When comparing bulls, a larger maternal calving ease EPD indicates that a bull's daughters will calve with a higher percentage of unassisted births. Calving ease EPDs should be used in concert with birth weight EPDs as another tool to use for avoiding dystocia problems in the cowherd. The front of breed sire summaries should be consulted to interpret the meaning of calving ease EPDs for each breed. Along with EPDs for the various traits, accuracy values associated with each EPD are also available. These accuracy values range from 0 to 1.0.
High accuracies are indicative of animals that have a large number of progeny records.
The accuracy level also gives us an indication of how much the EPD may change. Bull A and Bull B have equivalent birth weight EPDs. There is a chance that the EPD for Bull B is considerably higher than what is reported. An accuracy of .90 would be typical of a well-proven bull, whereas an accuracy of .25 would be common for a young bull. Implications of accuracy relate to associated risk.