Determination of elite or high-ranking grade status was based on a two-stage screening procedure. The first-stage screening criteria for eligibility were:

• Management groups included lactations of at least three other cows when averaged across a cow's lactations.
• Last calving was within 2 years and 3 months of current evaluation date.
• Last record was either in progress (code R) or had a termination code of 0 (blank), 1, 2, or 8.
• First lactation was not predominantly owner-sampler type of test.
• Reliability of milk evaluation was at least 30%.

Summary information for eligible (those passing first-stage screening) registered cows are in Table 1.

For registered eligible cows, a percentile table for each breed was constructed based on NM. Those percentile tables are provided with USDA-DHIA evaluations for active artificial-insemination bulls. A percentile was assigned for each cow with data distributed in format 105. Although the data for Red and White cows are combined with those for Holstein cows for genetic evaluations, a separate percentile was used for screening Red and White cows for elite or high-ranking grade status. The second-stage screening criterion was the NM corresponding to a specified minimum percentile (Table 3).