The Select Sires Podcast
The Select Sires Podcast brings the latest topics from the largest global A.I. cooperative. Listen in as we discuss sires, genetic programs, breeding practices and much more.
The Select Sires Podcast
From Managing the Dairy Remotely to Proactive Cow Health Decisions, here's how Greta Snider Halahan Leverages Technology
Greta Snider Halahan has a unique experience as the herdsman at Singing Brook Farms. Join Ethan Haywood as he and Greta talk about technology and communication protocols that help connect her team and make important genetic decisions on the farm. With Greta working remotely, she utilizes various apps to communicate with farm team members and has been successful with communicating with Spanish speaking team members. Also through these apps her team is able to share data and information that empowers them to dig in and discover solutions. CowManager® has been a helpful tool to help Greta and her team leverage health traits and maximize management efforts to get the most out of their cows.
Welcome to The Select Sires Podcast, talking Your Success, Our Passion. Starting in three, two, one.
Ethan Haywood
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Select Sires Podcast. Today, we are excited to be here with Greta Snider Halahan, manager of all things cows at Singing Brook Farms. Greta, thank you so much for taking the time to be here with us today.
Greta Snider Halahan
Thank you. I'm looking forward to it. It's going to be fun.
Ethan Haywood
Greta, we have a lot of really cool details to dig into regarding technology, management, communication, and genetics today. But to start us off, will you tell us a little bit about Singing Brook Farms and your involvement there at the farm?
Greta Snider Halahan
Yeah, Singing Brook Farms was founded in 1950 by my grandfather, Obie Snider. Today, it is a partnership between my dad and my brother. My grandfather started with five cows, four Guernseys and a Holstein. And today we milk about 300 milking cows and raise all of our replacements. My brother does a lot of extra cropping. We're farming about 1,000 acres at the farm and he's renting another 1,000 and doing that. So there's a whole custom component to the dairy. I've had the opportunity to step in and become really involved with the cows. And I'm so thankful for the opportunity that I've had to do that. It's not something that I ever dreamed I would be able to do when I graduated from college and went into ag business and worked in the ag industry for 15 years. It's not something I thought that I would be able to do. And it's really been a joy and it's been great for my kids and my parents and all of us. I've really enjoyed it.
Ethan Haywood
And as we talk about your involvement with the farm, you had a long and very fruitful career off the farm before returning back. And part of that process did not necessarily involve you moving back into the old farmhouse there at the farm. Tell us a little bit how your management is different within that system.
Greta Snider Halahan
Well, in 2019, we had been back and forth with a couple of herdspeople. We'd had someone for a long stretch up to 2017 and we were kind of in between people several times. And what was happening is that depending on who was there, our strategies and our processes followed what they wanted to do. And so it was kind of all over the place. And then my dad, one person had left and my dad was kind of trying to carry the burden himself. And he ended up having a heart attack in February of 2019. And at that time, my husband and I talked, I was living in Lebanon and the farm is in Imler, Pennsylvania. So it's a little over two hours away just for reference. And I said, you know, they hadn't been able to do a herd check in two months because the vet was also sick. And I said, I think I could go, write things down at herd check and put it in the computer. And at least I would be able to kind of keep that ball rolling. I had never managed a herd before. I fed calves when I was a kid, I showed cows, I worked, I helped toss small squares back in the day, but I had never done any actual cow management work, breeding, anything like that. But what happened was as I went each herd check I just started asking questions, “Why do we do this this way? Why do we do this this way?” and that's what led us into getting the CowManager® tags to help with breeding. So I started helping in February of 2019 and by June of the following year so about 15 months in I was making 100% of the decisions with the herd. We put CowManager in that fall.
Ethan Haywood
And so with the implementation of CowManager, as well as changing some of your protocols and processes to fit your new vision for the dairy, what all are you utilizing CowManager technology specifically for?
