Not many things in the livestock business are free, but heterosis — the bump in performance from crossbreeding — is one of them.

Then, why don’t we take full advantage of it in our commercial beef cattle herds?

It’s unfair to paint everyone with that same broad brush, but it is true that the cattle industry significantly lags its biggest competitors, pork and poultry, in capitalizing on heterosis. One industry survey revealed that only about half of beef producers have planned crossbreeding program. 

You get confirmation as you drive around many farm neighborhoods and count herds by color. Over 80% are black. Many are straight Angus.

And, if you think you’re getting a level of heterosis by diversifying your sources of bulls within a particular breed, think again. There is no such thing as within-breed heterosis.

The biggest downside to straightbred cattle may be in the mama cows. They don’t milk as well, breed back as well, or thrive in adversity as well. They aren’t as hardy.

Troy Rowan, a cattle genetics specialist at the University of Tennessee, said one of the more telling statistics comes from the Meat Animal Research Center in Nebraska. “Crossbred cows will stay in a herd about a year longer, on average, and produce an extra 600 pounds of calf weaning weight in their lifetime, compared to purebreds,” he said in summary of that research.  

Traits such as milk production, reproductive efficiency, and herd longevity are all considered lowly heritable, but they respond greatly to crossbreeding, he added.

Part of the straightbred trend may be a side effect of the success of Certified Angus Beef (CAB). Black calves often earn a premium on sale day for their perceived carcass desirability. But Rowan reminds that you can have CAB premiums and the heterosis kick. “There’s wiggle room in CAB,” he said. “They just have to be black-hided. Those crossbred baldy calves are eligible.”

For some producers, the best way to get crossbred cows is to buy F1 (two-way cross) heifers from someone who specializes in that business. You can mate them to a true terminal sire selected for growth, carcass, and other desired traits, without thinking about saving replacement heifers.

But about 85% of cow herd owners prefer to raise their own heifer replacements.

Given that, Rowan and Jared Decker, an animal genomics researcher at the University of Missouri, have some practical ideas for increasing crossbreeding into your cow herd through your own farm-raised heifer development program.

Add a Second Breed to Your Bull Rotation 

“If you just alternate bulls from breed A to breed B, you’ll stabilize at about two-thirds of maximum heterosis,” Decker said. “Alternating bull breeds is going to be well worth it, compared to straightbred.”

If it’s important to you, he added, you can alternate breeds that always give black-hided calves. “Besides the value-added programs, buyers also want consistency in calves they buy,” he said, “and that doesn’t happen with haphazard crossbreeding. But it is possible with a planned crossbreeding system.”

Decker offers a simple way to keep track of subsequent generations of replacement heifers. If breed A sires a heifer, put her ear tag in the left ear. If she’s from breed B, put it in the right. “You can easily tell which breeding group she belongs to,” Decker said. “If her sire was breed A, she gets bred to breed B.”

In some herds, he said, breeding by hair color can be even simpler. Red or brown cows go into a group to breed to a black bull, and vice versa. “One knock you sometimes hear on crossbreeding is the phenotypic [observable] uniformity,” Decker said. “This system would give you some level of heterosis in the calves and replacement heifers, and some uniformity in phenotype, too.”

Add a Third Breed 

This gets a little more complicated, but over the long haul, it can bring a stable level of heterosis in your herd to over 85%. “Again, if you want simplicity, you can put an ear tag in both ears to signify the third breed that sired those heifers and breed accordingly,” Decker said.

One example of a three-breed program, he said, could be a Hereford-Angus bull rotation to produce replacement heifers. Then, those females could be bred to a high-growth breed, such as Charolais or Simmental, in a terminal system — no heifers retained. “That could give you a visual marker of the breeds, too,” he said.

If you move to a third-breed system and the genetic management it entails, Rowan said you could consider fine-tuning the maternal line to produce all your replacement heifers. In that maternal line, you would put more emphasis on breeding for mothering characteristics such as calving ease, milking ability, and breed-back success. 

Those heifers become replacements for your main herds, and could be mated to a terminal bull of another breed, selected for growth, carcass, or whatever characteristics you value highly. Heifer calves from the terminal bull are not retained for breeding.

Front-load for Replacement Heifers

“If you are willing to go one more mile, you could implement an artificial insemination (AI) program on your maternal herd,” Rowan said. “You could front-load those cows to calve early in your calving season. Research shows that early-born heifers tend to calve early themselves, and do better throughout their lifetime of staying in the herd longer and performing year to year.”

Thanks to sexed semen technology, the maternal herd cows could be inseminated to produce only female calves, Rowan said. It’s over 90% successful at producing the desired sex, and it would give you more crossbred heifers to choose from, or fewer cows to AI.

In this program, Rowan said, cows that don’t conceive by AI — it’s usually 60% to 70% successful — can go out with a terminal cleanup bull. Their calves aren’t considered for replacements.