Reading the AgBoost Wheels: A Complete Guide
Jorgensen Land & Cattle ·
If you've ever seen one of those colorful wheel graphics attached to a JLC bull and weren't quite sure what you were looking at, here's the full breakdown — from the raw data problem AgBoost solves, to the four wheels you'll actually encounter, to how to use them on a whole group of animals at once.
The Problem: 70 Columns of Numbers
A raw Ideal Beef Evaluation (IBE) data extract can run 70 columns of numbers. That's not usable for most people — and as Nick Jorgensen points out, most cattlemen didn't get into this business because they wanted to sit in front of a spreadsheet.
That's the problem AgBoost, a partner Jorgensen Land & Cattle brought on board around 2020, was built to solve. Every animal JLC tests — six to seven thousand a year — runs through AgBoost, which normalizes all of it onto a simple one-to-ten scale based on percentile ranking and displays it visually as a wheel. Whether you're looking at one individual, a small group, a genetic partner's herd, or the whole operation, it all runs through the same tool.
The Overall Wheel
The first wheel you'll typically see on an individual animal is the Overall Wheel. A few things to know about how to read it:
The number in the middle is an unweighted score across every trait JLC tests for — currently 17 traits, none weighted more heavily than another. Five represents an average animal. A bull scoring 6.2, for example, sits roughly 12% above average across the board.
The width of each pie slice represents heritability — how much a trait can realistically be moved through genetic selection alone. A trait like fertility is barely visible on the wheel, not because it doesn't matter, but because it's genuinely difficult to move through genomics. A trait like ribeye area, docility, or dry matter intake takes up much more of the wheel, because it's highly heritable and can be moved more quickly. Width has nothing to do with how much a trait weighs into the center score — it's purely about how movable that trait is.
The depth of each slice is simply the animal's actual score on that trait — touching the innermost circle means a 1, touching the outer blue ring (which represents 100% breed composition) means a 10.
Because the Overall Wheel is unweighted, no one at JLC has decided for you that weaning weight matters more than fertility. That decision is yours. If dry matter intake matters most to your operation, the wheel tells you which bulls deliver it — regardless of where they land on any other trait. It's also worth knowing that it's genuinely hard to score above a 7 on the Overall Wheel; antagonistic traits like dry matter intake and feed conversion often work against each other, so most animals — even very good ones — cluster somewhere between a 4 and a 6.
The Three Weighted Index Wheels
Beyond the Overall Wheel, AgBoost generates three purpose-built index wheels for JLC — each weighted differently to answer a different breeding question. The key difference from the Overall Wheel: on these three, the width of each slice represents the trait's weight in the index, not its heritability.
JVIM — Jorgensen Versatile Index for Maternal. This is the flagship index, whether you're picking bulls or selecting females. It's weighted toward the traits that matter most for building a productive cow herd: weaning weight and fertility carry the most weight, followed by yearling weight, milk, IMF, birth weight, docility, dry matter intake, scrotal circumference (a fertility proxy), rib area, and rib fat. Roughly 75% of the total weighting comes from the top six traits alone. If you're trying to build maternal performance the way $W once served as a proxy for it in Angus genetics, this is that tool, rebuilt from JLC's own data.
JVIH — Jorgensen Versatile Index for Heifers. Same trait list as JVIM, but weighted very differently — about a third of the index comes from birth weight alone. This is explicitly a bull selection tool for breeding heifers, not a tool for sorting commercial females. Select females using JVIH, and you're setting yourself up for light calves and light weaning weights — which may be exactly what some operations want, but it's worth knowing that's the tradeoff before you make that call.
JVIT — Jorgensen Versatile Index for Terminal. The simplest of the three, built around just five traits: yearling weight, IMF, intake, and ribeye. It's a deliberately narrow, "KISS" model built for producers running a strictly terminal program — buying replacements elsewhere and breeding everything terminal. Build a cow herd off this index alone, though, and you'll give up meaningful ground on maternal traits.
One pattern worth noting: because these three indexes are weighted, they show far more spread than the Overall Wheel. It's common to see individual animals score a perfect 10 on JVIH or JVIM even when their Overall score sits closer to average — a reminder that "average overall" and "elite for a specific job" aren't contradictions. They're just different questions being asked of the same underlying data.
Reading a Wheel for a Group, Not Just One Animal
The wheels aren't limited to single animals — the same visualization works for a whole selected group. Pull up a set of, say, 21 bulls, and AgBoost combines them into one group wheel. You'll notice individual standout animals converge toward a more balanced center once they're viewed as a group — which is exactly the point. A trait distribution chart alongside the wheel shows the same information spread out, with heat-map circles showing how many animals in the group land at each score.
That combined view is where the wheels become a real decision-making tool. Spot a weak point in the group — say, a maternal milk average of only 2.6 — and you can filter the entire group by a minimum acceptable score on just that trait, narrowing the list in a few clicks rather than manually comparing dozens of individual spreadsheets. Add a second constraint, and the list narrows further, often while measurably lifting the group's overall score. The same filtering process works whether you're sorting 21 bulls or 400 heifers.
The Bottom Line
Four wheels, one shared visual language: the Overall Wheel shows where an animal or group stands without anyone's thumb on the scale, and JVIM, JVIH, and JVIT each apply a specific, purpose-built weighting to answer a specific breeding question — maternal performance, heifer-safe bull selection, or terminal growth and carcass merit. Once you know what the width and depth of each slice actually represents, a wheel that once looked like decoration becomes the fastest way to read 70 columns of data at a glance.