Creeping across the pasture land. Got dirt on
the boots and a working hand. From the milk house
home to the auction call. These are the folks
standing strong and tall. Yeah, this is... Welcome
back to the Bullvine Podcast. Usually when we
sit down to record one of these deep dives, we
have a pretty good idea of the archetype we're
dealing with. Right, yeah. We usually know the
kind of person we're going to be talking about.
Exactly. We're talking about the master breeder,
you know, the guy with the keen eye standing
right in the center of the ring. or maybe we're
talking about the innovator the person who built
a robotic milker in their shop or designed a
totally new forage system the tangible stuff
the tangible stuff exactly but today today is
different today we are sharing a story that quite
honestly uh stopped us in our tracks It is different.
And I'll admit, when we first looked at the source
material for this deep dive, this stack of papers
titled Architects of the Index, I thought, OK,
are we really going to spend our time talking
about statistics? It sounds dry when you say
it like that. It does. I mean, I love data, but
stats can be tough. But then I started reading.
And this isn't a story about math. This is the
story that reminds you exactly why you got into
dairy in the first place. From a completely,
and I mean completely, unexpected angle. It really
is. It's the story of the invisible architects.
Yeah. The people whose work dictates almost every
single decision made on a modern dairy farm.
And the wild part is it happens often without
you even knowing their names. Yeah, the quiet
guys in the background. Right. So today we are
doing a deep dive into the legacy of two men,
George Wiggins and Paul Van Ryn. And before anyone
tuning in thinks this is going to be some dry
history lesson or a lecture on algorithms, let
me drop a number on you, a really hard number.
Let's hear it. These two men are largely responsible
for pushing net merit progress, and that's the
literal profit potential of your herd, from about
$40 per cow per year to $85 per cow per year.
Okay, let's unpack that right away. 45 extra
dollars doesn't sound like a life -changing amount
when you just say it quickly like that. No, it
doesn't. It sounds like, I don't know, a rounding
error on a feed bill. Right. On the surface,
it's just a small number. But let's do the real
talk here. Let's do the barn math for you sitting
on the tractor right now listening to this. Break
it down. If you take that genetic game, that
exact acceleration that these two men engineered,
and you apply it to a standard 300 cow herd over
a decade, You are looking at roughly $135 ,000
in long -term genetic value added to that operation.
Wow. Yeah. That is money that simply wouldn't
exist without the systems they built. It's not
just theoretical value. It's real equity in your
herd. That is massive. I mean, think about what
you can do with that. That's a parlor renovation.
That's a new piece of heavy equipment. That's
literally college tuition for your kids. Exactly.
That is the margin between getting by and getting
ahead in this industry. And the crazy thing,
the really crazy thing, is that most producers
have never heard of them. Well, let's change
that today. I want to take you to a specific
moment to set the stage for this deep dive. Picture
this. It's September 29th, 2025. Not that long
ago. Right. We are in Madison, Wisconsin at the
National Dairy Shrine Banquet. It's one of those
nights where everyone looks polished. You know,
the air conditioning is humming in the banquet
hall and the room is... absolutely full of the
heavy hitters of the industry. The kind of room
where if you're a genetics nerd, you're basically
asking for autographs. Totally. You've got the
heads of the major AI companies, the university
professors, the legends of the breed, all sitting
at those roundtables. Right. And on this particular
night, George Wiggins and Paul Van Raden are
walking up to receive the Pioneer Award. Inside
that room... They are massive celebrities. They
are revered. Oh, absolutely. The geneticists
in that audience have been citing their research
papers for literally decades. They know that
these two men are the giants upon whose shoulders
the entire modern dairy industry stands. But
here is the contrast. And this is what really
struck me. Step outside that banquet hall. Drive
maybe 20 minutes out of Madison to an actual
working dairy farm. Maybe it's a 60 -cow tie
stall. Or maybe it's a 2 ,000 -cow rotary. Any
farm at all. Right. And you go up and ask the
guy scraping the alleys, hey, what do you think
about Wiggins and Van Raden? And what happens?
You'll probably get a blank stare. Almost total
anonymity. That is the paradox we are sitting
with today. How is it that these men appear on
practically every single sire list you use? I
mean, their work is literally the filter you
use to buy semen. Yeah. Yet the average farmer
has never heard their names. It's because they
were the back end. They were the operating system.
