Introducing the Holstein Conformation Composite

Everybody in this conversation has so much passion for what we're trying to do here. And we're really trying to breed that more profitable balanced cow. One of the biggest things for me was making sure that we're selecting how that people actually want to breed. I know all the detail that has gone into this and all the time and effort that has been put into it, that I can have the confidence, I can look at this composite and like, "Okay, this is what I want to use to breed the kind of cow I want to breed." We continue to take this breed to new levels and it's exciting. I think this accelerates our progress. Welcome to Holstein Connections, where we share the latest stories, insights, and news from Holstein Association USA and beyond. The largest dairy cattle breed association in the world, Holstein Association USA provides leadership, information, and services to help dairy producers worldwide be successful. Whether you're in the barn, on the road, or just tuning in for your dose of dairy news, we're glad you're here. This is Holstein Connections. Hello Holstein enthusiasts and welcome back to the Holstein Connections podcast. In today's discussion, we're going to be going over the highlights of the new Holstein Confirmation Composite, which is abbreviated as HCC. The HCC is a new selection tool designed to help breeders identify animals with the combination of confirmation traits most closely associated with balance, functionality, and long-term durability. Joining me for today's discussion is Director Jeff King, who serves as the chair of our Confirmation Advisory Committee. Dwight Roeke, the Holstein Association USA Vice President, along with Dr. Jeff Rebule, who is our Executive Director of Genetic Programs and Innovation, and Dr. Jason Graham, our Genetic Evaluation and Research Scientist. Welcome to the podcast everyone, and thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having us. Good to be here. Jeff, why don't you go ahead and start by giving us a little introduction here for our listeners. I'm Jeff King, and I'm one of the directors at Holstein USA. We dairy farm with my family and myself in the eastern part of New York State and milk a little over 3,000 head registered Holstein's. Awesome. Thank you, Jeff. Dwight, let's hear a little bit about you and your operation as well. Yeah, thanks Emily. Yeah, Dwight Roeke, currently serving as the Vice President of the Association, I served on the board for seven years and on the Confirmation Advisory Committee, all of them years and chaired that for the final year. So we're located in Northeast Kansas, Roeke Road Holstein's, we milk 100 registered Holstein cows, my family and I, and yeah, we enjoy what we do. Thank you, Dwight. And Dr. Graham, I know you're new to the team here, so give us a little introduction as well. My name is Jason Graham, I joined the association as a genetic evaluation and research scientist in July 2025. I grew up in 4H and FFA in California, and I really got my starting dairy at NC State through the dairy science club and a farmer apprenticeship on a dairy in Western North Carolina. I really love working with the dairy cows and I stayed at NC State for my masters in animal genetics where I focused on dairy cross-bred research. I then completed my PhD at Purdue studying calf resilience using automated milk feeding recorder dig. Thanks Jason and Dr. Bulear, your return podcast guest, but I think we should get a little introduction from you here as well. All right, I've been with Holstein now for about six years and we enjoyed the opportunity to work with our breeder, so that's the best part of my job is to get to work with people that are enthusiastic about breeding cows as I am also. So I've been involved in the dairy industry since I was a little kid and and love this industry. I love the Holstein care. To start off the conversation, Jeff, let's have you read the permission statement for us. Sure, the committee and staff work together to formulate the mission statement and it reads as follows. The Holstein confirmation composite is a selection tool designed to identify animals with the combination of confirmation traits most associated with balanced functionally correct Holstein cattle. The HCC emphasizes intermediate optimum values for key traits that support long-term functionality. It promotes moderate frame size, balanced tutors built for longevity and production potential and sound feet and legs. The HCC identifies cattle that move well, maintains structural soundness and produce profitably across many lactations representing the balanced durable cow that the dairy producers recognize as their most profitable. Developed through collaboration between experienced breeders and the empirical analysis of Holstein USA's comprehensive database of linear confirmation and production records, the HCC provides breeders and alternative to predictive transmitting ability for type or PTAT by waiting individual confirmation traits based on breed priorities considering the relationships between traits rather than being based on final score alone. The formula is evaluated periodically by Holstein Association USA's confirmation advisory and the genetic advancement committees to ensure it continues to advance the Holstein breed and serve the evolving needs of breeders worldwide. Do I take us back? When was this idea first suggested? I know it's something that has been in the works for a while. What did the process of coming up with HCC look like from your perspective? Yeah Emily, so this has been in the works for quite a few years. When it first came up, I would say it's been several years maybe like three and a half years ago at a confirmation advisory committee meeting in Chicago and just hearing a lot from breeders in our members, you know what the kind of cows