Blog Archive October 2009
Jeff It was ten years ago this morning that the heart and soul of Texas A&M fell.
To be clear, none of the guys I hung out with at A&M worked on Bonfire. Most of my friends in college were the more intelligent portion (hey, it is Texas A&M after all) of the cowboys and ranch hands from my area and worked their asses off all summer working cattle, hauling hay, or moving irrigation pipe. When approached about working on Bonfire, our first question was typically “what does it pay?” We’d laugh out loud at Target the night before first cut at the people shopping for rugged work clothes. We had enough clothes in our closets for all of them.
In fact, I never lifted a finger for Bonfire until I setup the temporary morgue.
In addition to the earning money sweating over the summer, I worked my way through college as a bus driver. The morning it happened was to be my first day in my new position as a dispatcher. I was brushing my teeth at 5:04 AM and heard a guy on the radio that wasn’t supposed to be on the radio at 5:04 AM. The first thing I heard was “we’re not sure how many are trapped under the stack right now” and for some reason the inappropriate thought that I was going to get a lot of hours that day immediately popped into my head.
I was in the usually empty but at that time completely packed dispatch office by 5:30 and was pulled out the door by a senior dispatcher who told me to grab #46 (Aggies remember that bus, it was an absolute piece of crap) and follow him to the site. On the way to the stack I was nearly run off the road by the KSAT-12 TV truck zooming in from
I did get my extra hours in that day, 17.5 hours of driving various shuttles and coordinating stand by drivers to be exact. I ended up managing the game day shuttles and memorials due in large part to that day.
Going back to the second paragraph, it took Bonfire dying for me to realize what its true value to Texas A&M was. While many of the people who read this blog are well aware of how fulfilling it is to get some dirt on your hands, that’s simply not the case for most kids who go to college. There was some serious value in guys who had never really gotten their hands dirty having Bonfire as an alternative to the fraternity crowd. That simply was not the case after Bonfire fell and it was something you could see in the student population as I got older. Texas A&M simply was not Texas A&M any more.
This isn’t some sappy memorial or an attempt at getting stuff of my chest. Now that I think about it, I don’t really know what it is.
Partial report because I left early. Collins is great about posting full sale reports quickly any way.
1 - 27,000
2 - 7,500
3 - 30,000
4 - 11,800
5 - n/s
6 - 7,700
7 - 25,000
8 - 6,000
9 - 12,400
10 - 13,400
11 - 17,500
12 - 7,000
13 - 5,000
14 - 5,000
15 - n/s
16 - 7,400
18 - 8,000
19 - 8,400
20 - n/s
21 - 7,000
22 - 6,200
Having gotten what I went for (excessive bone, muscle, and a little sheath), I left after 22.
Yeah, I know he doesn't have a neck, if he did there's no way he'd have made it to our pens. We're not messing with anything that has the Charolais diluter gene and there wasn't another black bull there with as good a combination of power and bone. We desperatly needed a meat wagon terminal bull that won't clean up American cows too much to fill out a lineup. In fact, for what he'll be working on most of his faults either aren't an issue (PHA carrier) or are a positive for us (dewlap and sheath).
In "dang, that's pretty nice" news...they were on top of things enough to get the bull a ride home quicker than I could make it home myself.
For the time period September 18th to October 19th...
- Cattle-Today 34.77%
- Ranchers.net** 33.86%
- Steerplanet 20.94%
- 5BarX 4.52%
- Advantage Cattle Services 3.98%
- Clubcalves 1.31%
- Breedersworld 0.48%
- EDJE 0.08%
- Showsteers 0.05%
**After some changes at Ranchers.net it wasn’t possible to get an accurate count for the time period so similar traffic to the previous month was assumed.
Overall forum activity was up 12.3% vs. the previous month and 10.1% vs. the previous year. The only two sites with decreases in traffic month over month were Showsteers.com and Breedersworld.
Breedersworld added more ads to bring their total count to 14. The content of the forum has now been pushed over one thousand pixels below the top of the page. I’m not sure if I have ever seen content pushed that far down below the fold on any site regardless of the subject or niche.
After several months of a languishing in the “extremely low” traffic range, Clubcalves.com has rebounded to just over 12 posts per day and peeked its head over the 1% share mark for the first time since the June report. Momentum is everything in online communities and it appears they've got that boulder starting to roll again.
How do you build a website?That's one of the most commonly asked questions I get quizzed about when people discover I'm a web developer. The sad truth is, there is no magic answer. Building a website and getting it on the internet involves a number of different processes.
Full Article at Webmasterworld.com
- Cattle Today Sites 21.44%
- CattleNetwork.com 16.69%
- Cattlerange.com 11.16%
- Cattle.com 9.57% (5)
- Beefmagazine.com 8.62% (4)
- Showsteers.com 7.07%
- Drovers.com 5.58%
- Clubcalves.com 3.47% (9)
- Cattlegrower.com 3.34% (8)
- Cattlepages.com 2.65%
The only thing worth commenting on is the fact that my dad really should have noticed the truck was low on fuel and that he'd need to stop for gas soon. I mean it's not like there wasn't a low fuel light that was already on.
1,094 Miles
That’s how far it is from San Antonio, to Throckmorton, to Wichita Falls, to Crawford OK, to Throckmorton, to Cisco, walking two miles back to Cisco because your dad didn’t watch the fuel gauge during the FIRST THIRTY **** MINUTES IT WAS HIS TURN TO DRIVE, to Crawford TX, to San Antonio.