That's a perfect way to put it. You don't think
about the code writer who built the GPS software
in your tractor, right? You just look back and
know the roser straight. You trust the scream.
Wiggins and Van Raden were the code writers for
the modern cow. The code writers. I love that.
But here's the thing. And this is why you really
need to stick with us on this deep dive. If you
don't understand the system they built, you are
definitely leaving money on the table. You have
to know how the tool works to get the most out
of it. So how did two quiet scientists in a lab
in Beltsville, Maryland, end up influencing your
milk check more than almost anyone else in history?
To understand that, we have to go back, way back.
And surprisingly, the story doesn't start in
a sterile lab with white coats. No, it doesn't.
It starts, as the best dairy stories do, on the
farm. Both of them were farm kids. And I think
that's a really crucial detail to hold on to.
They weren't academics looking for a random subject
to study. They were dairy kids looking for a
solution to problems they had actually lived
through. Let's start with George Wiggins. He
grew up near Aurora, New York, right on Cayuga
Lake. Beautiful, beautiful country up there.
Oh, yeah. Gorgeous dairy country. And his family
had a dynamic that I think really shapes his
entire trajectory. They ran a dairy, yes, but
they also had a hybrid seed business. So they
were already in the genetics game in a way. Exactly.
And his grandfather wasn't just a farmer. He
was a plant breeding professor at Cornell. See,
that's huge. So he had the dirt under his fingernails
from the daily chores, but he also had that high
level academic rigor happening right at the dinner
table. That's an incredibly powerful combination
for a kid to grow up around. It really is. And
here's the thing about George. He did the milking.
He did the field work. He put in the sweat equity.
But he didn't love the manual labor. Who does,
really? Right. He wasn't the kid dreaming of
being a herdsman for the rest of his life. He
loved the quantitative side. He loved the numbers.
I can completely relate to that. I mean, I love
cows. I love the lifestyle. But there's always
a moment, usually when you're throwing heavy
hay bales in 90 degree heat in a dusty mow, where
you just stop and think, there has to be a smarter
way to do this. For George, that smarter way
was calculus. When he enrolled at Cornell, which
was... Pretty much destiny, given his family's
deep ties there. His calculus scores were so
high, they caught the eye of a specific advisor.
Dr. L. Dale Van Vleck. And for anyone who doesn't
know the academic family tree of dairy genetics,
that is a heavy hitter name. Van Vleck studied
under Charles Henderson, who is basically considered
the father of modern animal breeding. connecting
with Van Fleck. It's like a high school basketball
player getting scouted by Phil Jackson. Right.
It was a fast track to the big leagues of quantitative
genetics. And Wiggins had this realization early
on that I think is just so profound. He realized
that farming takes seasons. You plant a seed
in the spring. You wait months until harvest
to see if it worked. And with cows, it's even
longer. You breed a heifer, you wait nine months
for the calf, then two years for her to calve
in, then almost another year to see her complete
a lactation. You're waiting years to see if your
decision was a good one. Exactly. The feedback
loop is agonizingly slow. But computer programs,
they give you immediate feedback. You write the
code, you run it, and you see success or failure
right there on the screen in seconds. He wanted
to hack the timeline. He saw that data could
move infinitely faster than biology. And if you
think about it, that core desire to speed up
the feedback loop is what eventually led to the
genomic revolution. He was chasing that speed
from day one. Now let's slip over to Paul Van
Raden because his story has a slightly different
flavor, but the same core drive. He grew up near
Freeport, Illinois. 30 Cow Holstein Farm. 30
cows! Man, that is a classic honest -to -goodness
family operation right there. On a farm that
size, you know every single cow's name, you know
her quirks, you know which stall she likes to
stand in, you know who kicks. And I know you'll
love this detail. His very first 4 -H calf was
named Spotty. Of course it was. We all had a
Spotty or a Princess or a Daisy. That's the relatable
part. He started exactly where we all started,
leading a cap around a sawdust ring. But Paul
had this hustle as a teenager that I think tells
you everything about where he was headed. While
he was in high school, he worked as a DHI supervisor.
Oh man, the tester. Yes, the milk tester. He
was earning $2 .20 an hour, driving to neighbor
farms, collecting milk weights, taking those
little samples. I want you to really picture
that. Being a DHI tester is not a glamorous job.
Not at all. You're there at the most awkward
hours, three in the morning, four in the afternoon.