we're looking for and you see the the change in the industry and far as feeding and the change in facilities and all that and we're just recognizing maybe our cow or what we were searching for and PTAT wasn't necessarily fitting what majority of breeders were wanting. So I think we kind of toss things around and if I remember mentioning like well why don't we come up with some kind of a confirmation index at that point and so it kind of challenged staff a little bit to start working on this and Dr. Buelly was involved and then it just so over time caught a little more traction and then Dr. Graham came on board and they really dove into it and started figuring things out. At that time I had no idea that there were so many traits that were so correlated and there were so many different things going on. To me it was like you know what you just pick your perfect cow and you make some kind of index to match her and life goes on but it was much more complicated in that. Jeffrey what key traits that support long-term functionality does HCC emphasize and why is this important? So the hosting confirmation composite focuses on reading a moderate size cow with balanced udders and sound feet and legs. That's the overarching goal of the HCC. We've also put emphasis on trying to increase teap length and improve rear teap placement, my increasing rear teap placement and there's an emphasis on trying to get more strength and stature and all these traits are what our breeders have suggested would be the best type of animal to be profitable long-term within their herders and we have data to support this concept. And how does HCC compare to PTA type? So it's very different I think a lot of people and even myself in the past was confused about PTA type. PTA type is based on final classification score. It's not a composite HCC on the other hand is a composite of all the linear traits so it's a bit more quantitative and how it's derived and it is again aimed toward that balanced cow that we talked about a minute ago. So the overall objective is to breed that animal that fits I think what breeders would like to see so we really incorporated a lot of breeder intuition into development of HCC but then we also took a very data driven approach to come up with the the actual value so it's a combination of breeder intuition and data focused analysis. And how does it compare to fitness traits like productive life and fertility for example? So that also was a consideration and development of the HCC and one of the encouraging things about HCC as when we look at the correlations between eight HCC and productive lives, livability, contraception rate. We see much better correlations for those traits with the HCC than what we do for PTA type. So HCC should provide us with more of the animal that is more resilient to last in our herds. - So you, as you mentioned, Jeffrey, you used a data driven approach combined with that breeder intuition to arrive at the trait weights. Jeffrey and Jason, would you want to dive in a little bit more on how that worked and how you arrived at the weights that you arrived at? - Sure, yeah. So I'll start now. I'll say, first of all, this was a very detailed long process. Dr. Graham and I worked through hundreds of iterations of the HCC to get to this point. I think for us as scientists, it was really, really quite fun to work through this. We liked doing this kind of data analysis, but we started with sort of the goals that the breeders had indicated through our committees over the years as we're to begin for that. And then I think the key point in the HCC that really differentiates HCC from anything that's ever been done is the quantitative approach that really was led by Dr. Graham. And I really want to take a second here to say, oh, Dr. Graham's new to our team, but this is a huge contribution already and it's been great to work with him on this. But I'd like Dr. Graham to explain kind of the quantitative approach that we took there. - Yeah, so one big thing with the HCC versus PTAT is like Dr. Buele said, PTAT is based on final score. So it's not very flexible on how we change kind of how we adapt selection would are. All of the future, while with HCC, we took all 18 linear traits and were able to change various weights based on the 18 heritabilities for those traits, but then also the 324 genetic correlations between all those traits. So when we consider the relationship of all these traits together, it allows us to better create the weights required to fit the overall confirmation that we're going for. - Yeah, I think that's really unique and really exciting is that the formula for HCC accounts for all of those underlying correlations and there's no way that any of us can think through what 324 correlations mean. But basically what that does is it allows us to really achieve that balance in a way that we can't necessarily do looking at traits one by one. And so some things in the HCC might look a little different than what we would expect them to look because they're inherently considering the underlying correlations between all the traits that we have. - So Jason, can you explain what the average linear profile of high raking bowls is expected to look like? - Yeah, sure. So from our analyses that we performed, we found that the average bowls would be closer to the average for stature, positive for strength, body depth and dairy form, higher on feet and legs, and then they're going to have high and wide under-hyton width with symmetrical teapacement and a bit longer teeth. - So will the profiles be seeing extremes or will they be on a center line there? What will that look like, Dr. Graham? - So the profiles are going to be a much more moderating while for the PTAT it was more selecting on the extremes. The approach now is to have a more moderate, well-formed animal. 