Alta Advantage Showcase - Response from Paul Meyer
This message was sent to us from Paul Meyer, Alta Genetics Inc. Marketing Manager, Products & Programs. It is in response to Karen Knutsen”””””””’’s blog posting on June 22nd about her trip to the recent Alta Advantage Showcase. Thanks, Paul, for your kind words and for the further information regarding the Advantage® program and its pursuit to eliminate as much as possible the errors in a bull”””””””’’s proof due to mis-ID!
Thanks for the great story Karen - and it was great to have you “on the bus”, as it were, for a day. The Alta Advantage® Showcase, New York tour concluded Friday with tremendous feedback from those who traveled from afar to take part. Many of the comments do harken to the marketing line we use to promote the tour: “Seeing is Believing”. Many who have taken part both now and in the inaugural tour last October at World Dairy Expo time tell us that they have heard about Alta”””””””’’s Advantage® program, but until they see it first hand, it”””””””’’s hard to understand why it is different. After all, these bulls get a proof much like any other bull.
I did want to make a clarification to your story however, and it relates to the typical mis-ID level that we know applies to US testing schemes, and in particular as herd sizes grow. The Advantage® program combines the obvious benefits of larger contemporary groups that exist in large dairies with the counterpoint of DNA testing to deal with the inaccuracy that results from mis-ID. It is the best of both worlds and offers a product that appeals to many growing, progressive styled dairies. The typical US mis-ID level is believed to be in the 25% range (validated by our own internal testing). Our Advantage® herds typically do experience a significantly better score at just 8% mis-ID, but it would be wrong to conclude that this error is included in Alta Advantage® tested sire proofs. The reason is because of DNA testing. All marketing sires proven in Advantage® have a 100% accurate sire ID level. Any daughters that fail a DNA parentage test are either corrected when supporting data makes it clear where the error resides, or failing that, have sire ID status changed to “Unknown”. Typically 2-3% of the errors can be corrected, while the remaining 5% are removed from the proof. The ironic thing about this process is that in improving accuracy by removing animals that fail a parentage test, we are actually lowering the published reliability level for the sire! We know that in the long run, this investment in accuracy will be rewarded with increased stability of proof information over time.
Again, thanks for including our tour in your blog and for taking part for a day. We appreciate Holstein World”””””””’’s interest in covering this story.
Best regards to all HW bloggers from Alta!
Paul