You're getting stepped on. You're dealing with
manure splashing on your clipboard. You're dealing
with grumpy farmers who really don't want to
slow down their milking routine to let you take
a sample. It's a grind. But think about what
he was actually doing on a fundamental level.
What do you mean? What was he doing? He was physically
collecting the raw data, the milk pounds, the
fat tests, the breeding dates. He was handling
the exact data points that he would later spend
his entire life analyzing. He was seeing the
input side of the equation in the most visceral,
real -world way possible. He wasn't just getting
a spreadsheet emailed to him. He was the one
writing it down. Right. He knew that data wasn't
just abstract numbers floating on a screen. It
was a freezing cold morning in Illinois with
manure on your boots and a cow swinging her tail
in your face. It's amazing foreshadowing. He
explicitly said later in life that he liked math
more than billing hay. He saw that programming
computers was, his word, easier and had far bigger
benefits for the industry. So you have these
two guys, both farm kids, both intimately familiar
with the sweat and the smell of a dairy, but
they both saw... the matrix, so to speak. They
saw the data behind the cows, not just the physical
animals themselves. But before they could team
up and literally change the world, George Wiggins
took a detour that I think is just, it's wild.
It's the absolute last thing you'd expect in
a story about dairy genetics. This is the part
of the source material that completely blew my
mind. Before he went to the USDA, before he settled
into the lab, Wiggins went To Laos. Laos during
the Vietnam War era. Yes. He went to the International
Voluntary Services. And this wasn't some cushy
study abroad program or vacation. This was incredibly
dangerous. You're talking about an active conflict
zone right next door. Exactly. Volunteers in
that region had literally been assassinated.
It was so volatile that Wiggins and his wife
were restricted to provincial centers just for
their own physical safety. Talk about high stakes.
Why even go? What was going through his head
to leave the safety of the U .S. for that? He
genuinely wanted to help. He had this deep drive
to improve agriculture on a global scale, to
help people feed themselves. But he learned a
lesson over there that became the absolute foundation
of his entire career. Which was? He realized
that you can't just tell farmers to change their
practices. You can't just walk into a village
or walk into a tie stall barn, for that matter,
and say, hey, do this differently because my
book says so. Oh, that is a universal truth.
Whether you are standing in a rice paddy in Laos
or a milking parlor in Wisconsin, farmers are
stubborn. And we have to be stubborn. We are
incredibly risk -averse because one bad crop
year or one bad breeding decision that ruins
a generation of heifers can literally end the
family farm. We don't have the luxury of adopting
every new theory that comes along. Exactly. And
Wiggins saw that firsthand. He learned that people
only change when the results are absolutely undeniable.
when they can see it working with their own two
eyes. That is profound. And I think that specific
philosophy is what made his later work so successful.
He wasn't just sitting in an ivory tower building
abstract math. He was building practical tools
that prove themselves on the ground. He knew
from his time in Laos that he had to win the
farmer's trust with concrete results, not just
a fancy theory. And then when he finally came
back to the US, he didn't even go straight back
to dairy cows. He took a job working at a school
for emotionally disturbed children that happened
to have a model farm attached to it. Huh. And
guess what they milked? I couldn't believe this
part. Goats. Goats. He became the goat guy for
a while. actually a pretty complex genetic puzzle
in itself. Goats have totally different seasonality
for breeding, different milk components, different
challenges. Working with them probably really
sharpened his skills in dealing with non -standard
data sets. So after all these detours, he finally
gets to the USDA lab in Beltsville, Maryland.
Paul Van Raden eventually joins him there. And
we have to pause. and set the scene for what
the technology actually looked like at the time.
Because this isn't iPads and cloud computing.
No, we are talking the dark ages of computing.
Yeah. Punch cards, giant reels of magnetic tape,
batch processing that took up entire rooms. If
you wanted a national genetic evaluation to see
how your bulls were doing, it happened twice
a year. Twice a year. Imagine trying to run a
business that way today. You're picking a bull
out of a catalog, and the data printed next to
his picture is already six months out of date.
You're basically flying blind, guessing based
on old information. It was incredibly slow. It
was clunky. And for guys who like speed and efficiency,
it had to be beyond frustrating. Their mission,
whether they knew it on day one or not, was to
drag this completely analog sluggish system kicking
and screaming into the digital age. And they
ended up doing it together for 38 years. 38 years
in the same lab. That kind of partnership is
just so rare anywhere, let alone in high level
science. John Cole, who worked closely with them,
said it's difficult to think of another pair
of animal breeders who were so influential as
a team. They were basically a marriage of minds.
