Greetings:

“It’s not that I’m not a people person…it’s that I’m not a stupid people person.” Quote inspired by the debate last night.

Ah, indeed, I too am stupid at times. For instance, for the past 4 years, including this year, we are offering every single bred heifer we have produced for sale. Many would say this is stupid. “Conventional” wisdom says a seedstock producer should save all young genetics (supposedly the best) and get rid of older genetics. We have been, and still are, in a unique stage of our operation. We spent 13 years with Pharo Cattle Company building up our herd and selling bulls. We leased Black Angus, Red Angus and Composite cows owned by Kit and Deanna Pharo. Our lease agreement was such that we kept all the heifer calves and some of the bull calves depending on how the percentages played out. We gave every heifer the opportunity to become part of our herd and sold all the opens. All those heifers became our current cow herd. From the time we started with PCC until done we grew from a herd of about 30 registered red angus PCC cows to a herd of about 300 cows that included all the breeds mentioned plus Herefords. We purchased our Hereford herd from David Hall, another PCC Cooperative Producer (CP).

So, from that herd of 300 cows we were producing approximately 150 bulls and 150 heifers each year. The bulls we sold through PCC sales and we developed the heifers. When we left PCC we were averaging $4000-$5000/bull sold through their sale. I reasoned that even if we sold bulls for half of that we would still be able to sell 100+ bulls. Reality sometimes hits like a truck. In the first sale and following weeks we sold 44 bulls. We ended up banding and fattening the rest. It became clear, quickly, that we did not need 300 cows to satisfy our customer needs. As such, we have been selling all our heifers as bred heifers and continuing to cull hard on the cows and now have the herd down to less than 150.

If I participated in such a wager I’d rather have to sell 1000 bred heifers than 50 bulls. One major positive of selling all our heifers has been realized in the fact that all sorts of producers have had the opportunity to experience our genetics. It takes a bigger leap of faith to buy a bull, which affects half of your gene pool, than to buy a few heifers. Our heifer customers have become our bull customers. As long as we are producing more bulls than we can sell we will continue to cull hard and offer all of our heifers for sale. Another benefit to all of this is that our cow quality “average”, and thus the quality of our bulls and bred heifers, has increased significantly. During evaluations this year I was pleasantly surprised by the quality, thickness, eye appeal and dispositions of the cattle we are offering…but now I sound like a salesman!

Listen, you can get our genetics at a PCC bull sale if you choose, many of our sires and grand sires are the same…but you can also get their genetics at our sale at a significant discount. What you won’t be able to get anywhere else are the heifers we have available. Additionally, we have added Ohlde Cattle Company genetics to our lineup and those cattle are going to be super special.

Website Note: My wife has just built a page that includes many of the sires we have used and are currently using in our program. I think it looks slick! https://www.icecattle.com/sire-directory/ I should probably reward her, suggestions?

We truly want, and pray in this direction, our cattle to be a benefit to every herd they go to. We have bred them to calve easy, have good dispositions, do well on grass or other grazing forages, to finish well on grass or grain, to be trouble free and to last a long time in the herd. I’m not a stupid cattle person either…may you find that to be true when you take them home.

Grace to you.

Lanny Greenhalgh | Steward
[email protected] | (402) 984-6375
www.icecattle.com