Greta Snider Halahan
We use CowManager for just about, we use all of the modules in CowManager, the nutrition modules and the fertility modules. We use that in several different places. We have the CowManager tags on heifers aged from the time they're at breeding age, ready to be bred, we leave those tags in. And that was a decision, I looked at the cost of what it was to have that different heifer group covered. And really we only needed to prevent illness in one heifer in order for it to pay for itself. That one heifer that might die in the winter from respiratory. And it's been really wonderful because it's given us an indication when we have a problem in a heifer group, we start to notice it probably a week to two weeks before you would really realize how sick that group was.
Ethan Haywood
And so, since you have so much data that you're looking at on animals, no matter where they are at the farm or where you are within your life and moving around, how do you utilize that data and make the decision-making at the farm level once you see a problem?
Greta Snider Halahan
Well, let me back up really quickly and tell you, we have different buckets, I guess I'd call it, that I use. I have my daily CowManager tasks and data tasks. And then I have sort of weekly, monthly things. And then we have like those, you know, putting out the fire kind of situations. And so on a daily basis, I'm taking a look every morning at who needs to be bred. And then I'm taking a look at the sick list, seeing who's sick. And I'm also taking a look at pre-fresh and then just post-fresh. The fresh cows, I actually got into a habit when we first put it in, I make a comment on every single fresh cow, just how I think she's doing. And what that has allowed me to do is, I think, as I am writing down what's happening, I'm visually seeing what's happening, I'm communicating what's happening, I start to recognize patterns really quickly. I'll say like, I don't think she's eating enough. Is she in pain, has she retained and number one I've been able to identify pretty quickly what the problem is because when I go back and do the vet check and I've made all those comments as those cows come through I know like, oh yeah she's the one that she said wasn't eating, so I kind of have learned what the patterns look like in fresh cows on our herd and how that affects that. Pre-fresh, I also can kind of see if I'm paying attention to that. I'll pick up when a train wrecks coming because pre-fresh is one of those things where, I firmly believe if you have a fresh cow, there's no such thing as a fresh cow problem. It's always a pre-fresh, and I would submit based on how I've used CowManager that it's actually a pre-dry-off problem. I would say 80% of cows that have a problem when they freshen in told you. They told you before you even dried them off that they were going to have a problem. You just weren't looking at the correct data or listening to what the data said. So that leads me into like one of the weekly monthly things that we do. When I started, when I turned on the nutrition module and we started trying to determine how can we be the best at transitioning cows? And I would look at the cows that were having a problem and CowManager’s amazing. They have a transition alert for cows that are having problems when they're transitioning and a solid 50% of those cows every single time will twist or need to leave the herd in the first 30 days or have some other major problem. And so I said, how can we reduce that number of cows that have transition problems? We did a lot of work. One of my favorite things to do with CowManager is we do this with sick cows too. We do a treatment and I'll actually watch it hourly to see what worked and what didn't. So, we've worked with our vet on antibiotic use where we've said okay we tried this antibiotic I don't think she's really responding to anything, what can we pivot and use next and that's part of how we've identified for respiratory diseases and different things what really works where we are. With the transition cows we had tried all different kinds of things once that transition alert had come on to move that cow, to improve her. And so that's what led us to look backwards and say, “Okay, where could we have identified this first? Where was the tipping point?” So what it caused us to do was 30 days prior to any cow being dried off, we have a conversation. You know, what are the things that are going to cause her to not freshen in successfully?
Ethan Haywood
And what indicators do you look for while watching these cows freshen into your herd?