And what made it work was they had this perfect
division of labor. They didn't step on each other's
toes. Van Raiden was the theorist. He was the
guy developing the incredibly dense statistical
methodology, the genomic predictions, the deep
heavy math. Wiggins was the builder. He managed
the operational systems. He was the one making
sure that Van Raiden's brilliant theories actually
got translated into evaluations that could be
generated, printed, and sent out to the farmers.
One guy designed the engine. The other guy built
the car and made sure it could actually run on
the highway you absolutely need both without
the theory the system is dumb but without the
builder the theory is just a research paper sitting
in a dusty drawer that never helps a single dairy
farmer so let's talk about the first really big
monster they tackled together the struggle of
breeding before 1994 oh i remember hearing the
older guys talk about this before 1994 picking
a bowl wasn't a science it was like a loud argument
at a coffee shop how so well you had one farmer
who was completely obsessed with milk volume
he just wanted pounds of fluid in the tank another
guy was totally obsessed with type he wanted
tall showy cows another guy was worried about
longevity and feet and legs and there was no
standard way to compare any of this it was totally
apples and oranges. It was just chaos. You had
all these individual traits floating around on
the page with no anchor. It was. You were trying
to balance all these biological traits with no
actual dollar value attached to them. I mean,
is 500 more pounds of milk worth more than a
two -point increase in utter composite? Who knew?
It was entirely subjective. It was a guessing
game. Enter Wiggins and Van Raden. In 1994, they
helped create something that changed the entire
paradigm. Net merit. Net merit dollars. NMA.
This literally changed everything about how we
breed cows. It took production, health, fertility,
longevity, and confirmation. And it collapsed
all of that complex biology into one single number.
One number to rule them all. Exactly. It finally
put a concrete price tag on the genetics. It
told the farmer, plain and simple, this cow will
make you X amount more profit over her lifetime
than that cow. It took the emotional bias out
of the decision and replaced it with cold, hard
economics. But surely there was pushback. I can
easily imagine farmers looking at this and saying,
you can't just reduce a living, breathing cow
to a single dollar sign. Oh, absolutely. There
is always massive pushback when you change a
deeply ingrained culture. People said, the computer
doesn't know what a good udder looks like in
the parlor. Or they'd say, you're completely
ignoring the art of breeding. And they had a
point, right? To some extent, yes. They were,
right breeding is an art. You still need good
cow sense. But Wiggins and Van Raden weren't
trying to kill the art. They were just trying
to give the artist a much better brush. They
were saying, look, here is the economic reality.
You can choose to ignore it if you want. But
this index reflects what the milk market actually
pays for. They were grounding the art in science.
Yeah. Giving it a financial floor. Exactly. And
over time. The money won the argument. It always
does. Farmers realized that the high net merit
cows actually did last longer. They bred back
faster and they made more profitable milk. The
undeniable proof was right there in the bulk
tank. And remember the lesson from Laos. When
the results are undeniable, the farmers change.
Full circle. But they didn't stop there. They
didn't just build the indexing coast. And this
next part of the deep dive is honestly like a
detective story. They started looking for what
wasn't there. This is the Sherlock Holmes aspect
of their work, the discovery of lethal recessives.
Explain that to us, because this is where the
science gets really fascinating. What exactly
were they looking for? Okay, so picture this.
They are looking at the entire bovine genome,
and they are breaking it down into smaller segments
called haplotypes. Think of haplotypes kind of
like paragraphs in a massive book. And because
of the database they built, they have this genetic
data on thousands and thousands of animals. Okay,
I'm with you. Paragraphs in a book. Right. Statistically
speaking, if a certain paragraph, a certain haplotype
is really common in the Holstein population,
you should eventually see an animal that has
two copies of it. One inherited from the sire,
one from the dam. It's just inevitable. Unless.
