When a seedstock producer discovers a portion of his herd has a problem, he is faced with a decision. As you know, he can either cull his way through it internally over time, identify the problem cows and send them to slaughter, designate those cows as terminal and let them age out raising feedlot calves, or sweep it under the rug and dump them into the general population via a "mature cow dispersal", "fall cow dispersal", or whatever the slick marketing agent wants to call the sale. These type of issues arise in all breeds from time to time and way too often the producer and the board of directors are the only ones in the know while cow men are throwing money at getting a piece of the "special dispersal". For me, these kind of decisions reveal morals and can firmly place a prefix on a list. Feet and disposition are currently an obvious issue within segments of the Angus gene pool, but I wasn't referring to either. I can't think of a reason I need to own one, but I know I won't own the prefix bing discussed.

If cow men would get into a serious discussion with a high level swine geneticist many of them would probably leave the room with more questions than answers or feeling like they just discovered the way to prosperity. White line A by light line B sent into production to be mated with White line G by dark line H. The process has been happening for a long time, but we as an industry are damn sure not following it. Animals aren't corn, but the same rules apply and there will come a time when we follow something similar. When it does switch, there won't be much reason to own anything else. If I live to see it, I'll be happy owning fewer cows. Most of which will belong to the oldest association in the country, even if they're worthless to the system. 

I would agree on the feeders covering for the flaws in the epd system and industry in general. People like Garvo and many other feeders across the country are very good at what they do when they're allowed to read a pen and roll the coal to them. When you have enough people who are capable of making very average marbling/growth cattle look like top tier genetics with very little actual traceability going on, it's easy to point and say "See, progress!". The only real progress I've been excited about in the last decade is the expanded use of grow safe efficiency testing. The epds are obviously very immature, but the actual data within groups is showing very sortable differences. If only we could get someone to commit to using fescue as the feed source.