Greta Snider Halahan
For us, it looks like, does she have a really high somatic cell? Is her CowManager graph really poor? Meaning, is she ruminating and eating well below the herd average? And another piece of that is, can we see her floating? Which means she's going on off feed and on feed and on feed and off feed because that's an indicator that something's not right. So if she's doing those things, if she has a high somatic cell, is she pregnant with twins? And also if she has a really low milk production, that for us is a red flag. If her milk production is below 50 pounds, we're concerned. And then the final thing that we'll take a look at based on what those is, is she over-conditioned? And to me, those are the big risk factors. And if she has three of those risk factors, we're probably going to cull her before we dry her off. So then, that's what we were doing for a while. Now we took it back even further as we've had experience. The cool thing about patterns and as you do them, you just recognize it when you're systematically using the same procedures and looking at data the same way over and over again. Now, what we've done is when a cow freshens in, we have a conversation and say, okay, how successfully do we think she can do this two more times? And I'll get to why I say two more times. If I don't think she can calve twice successfully, I probably, we're making the decision to not breed her back at that point at all. Because the pregnancy is a risk factor. Like obviously when we get them close to dry off, that's part of the risk factor, but we knew that already. So we found that I can actually create two lactations in a fourth or fifth lactation cow that I do not breed back. I do not put the stress of a pregnancy on her. Her persistency is probably going to be really great. If I freshen her back in once, I get two lactations. So if I can't freshen her back in twice, I might as well just have the two lactations with one calf and not transition her. And that has worked really well for us. It's meant that our cull cow list looks like a bunch of cows that we call them good game cows. Like we're giving them a high five on their way out. Like good game, good game. You did a good job. Thank you. Like we put that in the comments sometimes when they leave, like, you know, good game, good job. Like it's just your time. So, that's what our cull cow list looks like. The majority of the cows at this point, they're cows that I made a decision to not breed back. And when her production either gets to the point where it's no longer competitive with the rest of the herd, or, you know, if she gets a sore foot or whatever it is, we're ready at that moment to ship her and we've already made the decision and sometimes, you know, if a cow like that gets pneumonia, we might still choose to treat her because she’s making over 100 pounds of milk and whatever it would be. It doesn’t mean their exit from the herd is going to be soon. Last year we had a cull cow on the list that was 900 and some days in milk. She was over 90 pounds of milk still. She had that persistence. So that's one of the big ways I think that has really shifted the way we look at cull cows and transition cows.
Ethan Haywood
So obviously a lot of intensive management utilizing that information from CowManager to try and give these cows the best chance that you can give them, manage small problems before they become large ones. And that's through all the different CowManager modules. In addition to that technology, what other technology do you leverage on the dairy, whether it's on the feed side or the reproductive side or the genetic side to try and help tie all of that together back to management?
Greta Snider Halahan
So we genomic test every single heifer when it hits the ground. But the genetic strategy and using that data from the genomic testing is a huge piece of what we do. We use an app called Slack and basically, it's how everybody on the team communicates and we try to put data in there. And I just have different categories. It's like calves, sick cows, fresh cows, who need to be bred, all these different categories. So every morning when I say who needs to be bred or who's sick or what needs checked on, we're putting that information in there. And the people that take care of calves, if a calf gets sick and treated, it's going in there. If a cow goes down like and it even might, there's a section where there's all different sections of that. And that's a basic technology. But that has done some pretty cool things for us as a dairy herd. I think my favorite thing that happened when we started Slack, all of the Spanish-speaking employees are also on Slack. Edgar has been with us for 15 years, he does a phenomenal job and it occurred to me that how frequently are they getting information? How do I communicate this data to them? So I had started an item on Slack that was just somatic cell and butterfat. And so I print it out and I'm just regularly putting in the somatic cell and butterfat. A good somatic cell was 150 to 250 for us for a long time, for many, many years. And our last one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, ten pickups were all under 100,000. And what happened was, as I put that information in there, if it's high, Edgar all by himself says, hey, this isn't ok. And he wants to review with the other milkers the protocols. He wants to take a deep dive into that. And I never asked him to do that. I was providing the information. And I really believe that from a communication standpoint on dairies, if we let people see what was happening, they want it to be better. Nobody that's milking cows wants the somatic cell count to be high and have more mastitis and nobody wants to deal with that. So that's been a really cool piece of it is that communication, just everyone knowing what's going on. I think in order to manage at a cow level and a lot of things that technology and all this data that scares people is you're managing at a group level and how do we know that we're making decisions that are good for every single cow? And I think what it equips you to do is you have such a good baseline when you're managing at that level that when you go down to make individual cow decisions, you have so much more information to make it in an educated way. If you're trying only to make cow-level decisions, you can't compare. It's too much information.