Unless that specific combination of genes kills
the animal before it's even born. Wow. So the
complete absence of the animal is the clue they
were looking for. Exactly. They ran the massive
data sets and found these specific segments where
they never. ever saw a living calf with a double
dose. Not once. That silence, that completely
missing data point in the spreadsheets, was the
smoking gun. It meant that if an embryo happened
to get both copies of that haplotype, it died
in utero. These are the haplotypes we see flagged
on semen lists now, right? HH1, HH2, HH3, and
so on. Yes, exactly. And here is why this matters
so intensely to you on the farm. Before they
discovered this invisible killer, you would breed
a cow, and maybe she wouldn't settle. Or worse,
you'd confirm her pregnant, and then she'd slip
the calf early and come back into heat. And what
did farmers think was happening? You'd blame
everything else. You'd think, oh, it's just bad
luck, or maybe the ration is off, or it was a
really hot week, must be heat stress. But it
was actually a genetic time bomb. It was. The
math showed it was a 3 .0 to 3 .7 % drop in conception
rate for those specific carrier -to -carrier
matings. Now, you can't see a dead microscopic
embryo in a straw of semen, but you can absolutely
see the hole in your wallet when a cow is open
for an extra 40 days. And the beauty of it is,
they didn't just write a paper about the problem.
They built the system to fix it. Right. They
integrated it right into the mating software.
Now, when your AI rep runs your herd through
the program, it automatically flags those carrier
-by -carrier matings and stops you from making
the mistake in the first place. They saved the
dairy industry millions and millions of dollars
silently just by preventing pregnancies that
were biologically doomed from the start. That
is incredible. It's like they installed a hidden
safety switch on the entire national herd. But
the real explosion in their timeline, the moment
the graph line just abandons all logic and shoots
straight up vertically, was 2009. The genomic
revolution. Talk to me about the 50k SMP chip,
because that's the piece of hardware that changed
everything. Okay, so to be clear, other brilliant
researchers developed the chip itself. It's essentially
a glass slide that lets you look at roughly 54
,000 specific genetic markers on an animal's
DNA and do it cheaply. It's like having 50 ,000
individual mile markers on a highway instead
of just knowing the start and end points of the
road. But having the markers on a slide is one
thing. Actually knowing what they mean for the
cow standing in front of you is a completely
different challenge. Right. That was the monumental
hurdle. Wiggins and Van Raden had to figure out
how to take that mountain of raw DNA data and
make it useful. How do you take a blood or hair
sample from a day -old calf and turn it into
a highly accurate prediction of how much milk
her son's daughters will give in five years?
It sounds like science fiction. But Wiggins called
the use of those markers an inspired choice.
It truly was. And when they finally launched
the official USDA genomic evaluations in January
of 2009, the results were just absolutely staggering.
I have the numbers from the source material right
here. Yeah. Genetic gain for yield traits. So
milk, fat, protein increased 50 to 100 percent
almost overnight. And fitness traits, things
that are traditionally so hard to breed for,
like health and daughter pregnancy rates. three
to four times the historical games. Three to
four times. Think deeply about that for a second.
For decades, the industry struggled just to maintain
fertility. We were selecting so heavily for massive
milk volume that we were inadvertently burning
the cows out. We were losing ground on health
traits year after year. Because you couldn't
easily measure it. Exactly. But suddenly with
genomics, we could see the actual genes responsible
for fertility directly in the DNA. We could actively
select for them on day one without waiting for
a bull to have 500 daughters milking in 10 different
states. And that's where the generation interval
completely collapsed. It dropped from seven years
to basically the biological minimum. That is
the speed Wiggins was looking for back in college.
Before 2009, you had to wait for a bull to be
five or six years old before his proof was reliable
enough to trust heavily. Now? Now you can confidently
trust a two -month -old bull calf. You are turning
the genetic crank so much faster. I really wonder
how it felt for the two of them. To sit in that
somewhat plain lab in Beltsville, look at their
monitors, And watch the genetic progress graph
line just go vertical. To know they had actually
unlocked something that massive. I think for
Wiggins, it just validated everything he learned
back in Laos. How so? He said farmers change
when results are undeniable. Genomics was undeniable.
Think about how stubborn we established farmers
are. Yet... The shift from relying strictly on
proven sires to heavily using genomic young sires
was arguably the fastest, most aggressive adoption
of new technology in the entire history of agriculture.
Farmers just dropped the old way completely.
They did, because the new way worked, and it
worked fast. They saw the genomic heifers hitting
the ground, calving in and milking circles around
their own dams. You can't argue with the bulk
tank. And the financial numbers absolutely back
it up. Wiggins documented that the average net
merit gain across the breed jumped from $40 a
year before genomics to $85 a year after 2010.