Breaking News - Kris Black Sells Good Cattle
I had the opportunity to go check out the bulls at Crawford yesterday and there’s a ton of good bulls all the way through that sale. Kris Black man is somebody I could listen to talk about cattle all day long. I’d pay $10/minute for a CD of him talking about bulls. If you speak with him for ten minutes and don’t learn something you need to shut up and let him talk.
The lot 1 bull is a bull you’ll no doubt have the opportunity to buy semen on in the future. I don’t know of a better compliment to give a bull than to say the Christi Collins photo doesn’t quite do him justice.
There will be quality bulls at all price ranges in that sale.
R.A. Brown Sale Report
I was on the road until yesterday afternoon during the sale but reports are the bulls sold for an average of about $3,800. Good bulls still bring good money.
They’ve still got a large group of bulls that were pulled from the sale primarily due to tender feet (from the wet weather, not anything permanent) walking on hard rocks that ought to be for sale private treaty over the coming months.
Army Worms
Are absolutely evil.
Make sure to check out the R.A. Brown Ranch sale tomorrow if you’re looking for bulls to add dollars to weaned calves, SimAngus replacements, or Red Angus show heifers.
I remember going to this sale a few years back and hearing Donnell talk about one of their heifers that had been successful in the show ring in an almost apologetic tone to the primarily production oriented crowd. This year R.A.B. bred cattle took home the top honors at the Texas State Fair for both Red Angus bulls and females (as well as reserve female). Good cows are good cows and if the show ring agrees with the pastures, it can’t be a bad thing.
What's better is they’re selling six heifers that are full sisters to the grand champion Red Angus female from the State Fair of Texas. For details and videos of those heifers click the links below…
So go spend the $1 it takes to get a verified account at Cattle in Motion, register for the sale, check into the great shipping rates R.A. Brown offers, and buy online if you can’t make it to Throckmorton.
Disclaimer: R.A. Brown Ranch is a web consulting client of Cattle.com.
I’m officially declaring H1N1 the biggest media created phenomenon since our current president. H1N1 is going around San Antonio right now and 95%+ of the cases of flu are that strain. If you listen to the news that means this city should look something like a scene from 28 Days Later.
Our boy started showing signs of it last Tuesday night when he woke up crying. When he threw up on my face while I was sleeping two hours later, it was a pretty safe call that he got the flu at Sunday school like a lot of friends’ kids did. The doctor confirmed it the next morning and prescribed Tamiflu.
If you listen to the news, I should now be sick, my wife should be sick, and my son should have spent the last week in a living hell, none of which has happened. The only time I’ve been sick since then was during the A&M vs. OSU game and that has more to do with the left tackle than anything else. My son was running around chasing me within 24-hours of showing his first signs of the flu (which I’m sure Tamiflu had a lot do with). My brother got it at work and like a few others I know, declared it the weakest ‘flu’ he’s ever had.
I tell you what though, if you tell people you’re around that your kid has the flu you’ll see what it must have been like to be a leper in Biblical times (yeah you guys, I noticed). Grandparents ask you not to visit. Great grandparents decide it might be okay to wait a week or two for you to come.
My advice? Dealing with the pig flu itself will likely be easier than getting the vaccine.
Here at Drovers we have long supported the efforts of beef producers to differentiate themselves with production practices and products that meet consumer demand. If producers have opportunities to improve returns by addressing demand in niche or specialty markets such as grass-fed, natural or organic, we believe they should do so. Several have, with great success, and they achieved that success by promoting their products as alternatives for consumers who prefer beef from cattle raised using a specific set of production practices. That’s great.
If you look on the right hand side of the front page, you’ll see a list of sale broadcasts scheduled over the next week. As of right now, it checks Liveauctions,
That data will also be used for a quarterly auction broadcast market share index that we’ll start publishing in January. If that were to be published today without the BW or DVAuction info, it would look something like...
-
Liveauctions.tv 73%
-
Superior Livestock 19%
-
EDJECast 5%
-
Cattle in Motion 4%
Cattle in Motion Auctions
While working on that index and some work for the upcoming R.A. Brown Ranch sale, I visited CIM Auctions. They’ve thrown their hat in the increasingly competitive online auction arena.
Something worth noting is the fact that they do check the identity by way of an online subscription requirement similar to Liveauctions.tv. They only charge $1 for it which is all a person needs if a company is trying to confirm identity. However, as far as I can tell, they don’t offer anything like Lot One magazine or sale reports which is where the real value in a Liveauctions subscription is.
We’ve indexed quite a bit of auction data to the database over the past few weeks and we’re over 13,000 lots now. The “Recent Sale Averages” section of the AI bull pages has been updated to include the amount of lots sired by the bull and the size of the contemporary group.
Blog Tracker
The blog tracker got back online after I had messed it up with the wrong URL for the Brahman Blog about two-weeks ago.
Because We're Crazy
While the recently updated sites page has sent over 500 visitors to the constantly updated Lautner sites in September, that only accounts for 5% of the traffic generated.
We sent 10,182 visitors to 678 sites through the recently updated sites and directory pages during the month. The front page blog links sent 272 visitors to various blogs. The cattle site market share page sent 196 visitors to 30 sites.
Calf Sex Rant
Could somebody send our cows nuts to include with their calves? I think I’m going to puke if I see one more Heat Wave heifer calf.
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