E626 The $1,300 Gap Between the Bull You Want and the Bull You Should Buy

A 96th-percentile LPI bull can rank 31st for Health and Welfare. Pro$ puts that gap at $1,300 a daughter in lifetime profit. Most producers never look.

The Bullvine Podcast runs the barn math on Canada's 20 most-used Holstein sires against Lactanet's six new subindexes — the analysis that found bulls sitting at the 96th percentile overall and the 31st for health, behind roughly a quarter of registered calves born in 2025. Murray Hunt built Canada's first composite sire ranking index in 1970. Fifty-six years on, he says the tools finally exist and nobody's opening them.

What You'll Learn

• Why a composite index averages away the traits that empty your stalls
• How Health and Welfare carrying just 8% of LPI hides a below-average bull
• The two-minute Floor Rule that keeps hole-carrying sires off your main list
• Why five of six subindexes above the 50th percentile beats a top-10 ranking
• What 60 lameness cases cost a 300-cow herd at the low end of the range
• Where private indexes like DWP$ belong — and where they don't

Top-quartile sires retain 7.4% more daughters at six years, worth +$1,300 in lifetime profit per daughter. Bottom-quartile sires run −$1,200. US DWP$ validation across five herds put top-quartile lameness 15.9 points lower and mastitis 14.9 points lower. On a 300-cow herd at 20% lameness incidence, even the low $90-per-case figure is $5,400 walking out on bad feet every year. You buy those weaknesses by the daughter, year after year.

Full article and sources: https://www.thebullvine.com/genetics-breeding/lpi-subindexes-health-gap/ Subscribe for straight-talking dairy analysis. Share this with a producer who needs it.