That is the doubling we talked about right at
the start of this deep dive. They literally doubled
the speed of evolution in dairy cattle. It's
breathtaking when you step back and look at it.
And the database just kept feeding itself. It
grew exponentially. By 2025, they had amassed
over 12 million genotypes in the system. It's
a massive positive feedback loop. The more data
you feed into the system, the more accurate the
predictions become. And because the predictions
are so accurate, more farmers want to test their
animals, which gives you even more data. They
engineered a self -sustaining engine of progress.
So bringing it from history right up to the present
day, we have this massive, beautifully functioning
system. But it's not static. It's a living thing
that has to adapt to the real world. And there
is a very big shift happening right now in 2025.
The April 2025 net merit revision. This is where
the theoretical history meets the road for you
listening today. What shifted in the formula?
Why did they feel the need to rewrite the math
now? Well, the consumer market shifted, so the
math absolutely had to shift to keep pace. The
biggest change is they put significantly more
emphasis on butterfat. It's now up to 31 .8 %
of the entire formula. At the same time, they
pulled back the emphasis on protein. Why such
a strong pivot to fat? For years, it was all
about protein. Because butterfat is where the
actual milk check money is right now. Consumer
habits changed. People want full -fat dairy again.
They want real butter. They want premium high
-fat ice cream. They want whole milk lattes.
The market is practically screaming for fat.
That makes sense. But they also made other crucial
tweaks. They increased the weight on feed efficiency,
the feed -saved trait, because feed costs are
astronomical. And they heavily adjusted the formula
to account for the currently high prices we're
seeing for cull cows and bull calves. So if you
are a producer and you aren't paying close attention
to these new weights in the index, you might
unknowingly be breeding for the market of 2020,
not the market of 2025. Exactly. You are breeding
for a ghost market. If you are still flipping
through the catalog, chasing sheer protein volume
above all else, you are actively fighting the
index. You are building a biological factory
that produces a product the consumer market is
telling you it wants less of. And for our listeners
across the border, it's important to note this
isn't just a U .S. phenomenon. Right. Our Canadian
friends just went through a similar shift. overhauled
the LPI, the Lifetime Performance Index, and
the PRO formula in April 2025 as well. It's a
global trend. It is. The underlying science is
shared globally. In fact, Wiggins and Van Raden's
work on creating a shared genotype repository
helped make that international cooperation possible.
But the economic formulas get tweaked for regional
differences, like the Canadian quota system.
But the overarching trend is universal. Breed
for extreme feed efficiency and high solids.
It really is a legacy that spans borders and
generations. Wiggins officially retired back
in 2016, but of course he kept working as an
active advisor. And then Radin is still at it,
still refining the math to these 2025 revisions.
John Cole really did summarize it perfectly.
Difficult to think of another pair of animal
breeders who were so influential as a team. They
gave up the spotlight and stared in the lab for
almost four decades just so you could milk better,
healthier, more profitable cows. All right, Jake,
I mean, let's pivot to the now what for the listener.
Yeah, let's get practical. We have folks listening
to this while running the mixer wagon or standing
in the parlor or driving to the feed mill. They
can't sit down and do the calculus that Wiggins
did, but they absolutely can and should use the
tool he built. Right. You don't need to be a
master mechanic to drive a high -performance
truck, but you do need to know how to shift the
gears properly so you don't blow the transmission.
So let's give them the playbook, the bar in math.
Based on everything we've talked about with the
index and the revisions, what should they be
doing when they turn this audio off? I like to
break it down into a simple 30, 90, and 365 -day
plan, concrete, actionable steps. Okay, let's
start with the immediate term, right now, the
next 30 days. Step one, in the next 30 days,
pull your herd's actual net merit average. Call
your tester, look at your software, and do it
today. You need to compare your herd average
to the new April 2025 genetic base. And for context,
that base is the average of all the cows born
in 2020. And what if a farmer looks at that number
and sees they are below zero? If you are below
zero dollars on that new base, you have to realize
you are losing ground fast. Remember the speed
of progress we talked about? The entire breed
is moving forward at a clip of $85 a year. If
you are just standing still, or if your genetics
are below average, that profit gap between you
and your neighbor is widening every single day.