Ethan Haywood
Absolutely, and a lot of times we see those who are the best with technology and the best with these herd management systems, as all of this really great data is consolidated, then it all goes to one place and it's all on that person to try and cure any problems that they see in the data or try and fix any protocol issues that are associated with the data. So I think your method of communicating this data and what it means and giving access to that back out to the rest of your staff who are great cow people and are doing things cow side every day is a really cool approach that allows you to see things come full circle and why you're seeing so much success with it.
Greta Snider Halahan
Yeah, and I think it's really important for me to say my job is prominent, but it's not significant. Like I'm not the one that has to make sure that that calf gets fed. I'm not the one that makes sure that navels gets dipped. Dairy farming is a 10,000 piece puzzle and you need to do 9,050 of them right in order to be successful. And I cannot do those things. It's up to other people to do that. And so me kind of being the gatekeeper of all of that doesn't accomplish anything.
Ethan Haywood
We talk about your situation being unique with your management style, but I think it's becoming more and more common in our industry as expansions happen, as people live in different places post-COVID, and as systems get more and more sophisticated, that communication is maybe the hardest part as one of those 10,000 piece puzzles to get that piece put in just right. So it's a really cool system you have in place there.
Greta Snider Halahan
I think one of the keys with communication is, and I'm definitely guilty of not always doing this, is providing information and not solutions, and not interpretations of that data, always. I mean, there's definitely a time and place for that, and this was accidentally that I discovered this, but providing the information and saying, this is what this information means and allowing somebody else to interpret it and know what to do with it, that's far more empowering than me saying, hey, this is what this means and this is what you should do about it. Somebody that's on the farm working in that situation every day if I'm providing them information it also gives them the opportunity to give me additional information back because there's another piece of the puzzle that I'm not seeing just in the data. As much as I love all the data and to some degree I think you could run a dairy 100% that way there's also that on-farm component that is important.
Ethan Haywood
Right. The everyday human component is so important as a part of it.
Greta Snider Halahan
Sometimes every single heifer is in heat because the waterer is broken.
Ethan Haywood
Absolutely. And being able to tease those things out of the data, the people that are in that specific area is I would say a rather unique situation at this point that needs to become more common and gives you the opportunity to make full use of the staff that you've trained, worked with and acquired because they're good people.
Greta Snider Halahan
Yeah, and mental load is such a popular buzzword these days. But it takes a lot of mental load off of the employees when they know what's facing them. When they get there today, they know specifically where to go. They don't have to think about that. They know what cows look great, which ones don't. I think that it gives them the opportunity to do that. And there's this quote that says, “technology disconnects location and the skill set.” And I think that's a challenge that a lot of dairies have today is that we talk about labor. And is the labor there? Can you find labor? And technology is going to allow you to have a labor force that does not have to live where you live. And I think there's a lot of opportunity. People want different family members to be involved. And I think it's important for family members to be involved in a dairy. And technology allows someone to work a regular job and still be involved in that on some level and contribute.
Ethan Haywood
In our industry, we really like to classify dairies. They're very genetically focused or they're very focused on the management and the data such as you are. But really the dairy of the future and the dairy that you're trying to develop is one that is focused on both and views the interaction of those two things. And that's what's going to be necessary for success in the future. So tell us a little bit about what your genetic program and the ideal Holstein cow look like for you? And how does that dovetail into some of these things that you're tracking, communicating and managing?