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So now that we know a little bit about what the HCC is and how we got there, I think it's important that we acknowledge the true collaboration that it was between the Confirmation Advisory Committee and the Genetic Advancement Committee, along with, of course, staff analysis from the Holstein Association Database of Linear Confirmation and Production Records. So, just as current chair of the Confirmation Advisory Committee, I'm sure you've had many conversations about this. What type of feedback did breeders on the committee or others have when you really began discussing this idea? - Sure, it was interesting to me that when we worked with breeders on those committees, I think it was important and we had representation, I think, from all corners of our industry, from small to large, from traditional to more progressive, I think any type of breeder that is involved in our organization was represented in that room. And the exciting thing to me was, I think when we've had these conversations in the past, there's been a divide a little bit, and the opinions of folks as to what our direction should be. And it was really impressive to me, I think, that there was very much unity in what our purpose was there and what our goals were. It was exciting to see very, very broad support from kind of all aspects of the industry. At one of our committee meetings, I had an older member who had talked about serving on some of these committees in the past, and he said, yeah, we got together years ago and we talked about this and we talked about stature increasing and it was becoming an issue. He said, we talked about it at the end of the day, we never made any progress. And at the end of our meeting and some of the decisions we made, he said, I'm really excited. And he couldn't say enough good about the direction that we were taking in some of the, what I think is bold action toward changing how we define the future of our brief. - Dr. Buley and Dr. Graham, when you really started digging into the data, what stood out to you and did it align with what Jeff and Dwight and other fellow registered whole steam breeders were saying? - We've done a lot of analysis of confirmation data related to lifetime production and lifetime days in milk. And we have a data set of about a million cows that we've worked through where we have quantified the relationships between all of our linear traits and lifetime days in milk and lifetime energy corrected milk. And some of you probably have seen some of that work. It's on our website under the Megan Reason's Y link. If you're interested in studying that a little bit more. But some of the relationships realistically were a little bit surprising. So it is quite evident, for example, that smaller cows tend to last longer and have more lifetime production. There is a pointed diminishing return on size. And that includes something like body depth. For example, body depth, increased body depth is not necessarily a good thing, which might be counterintuitive for many of us who have been our lives looking at cows. When we look at a lot of the feed and leg traits, not surprising that those have intermediate optimums. And then when we look at the utter traits, it's really clear that that utter should be a major emphasis for us because having a higher wider rear utter with a stronger four utter attachment, those are really important traits to the lifetime production of the animal. So when we say we looked at data, we looked at a lot of data in this process to understand what traits really have an influence on how much that animal produces across our lifetime. And that's not the only thing, of course, that's important to profitability of an animal. But it's really important to the profitability of the animal. So we wanted to understand the underlying real data. And yeah, this is based on over a million cows that we looked at, along with that intuition that we have among some of the best breeders in the country. That's really who I would say sits on our committees. We have breeders on our committees that think about this all the time. And being able to listen to all the members of the committee and all the feedback that they received from other people that they brought to the committee. meeting. That's what separates this HCC from anything that's been out there before is that that Jason and I as scientists really try to look at it quantitatively as well as we could but we also had all of that conversation. So it's a truly collaborative effort between scientists and breeders to come to this HCC. And how were you able to tie all that information together? What do those discussions look like? How are you able to bring it together to form? What is now HCC? So really going like nailing down of okay so we created a draft of what this index, what kind of call this index is going to be selecting for this bull is index. Is this what people want? Is this close to what people would like? And so we would have to workshop and go back and forth and say okay is this what you want? And then if they said no we want something more like this we would have to go and basically I'd have to pencil out the math to try to get us to that destination. It was really an iterative process where we actually had multiple versions of this that we shared with the committee and went back to the drawing board each time. So it's not like we said here's the final version and everybody said good let's go for this. We went back and forth and back and forth with the committee to make sure we got this to a good point. And like I say it was really an enjoyable exercise. I think we all learned a lot from the process and as data geeks I think we we really enjoyed it a lot. And the cool thing is to me everybody in this conversation is so much passion for what we're trying to do here and we're really