If you'd like a part time project over the Thanksgiving break and can do children's coloring pages, e-mail me at jeff@cattle.com.
Not a big change, just a slightly updated look.
View the work in progress
Here.
The Texas A&M livestock judging team won their first national championship in seven years at the NAILE yesterday, coached by Brant Poe in his first full year at the helm of the program.
The win edged them past OSU and Tech in the final power rankings as well.
The power rankings are based on the top six finishes for each of the teams since the start of this year's judging season at the GCC contest in December of 2012 and includes the results from 18 different collegiate judging contests held since then.
The NAILE is weighted double.
If you look at the 10,951 steers we have a record of being sold online in the past three years you’ll find that there are only 3 bulls that have come close to accounting for 10% of any one sale season. They also make up a full 28% of all of the steers we have records of being sold.
Heat Wave, Monopoly, and Walks Alone.
Once the clones are thrown in, Monopoly is the sire of 21.0% of this fall’s steers sold online. That just barely edges out the record he set last fall with 20.5%.
What kind of trends have there been in just how much each of those bulls have been represented in those sale seasons?
We culled four of our older cows yesterday afternoon because we're still a tad bit overstocked after losing some more lease land to "progress", "energy independence", and "let's see how much we can tear south Texas up before we ship out of here to the next boom".
When we loaded two of them, one of them a rather healthy looking half blood, I asked my dad if he remembers ever fire branding without me. He said no, the last time we fire branded was that group of heifers that I had helped brand.
Well, the last time I fire branded I remember pretty vividly that I was in Mr. Heffernan's class. That was my freshman year of high school (our ag teachers were possessive of kids and I belonged to Kuretch)...in 1994.
That's why people put up with waiting 18-months before F1 Brahman cattle will start cycling, they'll still be there 18 years later. Those were 2 of 5 females from that calf crop still producing.
Oh, I took the camera out in the field afterward and snapped some shots. Here's a professionally done photo...
She's a nice enough little heifer, I wouldn't kick her out of the herd for eating creep in the stall, but it's highly doubtful she has any show halters in her future.
But look at that level top....
There’s a new record for the most distractingly tilted photo used to promote a female. I won’t go into specifics, anybody who has seen the picture can figure out which one it is.
The old one was 9.1 degrees and in this one the green panels in back as well as the trees and the cow are 11.3 degrees off center.
But do you know what IS level?
The freakin smokey heifer's topline. She’s one level topped little girl. Heck of a female.
Well, actually, she is a pretty darn nice female when you watch the video, perhaps a bit short coupled but I'm sure she sold for quite a bit any way. I'm not sure what the motivation to pull that kind of a stunt with the photo is. It's nothing but distracting and speaks poorly of those involved in its production.
I tried about ten different ways to elaborate on just how preposterous some of this foolishness is. Tilting isn’t Photoshoping in the traditional sense but I’ll just quote the a photographer to help him “hold the line as we move forward”…
I have come to realize that in a lot of people’s eyes, the expectation of my chosen career as a photographer is to hide their flaws with Photoshop and make them look better than they are, rather than to make them look as good as I can in a photograph. I find that people don't trust photographs and in my eyes, that means that people don't trust me. I am uncomfortable and unsatisfied with this reality.
...a semen company surveying the buyers of sexed vs convestional semen regarding the percentage of heifer/bull calves in their current calf crop.
I'm going to guess the correlation is pretty darn high.
Inevitably, if you have more than one ring going there will be kids that end up tying one of the rings up because they have calves showing in breeds that overlap each other. It can slow a show down significantly over the course of a day.
If you ask the generally accepted greatest minds of our times --the steer breeders standing around the show ring drinking beer-- the answer is obvious.
Make ring A the priority.
If a kid has a calf in ring b, then ring b stops whatever it’s doing and the kid reports back to ring a.
But is that true?
How could a person even test that?
A monte carlo simulation of 1,286 shows with randomly generated entry counts and breed assignments of course.
Surprisingly spry after six hour nap and soaking my feet in warm water for an hour yesterday afternoon, I setup a program to do exactly that. This isn't a condemnation or judgement of anything at all, just something I'm pretty curious about.
The simulations I ran included between 100 and 180 entries per show with each virtual “kid” randomly showing between 1 and 4 steers. The breeds each kid showed were randomly distributed between the 16 different breeds. The amount of kids that entered both rings ranged from 0-100%.
Why 1,286 simulations?
Because after much statistical analysis and thought, that’s the number of simulations my computer ran during The Walking Dead last night.
For each randomly created show, it ran through the show allowing 2 minutes per steer to judge the classes. It calculated how many minutes it would take for the show to run using each of the following rules…
- Ring A show only, no ring B.
- Ring B has priority. If a kid is showing a calf in consecutive breeds (Santa Gertrudis and Simbrah, Charolais and Chianina, Limousin and Maine, etc.) Ring A is held up until the conclusion of judging ring b because the kid is still showing his calf over there.
- Ring A has priority. If a kid is showing calf in consecutive breeds, ring B is held up until the conclusion of ring A.
There are obviously some flaws in this analysis. One, the selection of breeds was purely random. Most people in real life will gravitate to certain types of breeds or spread them out. Two, it assumed the breed had to be entirely complete for the other ring to get started. In real life, if a calf doesn’t finish 1st or 2nd in lightweight in a class, he won’t hold up the other ring waiting for him.
That being said, this did test the theory behind whether prioritizing ring a vs ring b is the best approach.
So, what’s the difference between the two strategies in with these assumptions?
On average, prioritizing ring A and holding up ring B decreased the amount of time it took to judge the show by 22.17%.
Not once in the 1,286 simulations did prioritizing ring b result in a speedier conclusion of the show day than prioritizing ring a.
The only scenarios in which prioritizing ring A over B did not have a significant time savings were scenarios in which a preposterously low amount of kids entered both rings.
It should be noted that the time savings, while consistent, are a bit exaggerated in this simulation. In a real life situation, the actual time savings would likely be less because some of the inefficiencies would be addressed by ring stewards yelling at people to get their kid back over to ring a as soon as possible because the A&M game starts at 8PM and his feet are killing him because he unwisely wore his old worn out boots and they were absolutely killing his feet.
Still, if there’s a choice to be made and the judges select cattle at a similar pace, it’s pretty clear the choice should be to shut ring B down instead of ring A if they conflict with each other.
The red dots are using the ring B priority and the green dots use ring A priority. There's also another row with no ring B which is just a 2 * entries since the simulation assumed 2 minutes per entry to judge.
The x-axis (bottom) is the amount of entries, the y-axis is the amount of time it took to finish the show. The variance of red & green dots is due largely to the amount of kids in the hypothetical situation that entered both rings.
The percentage of time saved by using a ring A priority over a ring B priority depending the amount of kids that enter both rings.
You can see that the percentage of time save increases steadily up until about the 50% point. After that point (when 50% of the steers in ring A show in ring B) the time savings decreased slightly.
I'm going to run an analysis where the judges each judge at different speeds some other time.
One of the ten thousand or so documentaries and reality television shows being produced that will explore stuff you are actually interested in. There was a reality tv show being filmed about show steers last year and another one now. If you go the right prospect shows in Texas now, you'll likely see a flyer on your way in saying you might end up on television.
This is about more traditional farming...
That actually looks pretty good. Farmland should be released next spring.
It's an independently produced documentary though, so don't expect huge marketing campaigns. In fact, call me if you want to join my "Who will be the first agvocate to whine that it's being ignored?" pool.