Greta Snider Halahan
That's a really great question. And I think it's important when we talk to genetics to always recognize that not everybody agrees on what the perfect dairy cow is. And one of the conversations that I had with my dad when we first started is, I think it's important to note that long-term my goal is to give a herd to the next generation that they can do whatever they want with. So it's important for decisions that I make to make us money now, to equip the next generation to take this dairy and go whatever and do whatever they'd like to do with it. Do they want to be a commercial herd? Do they want to go back to, you know, the really high type? What do they want to do and how can I leave that door open? And then the third thing is, how can I create a herd, if we determined to sell, that it's worth something, that it's something that somebody else wants. And so we are focusing both on what people would consider commercial traits and holding fast to some of those type traits at the same time. So I'd love to have a barn full of 88 and 90 point cows that have really strong components and are blowing the doors off the milk production. And that's my goal. They're going to need to be a more moderately sized animal. We're milking twice a day on mattresses with sawdust. And because of the age of my brother and myself and the kids and everything, we're kind of at a standstill where we're not going to choose for them where they're going to go. If Ross and Greta are the end of the road, Ross and Greta are the end of the road. If we're not, I want them to be working. When I worked with manure systems and sand separation systems, I got a feel for how when you design your manure system, that's a very you're driving the bus for a long time with those investments. I'm building a herd that can thrive in the setting that we have. So I guess to answer your question, we're holding, there's a lot of indexes out there I know as a herd as an HHP$® (Herd Health Profit Dollars®), when I select bulls and Michelle Cornman does an amazing job with me to do this. We are whatever index you want to take we're starting at the top of that index is our pool that we're choosing from, but then I get really specific really quickly and we're pulling down. I will not budge on udders and feet if I can help it. We're going to maintain that. If I had the best udders and best feet and legs in America, that would be good enough, even if they were small little hot dog cows. I could live and die on that hill. But those I won't budge on. We want to have really good components and that's something we've been focused on. We want milk and we want functionality. And I think when people talk about genomics and genetic numbers, where we start to get hung up as a group is the interpretation of the health traits and how significant all of these things are. Because I think type people and commercial people across the board would agree that we all breed based on the feet and legs, Udder Composite and final score on Type, right? Everybody believes that those traits work and that you can breed based on those because all of the bulls that we're using, whether you're on the show side or we'll call it the commercial, genomic side, you're all paying attention to those things. And we know that those are heritable. We know if you use a bull that has three points on udder, you're probably going to get a nice uddered heifer if it wasn't a complete disaster to begin with. I mean, that's just how it works. That's elementary. But I think the health traits are where you get bogged down. And I'm here to say that the numbers don't lie. If what you select for is what you will eventually get, if you're managing properly. If you have a cow that has tremendous milk and butterfat potential and fertility potential, and you do a disaster of raising her as a calf, then she's going to be a disaster. Genetic potential does not equal outcome, but you want to do whatever you can do on all of those 10,000 pieces to move the train in the direction you're trying to go, and I want to have a leg up in fertility. I would like to have a leg up in health traits, that she's not prone to lameness, that she's not prone to all of those things. And from a management level, am I doing everything that I can to prevent that? Yes. But if you take a cow that has excellent health traits and one that has really poor health traits, I'm going to ask for the one with excellent health traits every time because I know out of 100 times, I'm going to be more successful with her the most. That's how it works.
Ethan Haywood
Yeah, and I love your point that both in the management and the genetic selection, none of it's an accident. Your future is what you decide that you're going to make for yourself. And that also plays into the actual management of your repro program, selecting who you're going to breed to what, in addition to the actual bull selection. Will you tell us a little bit about what services you utilize through Premier Select Sires for that program and how that's figured on your farm?