trying to breed that more profitable balanced cow. And I think HCC is going to be able to do this in a way that probably nothing ever has before. I think this is one of the most innovative things that I've been involved in in my career and I'm really excited about the potential that HCC has for improving the Olstein cow long term. Jeff from your perspective I'm curious what that process was like going back and forth with Dr Graham and Dr. Bule to arrive at what you as breeders felt was important. We're passing the ball back and forth and trying to take shots every time we get really close but then we have to you know regroup and try shooting again. Yeah Jeff from your perspective what was that like? Yeah I think it was fun too. I consider myself a little bit of a data geek and I love studying bull proofs and genetics and so forth but surprisingly when I started visiting with people on the committee I realized there are actually people that spend more hours than I do at this and that was impressive. They might not have much of a social life but they really do enjoy genetics and it's it's fun to tear it apart and discuss and not only not only think about theory but also to look at how those things work in our herds and have that interaction as far as what we see as breeders and I think that that is part of the power of this whole thing is bringing together data and as Jeffrey and Jason pointed out data analysis and also a breeder intuition into the final decision as to what makes sense. I learned a lot in a process for sure. Absolutely so Jeff and Dwight as registered whole steam breeders what makes you excited to have HCC as another tool or in your toolbox? I think what it what gets me the most excited is because I'm more of a visual guy you know so we've got these other fellows here on the podcast especially Dr. Beeling, Dr. Graham who love looking at analysis and running all the different things and and figuring that all out and I love it when they can present to me in one slide this is what this looks like and and then I can look and visualize in my mind what this cow looks like and I can see the cows in my barn I can see the cows and other people's barns when we all want to breed a good balanced functional cow. You know so it for like a one-stop shop and I know all the detail that has gone into this and all the time and effort that has been put into it that I can have the confidence I can look at this composite and like okay this is what I want to use to breed the kind of cow I want to breed and whatever whatever member wants to do that or breeder he can use that with with pretty solid confidence because the amount of effort and the time and and all the data like when Dr. Billy mentioned the million reasons why study I think that was very eye-opening for all of us to see and to realize and move in that direction. Jeff anything to add on your end? I think Dwight makes a great point the one-stop shop. To me this this makes it easier I think to identify the type of genetics that that I'm looking for and you know when you when you compare and contrast the the new composite with PTA type there were plenty of times that I heard people say it's just I don't really use that anymore I use I use it but then I look at other linear and I and I put a lot of things together to make my final decision and I think that this makes things a little bit easier to really kind of identify those cows that are going to perform and be profitable in our herds. What impact do you think the implementation of HCC will have on the future of the whole scene breed? I think it's going to have a pretty significant impact especially in the stage we're in now and we see that the the hosting breed just with the stature getting maybe a little out of control. To get that curtailed and come back and to get that moderate frame cow that maybe uses her feed efficiency a lot better in a production and just more athletic and can get around and move about in whatever environment we're in I think this is something that's really going to to excel and get to that point in a good way. Emily I agree that I'm excited about where it can take to breed because when you think about greater correlations with livability greater correlations with fertility so many things that matter in our day-to-day management and then you combine that with the confirmation that we as breeders have all kind of really strive to build in the whole scene breed. I think it takes us eventually takes us to a new level. We continue to take this breed to new levels and it's exciting I think this accelerates our progress. Awesome. Is there anything else that any of the four of you want to mention or touch on that we haven't had a chance to discuss yet as it relates to HCC? I think just from my standpoint I'm really excited to see this come to fruition and to see this implemented it just is really neat from the get-go to hear from members and then through the committee process and then having staff work on things and the back and forth that we had it's just really neat to see how it's all come about and it's just going to be a really positive thing for association and the breed. One other thing that I would say is that when we start looking at the individual linear of animals with the HCC or what animal really excels on the HCC there may be some things that surprise people and some of that probably is related to some of the underlying correlations. For example my gut feeling on certain traits might be that all of the utter traits for example many of the utter traits like rear-under-hike rear width and four-utter attachment that the SDA perhaps should be toward a three on those individual traits that just kind of what I have in my mind when I think about the ideal utter for an animal. The problem is and why those animals might not always excel on the HCC is that in