The Select Sires Podcast

SMS Combines People and Technology to Achieve Unique Herd Goals

• Select Sires • Season 2 • Episode 18

Share episode

For over 50 years, dedicated Select Mating Service® (SMS) consultants have used research, computerized analysis and cow knowledge to build better herds around the world. In this episode, Brian Coyne takes a deep dive into the innovative technology backing the program and the people leveraging the tools.

SMS is intuitive and built to work for dairies of all sizes and with differing herd information. Consultants around the world have the cow-side experience needed to ask the right questions and create a customized plan to exceed set herd goals.

Ethan Haywood

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Select Sires Podcast. I'm your host, Ethan Haywood, and today we are very excited to be joined by Brian Coyne, Manager of Applied Genetic Strategies from Select Sires. Brian, thanks so much for taking the time to be here with us today. 

Brian Coyne

Absolutely. Glad to be here. 

Ethan Haywood

Brian, we're gonna dig into some of the mechanics and advantages of using SMS® or the Select Mating Service® here today, but let's start out. Tell us a little bit about yourself. You're coming to us from Wisconsin today, and what is your pathway here at Select Sires looked like thus far? 

Brian Coyne

I have done a little bit of everything with Select Sires. When I first got out of college, I was a herd manager and then kind of transitioned my way into the AI industry by breeding cows for a short period. And then I was hired at the former East Central Select Sires to be a genetic consultant there. So I started mating cows there and used a few of our other tools as well. But I also got the opportunity to do some relief breeding as well driving the sales truck here and there. And yeah, one of my more fortunate opportunities was going to YDLI, the Young Dairy Leaders Institute, put on by the Holstein Foundation, where I met Mark Chamberlain from Select Sires, who was the head of the IT department at that point. And after a short conversation with him, he told me that they were looking to expand the IT department at Select Sires, and they were looking for people to come in and potentially help design programs but provide some guidance on what it was that we needed in the field and so I took up the opportunity there to join Select Sires at that time and was hired as a business analyst in the IT department and spent the next four years pretty focused on the SMS program designing that program, doing a lot of testing for that program. And then ultimately that led to the training, training users all over the United States on how to use that program. Since then we've had many, many different versions of the program that we've released or updates to the program that we've released. And so I've been working very closely with our development team as well as our support team here at Select Sires to implement the releases of those updates and all the training that came with that and since we released that program I've now jumped into several other things. So I helped design our new bull search tool. I helped design our pedigree index calculator tool. I worked very closely on the StrataGEN® tool as well. And then here recently over the last year or so, I've transitioned into my new role, which you said is the manager of applied genetic strategies. And that's where I'm working a little more closely with our genetic services support team, helping support the use of all of our programs internationally, and also took on some more training activities internationally, as well as managing all of our global genomic testing partnerships. So I work with Zoetis and Labogena to try to get more customers around the world to start genomic testing their females. And we're working with both of those companies to try to make sure that all of the data that we need is available and easy to access, and handle most of the training on how to use all of their web portals. But that's been an exciting experience for me to get to work kind of dip my toe into a different part of our industry and see what genomics is all about. 

Ethan Haywood

Well, it sounds like you wear an awful lot of hats and that's ideal because that's what the dairy and beef industries are all about is wearing many hats and excelling at many different things. And it's amazing how IT and technology are such a core part of our business and our industry today. At its core and its basic inception, tell us a little bit about what is the Select Mating Service? What does it provide to producers and how does it go about doing that?

Brian Coyne

SMS is, like you said, Select Mating Service. It is a tool that takes in female information and when combined with bulls that have been selected through a myriad of different ways, that program will protect females against haplotypes and recessives and try to promote genetic diversity from an inbreeding perspective, as well as, trying to find the best bull to mate to specific females. 

Ethan Haywood

And so as it digests female data or that comes out of a herd management software or genomics that are located in a different program, what information does it have the ability to utilize? Do my females have to be genomic tested to use this information or what can it utilize on a herd to herd basis? 

Brian Coyne

Yeah, that's one of the pieces that we're really proud of with SMS is that essentially, as long as you have a CSV or Excel format for your data, which even if you don't, we can help create that and SMS can take that data in. So right now domestically, here, we are seeing more and more of our customers using genomic data. But internationally, the majority of our customers are just using pedigree average information. But we can take information commonly we see DairyComp, PCDART, Dairy Plus, Dairy Plan, I think, is another one. AFI, all of these different systems, BoviSync will create a CSV file and will import that data into SMS. And the system is set up inherently to use the most reliable data available. So even if you only have genomic information on a part of your herd or if for some reason you don't have a full genomic profile the system will calculate parent average information and can simply substitute that information in where genomic data is missing and the other big thing that our genetic consultants will do is go out and physically observe your cows and score them based on their linear traits. And that is also very easy to import that data and use that. So you're getting the most reliable and accurate data possible when trying to make those mating recommendations. 