Greta Snider Halahan
We work with Michelle Cornman really closely. I work with Michelle very closely. God bless Michelle. And I am making a list, first of all, to give her that is who I'd like to breed. And I'm probably going into a new topic, to sexed semen and who's going to get Angus. We started utilizing that several years ago. I couldn't even tell you now. So we're doing mostly sexed semen and Angus. In some of the cows, we are doing some conventional semen. If I'm going to try to get a second or third calf out of that particular cow, but I'm selecting, I'm sending her that list and then she is doing the matings and she and I sort of have our process that we go through of how to select those bulls. She sends me an initial list based on the parameters, it might be 30 bulls based on the parameters that we've kind of decided. So there's nobody with an Udder Composite of +0.50 on our list, for example. And then I take a look at those bulls and I go through and we decide together who are the next ones that we're going to do. So we're utilizing that service and it's working. The best thing that I can tell you is that the results that we're seeing are the results that we've been working on getting. We also are classifying. And so this next time around is going to be the first time I'm actually able to pull the classification numbers into this data as well. I've heard mixed bags on this too, like, well, why do you classify? What's the point? And to me, that's just another data point. So if I have two cows equal on paper genetically, and one is an 86 point two year old and one is an 80 point two-year-old. And I'm saying who gets the Angus and who gets the sexed semen? I have better data now. I have more information than I did before. That's how we're doing that. It's interesting how holding traits, Michelle, I won't say the bull names, but two times ago when we classified, we just so happened we had a really, really, really high Type bull that we had maybe a dozen heifers that were classified and then we had another bull that was very commercial driven and we had again held tight on the feet and legs and the udder component and those heifers as two-year-olds, those two groups actually classified almost identically because we had almost 100% Very Good udders on that bull that we had sifted through and said where's that udder bull where where are those traits that we can hold tight on and I thought that kind of surprised me. Because I knew that this one group, they weren't flashy cows at all. They were very commercial, but I knew they had fantastic udders. And so that's kind of what we're holding tight to.
Ethan Haywood
Yeah, no, I love the approach of being very specific about how you're using animals, whether it is how you're treating them throughout the system, how you're breeding them, you're picking what this specific animal needs and being very strategic and purposeful about that. And really having the data at your hands is the only way to be able to do that efficiently across your whole herd. So it's incredible to see how you're tying all of those different data points together.
Greta Snider Halahan
We also actually, not every day depending on, I call my dad every morning and say this is who needs to be bred and pretty frequently, almost every day not every day I actually pull the genomics up of every single animal at that time. If I have three options I can look from the genomically what her weakest functional trait is and I'll say you know what this is my first pick on that one. So I think just because you're managing with data and all of that doesn't mean that you're not meeting the cow on a cow level. It just makes it so much easier to do.
Ethan Haywood
Right, you're doing it so precisely is the goal and to be able to do it from wherever you are in the world, wherever that cow is in her lactation to do it precisely, right?
Greta Snider Halahan
Yeah, you can do it, but you have to have the systems in place. In order to have precision, you have to have the systems in place at a top level or it just doesn't work or you're, we trick ourselves sometimes. And you better believe that we have cow families where I fudge the rules for them.
Ethan Haywood
Everybody's got to have a favorite.
Greta Snider Halahan
Everyone has those. And my thing that I always laugh about is, you know, I clearly do a lot of analyzing and data and thinking and choosing and getting down to the numbers. And I'll go up to the breeding pen and I'll look at a heifer and I’ll say, you look just like your mother. Like they are their mother's daughters and that’s where, you know you'll have a group of cows where you'll have a cow where it doesn't matter what you throw in her she's going to have a winner as a heifer, a successful, that they just do and then you're going to have ones, we have one or two cow families and they're on the beef list now where on paper they look great but they're always a disaster. I don't know why they're always a disaster. The numbers don't say that but that family is always a disaster. So there are exceptions to the rules, there are. But man, like it makes it easier to recognize. I think it makes a decision for me easier when I have a cow family and I know I follow the rules.
Ethan Haywood
No, and that makes sense. You know, making sure that both genetically and management wise, they fit within your system and you can figure out how those numbers best translate to your actual system. Jumping into that and to move back, health traits have become a larger focus for you. Obviously, both genetic and management prevention are opportunity number one to try and reduce health incidences within your herd. Whether it is management-wise or genetically, which health traits are you focusing on trying to prevent from dealing with later on as a cow goes through her lactation or her freshening?