order to get that because of the underlying correlations we end up back toward that really large animal because ultimately in the underlying data set the data kind of says that in order to have those extreme utter traits you also have to have extreme body size which none of us really think that's necessarily the case but because of that we really end up with a more moderate one and a half to two for example as the optimum for the SDAs on traits like rear-under-hike and rear-utter width and that might be a little bit surprising to see that when we look at some of these linear I know it it was for me and believe me that was part of our discussion in the process is saying well I don't think that's far enough to the right to me let's let's see what we can do but unfortunately the underlying data really says we can't do that and maintain that goal of having that moderate-sized animal so one of the things that when I think about this and believe me it's because I thought about it so much is that those underlying correlations and the relationships that are there. None of us can be We wrap our minds around 324 correlations. So we have to kind of trust the process, understand that the model is accounting for all those underlying correlations simultaneously. So some things may be a little bit surprising. And I think it's important also to look at the entire breed. We can't design an equation or a model for one animal or two animals. We're looking at the entire population. And there are individual animals that might rate really, really high on the HCC that have a flaw because there's 18 traits in there. So it might look like it's close to what we want, but maybe the pen height is a little too high or the leg set is a little too one way or the other. And that can be surprising. We're not looking at individual animals. We don't develop genetic tools for individual animals. We develop them for the breed. And so it's a little surprising sometimes when we look at this. But again, I think that the process to get here is really detailed and really thought out from both the breeder perspective and the genetic perspective. One thing I'd like Jason to touch on, if you could kind of describe that 10 generation improvement, for example, that chart how you were able to show that, even though it might not look like we're making as much progress on some of these traits, we're still moving toward our wider rear udders. And we do actually project toward that smaller calendar sort of thing. Yeah, sure, Jeffrey. So essentially what I did was to make sure we're going in the right direction because I don't have a crystal ball. But when I'm thinking about genetic selection and breeding, I'm thinking five to 10 years into the future. So I want to know that if we're going to perform this composite, are we going to see the improvements that we're expecting? And one thing, it's very difficult, like Jeffrey said, to moderate that stature without also taking a little bit off the gas of some of the other traits. But essentially what I did was I took the current averages of the population and then I derived a simulation that showed that we were making those improvements to where we wanted to go 10 years into the future. So based on if we, if everyone started taking the HCC right away, within 10 years, we should really get to where we want to be. Thanks for walking us through that, Jason. Before we wrap up here, could you also quickly explain what the plan is for HCC to be published initially? Just give us a little brief overview on that. Yeah, sure, Emily. So first we're going to publish the HCC composite for the current ball list by July 1st is the plan. And then we're going to roll it out as an independent trait by August 1st. All right. Now just to get to know all of you a little bit better, we're going to wrap up with five. Would you rather questions? I think just to make it easy, let's just go in the same order for every every question. So we can go Jeff, do I, Jason, Jeffrey? So to kick it off, cheddar, mozzarella cheese. Cheddar. mozzarella. Jason. Cheddar, old day alone. Extra sharp cheddar. Extra sharp, but me too, Jeffrey. Genomic or proven sire? Genomic. Proving. A little bit of both. The best available. The geneticist can't choose early morning, milking or late night barn check. For me, it's late night barn check. Boy, Jeff, we're just about to disagree on all of them. For me, it's no doubt an early morning. 10 years ago, it had been late night barn check, but I think early morning milking late night at midnight. Black and white are running white, whole steam. I love them all, but I would prefer black and white. There we go. Whatever whichever one's good, but black and white is fine with me. I like the black and white, but also I like rebels. So red and white's too. There's some interesting ones out there, everything. Which ever one scores highest grade CC. Love it. All right. Last question. Would you rather have an unlimited supply of ice cream or an unlimited supply of fitting supplies for a year? And Jeff, this question might be a little bit unfair for you. I think you might already have an unlimited supply of ice cream. There are kings of handsome. But-- Well, in terms of probably what's near and dear to my heart, ice cream would probably rank up there pretty good. Yeah, I think the fitting selection of stuff kind of evolves and changes over time. But you know what? The love of ice cream never changes. So ice cream is good. Yeah, you have an unlimited supply of ice cream there too, do I? So if it could be unlimited, it would probably be in heaven right there. But that would also be very dangerous. So-- Extra sharp chatter. Jeffrey just wants the unlimited supply of extra sharp chatter. That's perfect. Thanks for listening to this episode of Whole Scene Connections. Until next time, this is Whole Scene Connections.