You are bleeding competitive advantage. Okay,
so that's step one. What else in the next 30
days? There's a specific phone call they need
to make, right? Yes. Step two, pick up the phone,
call your AI representative, and ask them one
very specific question. Which lethal haplotypes
do the sires sitting in my semen tank right now
carry? addressing the fertility leak we talked
about. You have to fix it. If you are unknowingly
using a bull that is a known carrier for HH1,
and you are breeding him randomly to cows in
your herd that are also carriers, you are just
willingly accepting a 3 .7 % dip in conception.
Why on earth would you do that? It's throwing
money away. It is entirely an unforced error.
The software exists to stop it, but you have
to make sure your rep is actually utilizing that
tool when they run your mating program. That
makes perfect sense. Okay, let's move out a bit.
The medium term. The next 90 days. Step three
in the next 90 days. Do a hard audit of your
herd's genetic diversity. In the genomic era,
it is so incredibly easy to get swept up in the
hype. We all get excited about the hot new bull
that tops the list, and suddenly everyone is
using his sons, his grandsons, and his great
-grandsons. So what's the danger threshold? What's
the rule of thumb they should look for? If one
single sire or one highly related sire family
makes up more than 15 % of your replacement heifers,
you have exposed yourself to a massive risk.
Because of the unknown. Exactly. If that specific
family turns out to have a hidden genetic defect
that science hasn't found yet, or if they just
don't pan out the way the early genomic numbers
predicted, you've put all your eggs in one basket.
The most advanced math in the world cannot fix
bad risk management on the farm level. Keep your
portfolio diverse. Solid advice. And finally,
the long game. The 365 -day strategy. Step four,
looking at your strategy over the next year.
Check your young sire ratio. Look deeply at your
breeding log. If more than 50 % of your matings
are to very young, unproven genomic sire's bulls
with less than, say, 75 % reliability, you just
need to... consciously understand the trade -off
you're making. You are trading predictability
and stability for absolute maximum speed. Is
that necessarily a bad thing, though? Not necessarily.
Like I said earlier, speed is good. I really
like speed and genetic progress. But you have
to respect that it comes with variance. Some
of those young bulls are going to drop in the
rankings once their daughters actually start
milking. Some will rise. You just need to make
sure that aggressive strategy is a conscious,
calculated business choice and not an accident
just because the semen was cheap. Don't bet the
farm on a stack of lottery tickets if you can't
afford a few losing scratch -offs. That is just
incredibly practical. It really takes all this
high -level, invisible science and makes it highly
visible and actionable right there in the barn.
That's the entire goal. The math only matters
if it changes what happens in the parlor. You
know, as we wrap this deep dive up, I just keep
thinking about that core image of the two of
them, Wiggins and Van Ribben, spending 38 years
working together in the exact same building.
Never once chasing the fame, never trying to
be the loud face of the dairy industry on magazine
covers. They truly proved that the biggest, most
sweeping changes in dairy don't always happen
in the barn. Sometimes they happen on a tiny
cardboard punch card, or a massive spreadsheet,
or hidden deep in a database of 12 million animals.
They were the invisible architects. And frankly,
because of their relentless dedication to the
data, the cows we are going to milk tomorrow
are going to be infinitely better than the cows
we milk today. That is a heck of a legacy to
leave behind. It certainly is. A legacy that
literally pays the bills for thousands of families.
And for you listening, if you want to see the
actual charts, dive into the historical data
and get a full line -by -line breakdown of that
2025 net merit revision we spent time on, head
over to www .thebullvine .com. We've got the
full story and all the resources right there.
And trust me on this, you really want to read
up on those new fat and protein economic weights
before you finalize your next semen order. It
will change how you breed. Absolutely. Dairy
farmers are incredibly resilient people. And
now... Thanks to the quiet work of men like Wiggins
and Van Raden, you were armed with the best,
most accurate data in the history of agriculture.
Use it to your advantage. I couldn't have summarized
it better myself. That's another powerful story
from the Bullvine podcast. These are the people
actively building the future of dairy. Find more
deep dives and stories that matter at www .thebullvine
.com. Next time we're taking a completely different
track. We'll be talking to a young breeder who
is actively taking extreme genomic outliers and
doing something completely unheard of with them
in his breeding program. You will want to hear
this one. Make sure you subscribe so you don't
miss it. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive.
Stay safe out there.