Ethan Haywood

So the system has an incredible capacity for taking in data from multiple sources and making a lot of decisions. How do you go about making the genetic goals that it is working to achieve on a farm by farm basis? 

Brian Coyne

Yeah, I think that's an area that we are trying to promote at this very moment, but we call that process discovery. And so that's a process or the step in the process where our consultants, whether it's the first time that we're meeting with this customer or whether they've been a regular customer for a number of years, we want to go out and make sure that we're addressing the important needs of each customer. So we'll go through a process of asking a number of questions to try to understand who are the best cows in your herd? What is important to you from an inventory perspective? Are you trying to grow your herd? Are you trying to plan for some changes with government regulations, whatever it may be, we're trying to understand what the goals are of each customer. Who do they sell their milk to? Do they get bonuses for certain things? And all of these things can factor into the decisions that we make from a mating perspective. And so again, we use that process of discovery to try to identify what are the challenges right now in the herd? What are the opportunities and what are the goals that we want to set for this herd? Then from there we'll take that information whether we're going to be ranking females we might use that information to select an index to rank the females on and determine who to breed to sexed semen or who to beef and ultimately make decisions on which bulls that we're going to select to use in the mating program and make mating recommendations. 

Ethan Haywood

And you work with a really great group of consultants, both here domestically as well as internationally, to do that discovery process. And in that process, you can also interface SMS with some other programs for some other advantages. What other information are you trying to leverage from other programs to overall create a mating plan for a herd? 

Brian Coyne

Both internationally and domestically, we have a number of tools that whether they're genetic consultants or reproductive consultants, we have a number of tools that those consultants are using in order to try to create breeding strategies and accomplish the goals of each customer. So one that comes to mind really quickly is OGP or optimal genetic pathways or the genetic strategy calculator tool. Both of them are going to help figure out how many animals we need to breed to sexed semen, how many animals we need to breed to beef or conventional semen. And those will align with the goals of the customer. So if the customer is trying to grow, we obviously will breed more females or try to get more replacements created. But SMS was set up with those strategies in mind. So we can take the output of whatever those tools create those progressive breeding strategies and apply them directly into the SMS tool. So we create groups of females based off whatever those breeding plans are. And then that will in turn help calculate how many units of semen we need, where those units should be applied to which females. And so the systems work very streamlined together. Additionally, we don't see it as much here in the United States but outside of the U.S. there's less information readily available on pedigree index information so we have a tool called the pedigree index calculator which allows customers to view all of the parent average trait information for their females and that information can be brought into SMS as well as part of the mating program. We also have a tool called StrataGEN, which helps us in most cases where we see that used, this helps us narrow down the list of bulls that should be used. And that program will generate lists of bulls that will work from an inbreeding perspective, but it also ranks them in order of the index that you've chosen to try to accomplish the goals that each customer has. So we do see some of our users using StrataGEN to try to narrow down that list of bulls and really be sure that the bulls they're using in the mating program are not only going to run from an inbreeding perspective on that herd, but also help them accomplish their genetic goals. 

Ethan Haywood

And so the advantage of using a system like this where you can do individualized matings, no matter the size of the herd, no matter the complexity of the program that you're trying to achieve, it's all about doing it accurately and doing it conveniently. How do you make that output convenient for a producer to utilize when it comes time to thaw a straw out of the tank and go breed a cow or heifer? 

Brian Coyne

SMS has a number of different ways that we can kick out mating recommendation information. So, traditionally we would use what we call a sire summary and a breeding guide that listed the bulls and the number of units and then listed each. The breeding guide lists each female and who the three recommended bulls or up to three recommended bulls are for that female. One of the other things that SMS does is we can create files that can be imported into DairyComp or BoviSync or PCDART or other programs as well. But that makes it really convenient so that when a customer is used to using DairyComp on their phone or creating a list and printing that off in the morning to go breed, all of that mating information is readily available within the program. And there doesn't have to be any second guessing. Nowadays we tend to see those matings are run more frequently so we're getting updated matings on a consistent basis and one of the nice things about SMS is that you can choose to only mate your open females or you can choose to mate your whole herd and what that does is it helps make those mating recommendations more accurate by only aligning the sires with the females that are available at this current point in time. 

Ethan Haywood 

Is there really a size and scale limitation to who can utilize SMS and some of these other programs? Can you scale it up to whatever the industry needs? 

