November Black & White Briefs

HFW Adds Internet Manager
HFW Communications, Inc., is pleased to announce the addition of John Wadsworth, Middlesex, NY, to its staff. Wadsworth was named Manager, Internet Services in September.
He will be working part time from his home dairy farm to coordinate internet sales of websites to breeders, including the development of websites, home pages, advertising messages and related promotions, and to organize the content of the Holstein World’s website, according to Joel Hastings, president of HFW Communications.
John and his wife, Holly, successfully breed and merchandise Milkworth Holsteins from their 55-cow operation. The Wadsworths are graduates of the University of Connecticut where they began their dairy career. They have been active breeders in New York since 1975 and were named New York’s Outstanding Young Breeders in 1989. They are the parents of four children.
Wadsworth served as manager of the New York Holstein Association from 1994-1997, overseeing a revamping of the committee structure and other primary concerns of finances, membership and staff supervision. He is a published writer and has computer skills in varied computer programs.
Wadsworth believes the internet offers many opportunities for breeders and has developed an active website for his own herd. “You could sell embryos over the internet or provide information about consignments to sales. It’s there for people to access 365 days a year all day long,” explains Wadsworth.
“He shares our goal of making the Holstein World website the preferred spot on the internet for Holstein and dairy breeders and related firms,” says Hastings.
Wadworth’s e-mail address at HFW is: jwadsworth@hfw.com. He can also be reached by phone: 1-800-239-6080, 716-554-3836 or fax: 716-554-4495.

World-Wide Sires Purchases Agritech Analytics
World-Wide Sires, Inc. (WWS) of Visalia, CA has purchased Agritech Analytics (ATA) from Dairyman’s Creamery Cooperative Association of Tulare, CA. WWS represents the U.S. AI Cooperatives internationally in the export of frozen bull semen from new headquarters in Visalia. ATA is one of the two largest Dairy Record Processing Centers (DRPC’s) in the U.S., processing over 900,000 cow records each month.
“We have invested heavily in technology and market semen in 70 different countries. Our success depends on our customers and our co-op suppliers, says Richard Denier, WWS executive vice president. “The data base at a DRPC, such as Agritech, is critical to our mutual well-being.”
“Our co-op suppliers and we depend heavily on dairy records. Pure and simple—we wanted to buy it (Agritech) before one of the private AI companies did,” explains Denier. “The success of our business, indeed our industry, will be increasingly affected by accuracy of identification and consistency of data sharing. We hope we can impact that.”
ATA and their employees will remain at current facilities, but will eventually move into their own offices at WWS. There should be little change for ATA customers initially, according to Denier.” Any later changes will be influenced by what the dairymen, Agritech employees, and those organizations that interact with Agritech think are important,” he says.

Dutch Announce Changes in Bull Proof Calculations
The Dutch NRS, which carries out similar functions as the USDA-AIPL concerning bull proofs, will make an additional run of breeding values for production in November 1997. The NRS currently calculates proofs on Dutch bulls in February and August.
“Some other countries that are marketing in the global marketplace are reacting to the fact that the U.S. has gone to releasing sire summaries four times a year,” says Steve Schnell, dairy genetics program specialist at 21st Century Genetics/CRI. The AI Cooperative markets Dutch semen in the U.S.
The reason for this additional run is the occurrence of the Records in Progress (RIP-DIP) affect, according to NRS. This RIP-DIP was seen with sires such as Sunny Boy and Jabot, and in August 1997, with Celsius and Labelle. For more details, see “Dutch Bulls Drop, Will They Recover?’ in the September Holstein World.
RIP-DIP is thought to occur when a bull receives a huge number of second-crop daughters with short records included in the calculation of the proof. Until now the NRS included in their calculations of Dutch bull proofs the first three lactations of daughters as soon as they reached a length of 60 days.
Beginning in November, NRS will calculate proofs based on the first three lactations of a bull’s daughters with a minimum length of 180 days. The change is based on research with five influential Dutch sires, with proofs having shown a clear RIP-DIP. Research indicates that the prediction for a 305-day lactation gains considerable accuracy when lactation length is 180 days or more.
“This should stabilize their proofs some. At 180 days, there’s less bouncing around than if you use 60 days. If a bull’s daughters start out fast, peak higher, but aren’t as persistent, he’ll be overranked. If a bull’s daughters are more persistent, but don’t peak as high, he will come back up some in his proof as daughters’ lactation records are longer,” explains Schnell. “We’ll find out in less than 30 days (when November proofs are out).”
By comparison, USDA-AIPL requires a minimum of 40 days for in-progress daughter records before including their projections in a sire summary; shorter-length projected records get less weighting in the projection process. In 1991 UDSA-AIPL added an adjustment to help lessen the RIP-DIP effect on U.S. sire summaries. “The real underlying challenge is that we all need systems to handle records of all lengths,” explains Rex Powell of USDA-AIPL.