Greta Snider Halahan
From a genetic standpoint, respiratory issues, lameness issues, and mastitis issues are the ones that I focus on the most. If we're honest, I would think probably across the board that udders and feet are why we lose. And after that, fertility, obviously, that's really important. She needs to be able to have calves, but we select for those. You have to know like on our farm, we have a mastitis strain that when we get it, it is a battle. It is a battle to get her well again, to get her functioning, the cows go down with it. So that's something that I have to hold tight to because that's an area where we frequently lose despite our best efforts. And so with the health traits, that's a big one. Also, I despise twins, so I'm always paying attention to the twinning number. And I could record a podcast on twinning, not that anyone would listen to it. But I think that there's not a lot of data out there on what twinning actually costs a cow. But if you did the math on it, I think you'd be astounded because you're like at the milk loss, because a lot of times you're not seeing twins in first calf heifers. So the milk loss, you're not, if she's having a second or third she's having those twins in the lactation where she should have been killing it but it doesn't look that bad because she was more mature. I think if we could really put a number on it it would have astounded us and I think that what it does to their immune system, they're never the same so I'm pretty hard and fast on that if I can be.
Ethan Haywood
You're measuring a lot of key traits that are hot topics across the industry, and many of these traits are parts of the composition of Select Sires’ Herd Health Profit Dollars, or HHP$. When you look at a composite index or selection index such as Herd Health Profit Dollars within your herd what trends and differences do you see?
Greta Snider Halahan
Michelle actually put some numbers together for me. So I have like the bottom and the top 25% of the HHP$ and how they perform. We've gotten what we selected for is basically the theme you know like the top 25% of heifers are outperforming. The adjusted 305 milk on those is 31,197 pounds and it's 29,000 pounds for the bottom 25%. If you look at fat and protein combined, it's over 2,200 pounds on the top 25%, and it is over, it's 2,031 pounds on the bottom 25%. So that's 200 pounds. And this is in first calf heifers. If you look at somatic cell, the somatic cell is a point better in the top 25% of heifers than what we selected for. And this is on their final score because they're all genomically tested. So this is based on that data. If you look at what we've been selecting for, for somatic cell like these all follow. If you look at breeding, the bottom 25% is at a 22-23% pregnancy rate. The top 25% is over 26%. You could go through and look at every single one of those. The numbers follow what we've been selecting for, and while you're always going to find a top cow on paper in the bottom and a bottom cow on paper on the top, as a group, they perform exactly how the numbers say they should. So I hope that that gives confidence to someone that's saying, hey, can I really trust these indexes and everything? For sure you can. You definitely need to pay attention and don't just select on the index. You need to know what traits you need because there's a lot of variety out there and you know, if a bull has +1,000 HHP$ and you picked every bull that was in that range there's still a lot going on and all of those things so you definitely need to know what it is you're looking for but you get what you select eventually.
Ethan Haywood
Yeah, there's a lot of different ways that animals get to those high index numbers, the ways that they can get there, whether they're doing it through health, through fertility, through type, through production. And as you have mentioned, those quartile analysis are really my favorite way to look at the genetics of a herd that are all in the same management structure. And remembering that genetics is a population science, so we don't just want to look at the genomics on one animal and compare to one other one, but to look at these quartiles of our animals and to get that data feedback from your own herd really validates the selection process that you're going through and helps guide your selection for the next generation, as well as how are the genetics overlapping with the management is fantastic to see.
Greta Snider Halahan
Yeah, I mean, I can say that we're almost six years in now, which I don't know how that happened. And we're accomplishing things from a production standpoint that we wouldn't have believed were possible as a group. And it's because the difference between the top and the bottom is getting more narrow. We always had some really high producers, but as that gap closes, the whole bar is getting raised. That's the goal. That's the goal with everything is you think who your very best cow is from a fertility, production, type, like who my very favorite cow is, I would like a barn full of those. And we all like to fill every single stall with a cow like that. And all of these things put together using the indexes, the tools that Select has, the management, the teamwork, all of that, it inches us closer to that every day. And the closer you get to that, it's pretty cool, cumulative effect of all the cows moving towards that ideal animal.
Ethan Haywood
It's really cool for us to see all of those pieces come together in this big puzzle for you. And we're excited to continue to see what you and the team at Singing Brook Farms does for the future. Greta, thank you so much for your time and all of your insight today. We're excited to visit with you again soon in the future and see what's new in the pipeline for your team.