This website was designed with beef cattle breeding instructors at two- and four-year postgraduate institutions in mind. Our goal is to provide instructional resources for faculty who are teaching classes where all or part of the content includes beef cattle breeding material. We envision these materials may be useful for faculty teaching animal breeding, animal genetics and beef cattle production classes; however, any class that discusses beef cattle breeding is welcome to use this website.
“Beef cattle breeding” is defined here as the science of selection and mating systems in beef production. Our focus is on how to select the “best” animals to breed and how to plan mating systems to improve profitability of beef operations. Presently, our definition of “beef cattle breeding” does not include topics such as improving conception rates, pregnancy success or artificial insemination protocols. Our focus is on genetic selection and mating decisions in beef herds.
Instructors are encouraged to submit their own instructional materials to this website.
We strongly encourage you to share problem sets, videos, assignments, links to websites and other materials you have used in your classes. This resource becomes more powerful as more instructors contribute their own materials and ideas. We will credit you for any materials provided to this website. Please contact Michael Gonda, 605-688-5442, if you have instructional materials you would like to contribute.
On the right, you will find links to topic areas within the discipline of beef cattle breeding. Within each topic area are videos, links to reading assignments and problems that could be used when teaching this material to your students. We also have an answer key for problem sets. To obtain the answer key, please contact Michael Gonda, 605-688-5442. We will verify that you are an instructor at a postgraduate institution and then provide you with the answer key.
The development of this website was supported by a USDA-NIFA-AFRI grant (#2016-68004-24827) awarded to the University of Missouri (PI: Jared Decker). We would also like to thank Clara Moeller for developing this website.
Sections:
- Herd assessment.
- Coat color.
- Performance records.
- Breeding objectives.
- Visual evaluation of cattle.
- Expected progeny differences.
- Economic selection indices.
- DNA technologies.
- Inbreeding and linebreeding.
- Crossbreeding benefits and systems.
- Reproductive technologies.