Council On Dairy Cattle Breeding Meets
Twenty members of the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding met September 18 in Cleveland, OH. Duane Norman, USDA-AIPL reported on the Industry Research Priorities, a list of priorities the Council identifies to AIPL. Among them is the test-day model. Council members were pleased to hear this evaluation model could be implemented as early as February 1999, according to Tom Lawlor, Holstein Association director of research and development, who attended the meeting. One of the benefits of the test day model is that it reflects lactation curve better, according to Lawlor. “Some people see this as a better way to project records in progress, therefore eliminating RIP-DIP,” Lawlor explains, “It also could tell us which bulls’ daughters are more persistent.”
Lawlor reported that the MACE (Multiple-Across-Country-Evaluations) for type project was implemented on the August 1997 run and everything ran smoothly. Data from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the U.S. was used to calculated type evaluations using MACE. There was some discussion about Interbull calculating MACE for type and increasing the frequency of their genetic evaluation releases to four times per year. At this time, Interbull’s likely fee increase makes it cost-prohibitive, according to Lawlor.
In the discussion about Interbull, Norman reviewed the effects of removing the pre-1980 data from the Interbull submission so that all participating countries submitted information from roughly the same number of years. He pointed out that the August 1997 run posted an increase in the percentage of U.S. bulls in the top 100 for PTA protein pounds, which may have been partly due to the change. There were 67 U.S. bulls on the list, five more than in February.
Erick Metzger, representing PDCA, expressed concern about the publication of Data Collection Ratings (DCR) with records. Now that there are no “official” or “unofficial” records DCRs are supposed to reflect the level of accuracy of the record. He pointed out that many of the data records processing labs were not set up to print DCRs.
The next meeting of the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding is scheduled for March 29, 1998 in Orlando, FL. This coincides with the National Dairy Genetics Workshop.

Former Holstein Breeder Named Wisconsin AG Chief
Ben Brancel, a lifelong dairy farmer and Holstein breeder, has been named Secretary of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection in Wisconsin by Governor Tommy Thompson. Brancel, 47, whose farm is near Endeavor, WI has served for 11 years in the State Assembly, most recently as speaker.
The Brancel name may be familiar to World readers, as his son, Tod, is part-owner of Brancel Astre Inspire, nominated Junior All-American Fall Yearling in 1996 and named 1997 Junior All-Wisconsin Jr 2-Yr-Old this year. Tod was cited in 1996 as the outstanding 4-H exhibitor at the Wisconsin State Fair. The Brancel milking herd was dispersed in 1995.

CRI Survey Response
Nearly 600 dairy producers from 30 states responded to a recent survey conducted for Cooperative Resources International (CRI) by the University of Wisconsin Center for Cooperatives. Two-thirds of the respondents were between the ages of 35 and 54. When asked about the future of the dairy industry, 83 percent were pessimistic about improved milk prices and 80 percent were pessimistic about future profitability, with the exception of California producers - 42 percent of them believe the picture to be a bright one.
Seven percent of the producers indicated they would be getting out of dairying within the next three years and 13 percent in the next five years. One-third noted they planned to expand their herd size by 25 percent or more in the next five years.
For herd replacement decisions, 89 percent felt having their animals identified by sire was important, with Predicted Transmitting Ability (PTA) for milk and protein or udder and feet & leg composites ranking high. Nearly 80 percent felt it was somewhat or very beneficial to have DHI records accessed by various organizations to improve the accuracy of sire proofs and for faster genetic advancement. Nearly half of the producers use a personal computer as a means of managing farm information.
Said one respondent: “I think this is a very good industry, but we farmers need to take better control of our own destiny. Our contribution to society and the economy is far greater than we give ourselves credit for. Competition is a great thing, but instead of just compteing with each other, maybe we should be competing with the rest of society for a better livelihood and a fair return for ourselves and our employees.”

Research Links BSE to Humans
An article published in USA Today, September 30, announced the release of two new studies providing “the best evidence yet that the brain-wasting ailment known as mad-cow disease may have jumped from cows to people.” Nature, a highly-regarded U.K. scientific publication, published the results of the studies carried out at England’s National CJD Surveillance Unit in their current issue and immediately posted it on their web site (Http://www.nature.com).
Twenty-one human cases believed to be similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) have been reported in Britain and one in France, but up to this point, there was no proof that they were the same disease. The researchers believe the disease is caused by warped, misshapen proteins called prions. The British research team found warped proteins in three humans that were identical to those that cause BSE in cows. The research team then succeeded in transmitting the disease to mice using BSE prions from humans. The symptoms and characteristic brain damage was different than those caused by Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (a similar human brain disease) and scrapie (a similar disease in sheep). One question which remains unanswered is how humans contract the disease.
While there have been no reported cases of BSE in the U.S., an FDA ruling effective October 3, 1997 prohibits feeding animal proteins to ruminants. In countries where BSE cases have been diagnosed, cattle contracted the disease through the feeding of meat meal and bone meal made from contaminated animals.
A discussion about the new BSE study on Dairy-L, an Internet dairy discussion group, yielded one posting from a dairy farmer in the U.K. who had felt the financial impact of BSE. He stressed that BSE is a public relations issue as well as a health issue and urged dairy producers not to use the description “mad cow disease.” “ — it gives a totally false impression and indeed anyone who has seen the symptoms will tell you it is not accurate. The cows behave as if drunk and are not that much different than staggers or magnesium deficiency,” he writes.

