When Dr George Seifert starts talking genetics, he has a simple philosophy: keep it simple. And perhaps the simplest and most important lesson for anyone breeding cattle is this:
Phenotype = Genotype + Environment.
In everyday language, phenotype is what you see in front of you. It’s the size of the animal, its weight, condition and general appearance. But what you see is the result of two things the genetics the animal was born with and the environment in which it has been raised. That distinction matters enormously when we’re selecting cattle.
Take two genetically similar animals. Put one on excellent feed and give it every advantage, while the other must perform on ordinary pasture with little intervention. After a few months, they may look completely different. The environment has changed the way they look.
It hasn’t changed their genetics.
And that’s where George believes cattle breeders can easily get caught out.
Are we buying the bull or the feed that’s gone into him?
George has never been particularly impressed by the tradition of preparing bulls to look magnificent for sale.
Give an animal enough grain, parasite treatments and special preparation and you can dramatically change its appearance. As George rather memorably describes it, sometimes you’re not really looking at cattle at all, you’re looking at “grain on the hoof.”
The bull may look fantastic on sale day, but the question for the commercial producer is: how much of what we’re looking at is genetic?
George demonstrated this point brilliantly at Belmont Research Station in the 1970s.
He selected cattle from the Afrikaner crosses, Brahman crosses and British crosses. Within each group, he chose some of the highest-performing animals and some of the poorest-performing animals.
Then he did something interesting.
The genetically poorer performers were taken out of the paddock and given the full show treatment. They were fed extremely well, drenched, dipped, groomed and prepared to look their absolute best.
The high performers stayed in the paddock.
For nearly six months, the two groups lived very different lives.
By the time Belmont held its field day, the transformation was remarkable. The previously poor-performing cattle were sleek, beautifully conditioned and looked every bit like the animals people expected to see in a show ring.
More than 1,000 people attended the field day, including some very experienced and respected cattle breeders.
They were given a simple challenge.
Rank the cattle from best to worst based on what they could see.
The result?
According to George, they got it 100% wrong.
The cattle that looked the best weren’t the cattle that had performed the best. What people were selecting was largely the result of the environment, the feeding and preparation, not the underlying genetics.
It was a powerful demonstration of just how misleading phenotype can be.
So, what should we select for?
George comes back to one word again and again:
Performance.
Think of it like an athletic race. The winner is the animal that performs, not necessarily the one we think looks the prettiest standing at the starting line.
If we’re interested in growth, measure growth.
If we’re interested in fertility, measure fertility.
If we’re interested in parasite resistance, measure parasite resistance.
The important thing is to compare animals that have been given the same opportunity to perform. Once we reduce those environmental differences, we start getting a much clearer picture of the genetics underneath.
That’s the difference George draws between subjective selection and objective selection.
We can argue all day about whether a bull has the right head, whether his face is too long, whether his ears are too short or whether we like his conformation.
Those are opinions.
Put the cattle over the scales and suddenly we have a measurement.
As George puts it:
“Cattle judging is an art. Selecting cattle on their performance is a science.”
And this is where EBVs come in
Estimated Breeding Values, or EBVs, are essentially an attempt to do something breeders have always wanted to do, separate G from E.
Rather than simply asking what an animal looks like or even how it performed individually, an EBV brings together information from the animal and its genetic relatives to provide a better estimate of the genetics it can pass to the next generation.
George was exposed to the early development of this science while studying in the United States. He later helped bring those ideas into Australian beef cattle breeding, and the Belmont herd became one of the first beef herds in the world where EBVs were applied.
But there’s an important warning in George’s message too.
An EBV is an estimate. It’s not gospel.
The better the information behind it, the more useful it becomes. But George cautions against becoming so focused on increasingly sophisticated figures that we forget what we’re trying to achieve.
Better cattle.
Cattle that reproduce. Cattle that grow. Cattle that handle parasites. Cattle that remain productive in the environment where they’re expected to work.
And perhaps that’s the real lesson from this conversation.
Good cattle breeding doesn’t have to begin with something complicated.
It begins by deciding which traits matter economically, giving cattle an equal opportunity to express those traits, measuring their performance and then selecting the animals that consistently deliver.
Because a beautifully presented animal can certainly catch your eye.
But it’s the genetics underneath that you’re going to take home.