Evaluation of partial body weight for predicting body weight and average daily gain in growing beef cattle

Information on body weight and average daily gain (ADG) of growing animals is key not only to monitoring performance, but also for use in genetic evaluations in the pursuit of achieving sustainable genetic gain. Accurate calculation of ADG, however, requires serial measures of body weight over at least 70 days. This can be resource intensive and thus alternative approaches to predicting individual animal ADG warrant investigation. One such approach is the use of continuously collected individual animal partial body weights. The objective of the present study was to determine the utility of partial body weights in predicting both body weight and ADG; a secondary objective was to deduce the appropriate length of test to determine ADG from partial body weight records. The dataset used consisted of partial body weights, predicted body weights and recorded body weights recorded for 8,972 growing cattle from a range of different breed types in 35 contemporary groups. The relationships among partial body weight, predicted body weight and recorded body weight at the beginning and end of the performance test were determined and calculated ADG per animal from each body weight measure were also compared. On average, partial body weight explained 90.7 ± 2.0% of the variation in recorded body weight at the beginning of the postweaning gain test and 87.9 ± 2.9% of the variation in recorded body weight at its end. The GrowSafe proprietary algorithm to predict body weight from the partial body weight strengthened these coefficients of determination to 95.1 ± 0.9% and 94.9 ± 0.8%, respectively. The ADG calculated from the partial body weight or from the predicted body weight were very strongly correlated (r = 0.95); correlations between these ADG values with those calculated from the recorded body weights were weaker at 0.81 and 0.78, respectively. For some applications, ADG may be measured with sufficient accuracy with a test period of 50 days using partial body weights. The intended inference space is to individual trials which have been represented in this study by contemporary groups of growing cattle from different genotypes.