solution to enhance them. You need to define it, collect it and select it to improve the genetic merit of these animals. The relationship between cost of production and consumer demand is very high so the more efficient we become and better our product is, the larger the market and the more profitable we all become.

When we trade our product on the world market the product will be better and cheaper than our overseas competitors.

Progeny Testing

Selected team herds are committed to the progeny testing program of young Te Mania Angus bulls. Approximately 12 bulls per year are test mated in six fully BREEDPLAN recorded herds. Sires are selected annually for testing based on their index values plus a visual inspection for structural soundness. Some attempt is made to use a wide representative of sire lines in the young bulls. Sires are repeat mated across years to ensure across year linkage and linkage across herds is by AI from some of the young bulls.

In the progeny test herds all male calves are castrated and the full compliment of weights (including birth weights) are recorded along with scans taken on both sexes. Heifers are fully recorded for calving ease and days to calving. The majority of steers are followed through to slaughter and carcase records submitted for BREEDPLAN analysis.

Conclusion

It is very important for progressive seedstock herds to be early adopters of technology, as it gives them the opportunity to maximize benefits from new technology in their breeding operation. The result is faster genetic improvement and more profit for their clients. But faster genetic progress will only eventuate if the technology is implemented in a well organised business.

However, being early adopters of technology comes with some risks as the technology has not been rigorously tested in practical breeding herd situations to iron out any unforeseeable ‘bugs’.

While implementing scientifically sound breeding theory, seedstock herds must be mindful of the need to evaluate the theory under practical conditions. To do this seedstock cattle need to be kept in a management system that will instantly report if any theory has been applied to the system which in practice will not work. In part this is to check that the theorists have not missed an important genotype by environment interaction but also to demonstrate to commercial clients that the genetics will perform under conditions similar to their own production systems.

The genetic technologies that are being developed by our industry’s scientists and others, can make a positive and profitable contribution to farmers, feedlotters, processors and to the economy of Australia but they must be effectively applied in seedstock herds.