Photo by Abby Moulton on Unsplash
The Florida Cattle Enhancement Board provides funding to research projects that benefit the cattle industry in Florida. We sat down with Dr. Mario Binelli who shared some details on how the funding from the Enhancement Board has enhanced Brahman genetics.
“That is a beautiful program and we have been supported to conduct that program for at least five years. And every year it’s recurring that they will fund that project once again. The main goal of that project is to produce embryos that will be superior in genetics and those embryos will be transferred to recipients within our herd and they generate calves that will increase the quality of the genetic basis of our herd. So basically we will choose from about 250 mama cows, we’ll choose a top five or top ten. And that is a cool process because that is based both on the genomic and genetic evaluation we have from the herd and also from the expert eyes of phenotypic traits, the characteristics of animals. So the ranch manager will tell him, hey, these are the best cows because they never fail. They always have a calf every year,” said Binelli.
“Or they will say, hey, yeah, these are the cows that every year will breed very early in the season. These are the cows that wean the heaviest calves. So we’ll get some just phenotypical traits that are data from the field, from the ranch. And of course, we have a faculty here involved on that. Dr. Todtrift is a big name here that helps us on finding these animals. But you also have the genetics and genomics portion of it. So Dr. Peter Hansen and Dr. Fernanda Rezende, they go on those data pretty deeply and say, hey, these are the animals that will have genomics and genetics characteristics that will likely take those traits and take to the next generation,” said Binelli.
Audio Reporting by Dale Sandlin for Southeast AgNet.