Brian Coyne

For the most part, we do not have a size limit within the SMS program, but it is definitely optimized for herds that I would say are less than 10,000 total females, which would be the vast majority of our herds. But I know just this week we've been running a herd that has 20,000 females in it, and that tends to take a little bit longer for the system to process because there is a massive amount of information in there that it has to generate in order to create those mating recommendations but we do not have any inherent data limitations on that program. We regularly do testing on herds of over 30,000 females so we know that those will work in that program as well, but from a scaling perspective we typically will recommend that if you don't need to mate all of your females, when you really get into that large size, if we really focus on just our open females or the the heifers that are eligible to be bred within the next couple months, that can speed up the time of processing that data. But overall there are no data limitations. 

Ethan Haywood

The other huge component to some of these genetic programs that we have to offer at the local level are the people that are involved in the genetic decision making and consulting. You know, this sounds like a really complex program, but what do I as a producer have to do and provide versus what is my genetic consultant assisting me with? 

Brian Coyne

So from a producer perspective, I think it's very easy to use this program. Like I said, we have reports and we have files that we can output that make it very easy to see and interpret who you should be breeding to which bull and when. The biggest thing that we ask is to be open and honest with our consultants so that they can custom fit the recommendations that they make to you and your operation. Like I talked about in discovery a little bit earlier, giving our consultants that time and that effort and honesty in what it is that you're trying to accomplish can be very helpful again, so that they can make the right recommendations. But from a consultant perspective we definitely made it an effort to try to make this program efficient and effective from a consultant perspective. But it's a matter of gathering the data on the farm, or logging in view a team viewer, or however they get that herd information, bringing that information into the program. There are typically some decisions that are going to be made about which bulls are going to be used in the program. But once they get everything set up and get the unit set in the right place, the system does most of the work for them. And all they have to do is create the reports at the end and either mail those out or email that information back to the herd owner and it's available for use. 

Ethan Haywood

It's really cool that the system can be applied in so many ways. It can really be applied on a lot of different operations. Where all is the system being used within the US or within the world and what producers are making use of it now? 

Brian Coyne 

So currently we have about 135 consultants who are using this program around the world. About 100 of those are here in the United States and Canada. And then we have another 30 consultants roughly who are using that program in 17 other countries around the world. The reason that we are using that in those 17 countries right now is because we really want to use that program where it's most effective. And there are many places in the world where we have different bull sources who are not run through the U.S. proof system. And so that system right now runs on the U.S. proof system. And if we have females in the herd that are in their pedigree, they have bulls that are not run through the U.S. system, then it's much more difficult for us to get an accurate mating recommendation on those females. So we have targeted markets where they do use a lot of U.S. genetics. But those 17 countries are using the program very effectively and if you're outside of one of those 17 countries, we've set up some criteria. So if you have specific herds who are using mostly U.S. bulls or U.S. proof information, then we will have people in our genetic services team who can run those matings on the SMS mating program for you. 

Ethan Haywood

Brian, if I am a producer who may or may not be buying semen from Select Sires, but I want to be able to utilize this information, I'm making less females because the price of beef on dairy calves is so high. And I want to be very strategic about how I'm going through and utilizing and producing replacements. How do I get in contact with someone to potentially leverage this information? 

Brian Coyne

Great question. The honest answer is just talk to somebody who has that Select Sires on their chest, and they will probably be able to hook you up with someone who can run this program, especially if you're here domestically. The program is very widespread throughout the U.S. and essentially all of our consultants are using the SMS program. So whether it's your salesperson or a consultant that stops in on a regular or semi-regular basis, all of those people can help you get attached to somebody who can run this mating program. If you are an international producer and you're not working closely with the World Wide Sires team there, then you can contact myself or one of your sales reps from World Wide Sires and they will be able to get you set in the right direction so that you can utilize the SMS mating program. 

Ethan Haywood

Well, fantastic, Brian. Thank you so much for your time here today. We look forward to seeing how this system will continue to evolve and all of the females that will continue to touch within the world dairy system. You spend a lot of time traveling the world and the U.S. working with different producers, working with different consultants. What is some advice you would give to someone who's thinking about making the jump to add this precision breeding tactic into their dairy system? 

Brian Coyne

Yeah, I think the biggest advice that I would have is just to utilize the resources that you have available. And what I mean by that is utilize your Select Sires consultant. We take a great effort here at Select Sires to try to keep all of our consultants informed about what is happening with these tools, what tools are available, how to use these tools to custom fit your recommendations to each of your customers. I would lean on them. I would say, ask questions, give them the time to ask you questions and understand how they can help you. And have faith in that team because I feel very strongly that we have an extremely knowledgeable team around the world. And our goal as we're training people is to continue to instill that knowledge and share that knowledge with others. And so I would recommend that you and your Select Sires consultants for all of your needs. 

Ethan Haywood 

Well, thank you so much for that advice and for all the hard work that you, the IT teams, and genetic consulting teams do around the world to help our producers be successful. Thank you so much for tuning in and listening to this episode of The Select Sires Podcast, and we'll talk to you next time.