Jed Raised to EX-96
Alta Genetics sire Juniper Rotate Jed was raised to EX-96 Friday, October 3. The 10-year-old bull was classified while being featured as part of the Alta Genetics Progeny Preview, held near Madison, WI during World Dairy Expo. A committee of classifiers broke him down at 97 in frame, 100 in dairy, 95 in body and 91 in feet and legs. He is pictured with (from left): Holstein Association Director of Classification John Connor, Pete Blodgett, president, Alta Genetics USA Inc., and classifiers/technical supervisors Dick Howe, Jim Henderson and Al Haberkorn. Photo: Randy Blodgett

Sales & Shows
The SUNY Morrisville Autumn Review Sale, held September 19 in Morrisville, NY, averaged $1230 on 100 lots. A July 1997 Megabuck heifer consigned by Jack Button, Troupsburg, NY, topped the sale at $4600. She was from a VG-86, +117 PTAP Mascot daughter of Beachlawn Dutchoe Bell*BL (2E-92 GMD-DOM). She was purchased by Floyd Rayburn, Bloomfield, NY. Over thirty students from the SUNY Morrisville Dairy Club and Dairy Cattle Management Program worked to organize the sale, taking responsibility for selection, advertising, fitting and preparation.

The Eastern National Sale on September 24 at Harrisburg, PA averaged $3525 on 42 lots. Two head brought over five figures. At $10,200 was a milking 2-year-old Bellwood daughter from a VG-85 Tong daughter with records to 1100 fat and 1069 protein. Tom Wilson, Saegertown, PA was the consignor and Solid Gold Holsteins, Emlenton, PA the buyer. Close behind at $10,100 was a first-choice female due in April 1998, sired by Winchester. The dam is a VG-86, first calf Luke daughter. This consignment was from Dale & Fred Rice, Chambersburg, PA and was taken by Floyd Rayburn, Bloomfield, NY.

The Appeal of Chel-Brook Sale on Sept. 27 in Ravenna, MI averaged $3315 on 94 lots. Beachlawn Mitz Luke Lil-ET sold for $51,000 to the Mitz Syndicate of Harmony, NC. This VG-86 VG-MS Luke daughter, with AI and embryo contracts, carries PTA +2866M +62F +108P CTPI +1847 and made 2-3 365d 2X 25,618 3.0% 770 3.6% 913. Her dam is a VG-DOM Mascot with 34,902 4.4% 1530 3.8% 1327 backed by Dutchoe Bell (2E-92 GMD-DOM). The Proeschel family, owners of Chel-Brook, are from Camden, OH.

The crowd overflowed the tent at the Beachlawn Holsteins Milking Herd Dispersal and Influence of Beachlawn Dutchoe Bell Sale, September 29, Arkport, NY. A total of 124 lots sold for an average of $2381. Etazon-Holland Genetics purchased the top two high-selling animals. Beachlawn Mitz Luke Lynn-ET*BL, a GP-82 Luke with +117 PTAP topped the sale at $19,500. She was from a VG-86 Mascot daughter of Beachlawn Dutchoe Bell (2E-92 GMD-DOM). Fresh in August, Beachlawn Bellwood Tammy-ET*BL brought $13,500. She was from a VG-89, +74 PTAP Tesk daughter of Beachlawn Bell Cleitus Pro*BL (EX-93 GMD-DOM). The third dam is Dutchoe Bell.

Topping the annual Stars of the Silent Screen Sale at $8700 was a second-choice female from a Mattie G flush, due in April 1998. The dam is a VG-88 EX-MS Tesk with a PTA of +73 protein and credits of 2-0 365d 2X 29,890 milk 3.7% 1099 fat 3.5% 1033 protein. The next dam is a 2E-95-GMD-DOM Mark with 35,610 milk, while the next dam is a 2E-90-GMD-DOM Bell with 33,350 milk. Offered by Regancrest Farm, Waukon, IA and John Bierbaum, Burnsville, MN, this offering went to Marc Wolf, Lebanon, CT. Held during World Dairy Expo, this year’s edition featured 46 lots that sold for an average of $3687.