Angus Steer Classification
While at San Antonio last week I took the opportunity to watch the Angus steer classification to see what I could learn. 1/3 of the lightweight steers were kicked out of the Angus class and thrown to the wolves in the AOBs. Most of them were pretty obvious but I did learn a few things...
One thing that stuck out like a sore thumb was kids who were told by their parents to keep the head of their cocky necked Chi down to make it look more Angus. I saw four kids do it and none of them made it through. It's the first thing parents think about when thinking of ways to classify but it just doesn't look right and is obvious as hell when somebody does it.
If you are trying to sneak something with a longer neck in, just let the calf hold its head naturally. There's no need to keep the head up like in the show ring but don't actually force the steer to bring the head down.
Secondly, the head is important. Shorter is better.
Third, I know a lot of people stress about when to go through the line. Is it better to go first or wait and go last? For what it's worth, 5 of the first 8 through the classifiers were kicked out of Angus. There wasn't a consistent run of calves getting thrown out the rest of the time.
Lastly, other than the head, the one thing that I saw that seemed to be the best sign of whether a calf would get through Angus was the top line over the shoulders. Any calf that was too square over the shoulders really had a strike against it. Angus cattle just don't have the width over the shoulder that the clubby calves people tried to sneak through had.
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Back
Sorry for the lack of updates in the past two-weeks. Chalk it up to laziness combined with more work than I can handle.
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$750 ACCBA Steer Places 2nd at San Antonio
The ACCBA sale put another steer in a major sale today when a steer that went for $750 placed 2nd out of 40+ Limousin lightweight Limousin steers at the San Antonio Stock Show today.
I remember the steer, he was from Rankin Limousins. Their calves look just like that one again this year. They're the quality of cattle that just don't look like show steers at this time but have the seedstock blood in them that turns out in the end. They had another steer end up one spot out of the money in another class.
There are going to be a lot of steers selling below what they would typicaly go for this year due to nourishment issues. For a full list of sale cattle, CLICK HERE.
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K-State Legacy Bull Sale 2009
Angus Productions sent us this video that you can also find on Youtube...
K-State Legacy Bull Sale 2009 Video
Angus Productions Channel on Youtube
If you have some video you'd like uploaded on Cattle.com, just send it to me. For more details, contact me at jeff@cattle.com.
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Rural Broadband Funding
Let me be clear, I hate the stimulus bill. We should all be ashamed of the burden we are placing on future generations just so we don’t have to feel the pain of an economic correction right now.
That being said, there’s anywhere between $2,000,000,000 and $6,000,000,000 of pork in it for the expansion of rural broadband access and maintaining network neutrality. This is pretty much the only way that reliable high speed Internet is going to become available to many rural locations in a reasonable period of time.
CLICK HERE for a blatantly self serving opinion piece on it by the owner of Skype.
HERE is a much less biased article on the subject from the Seattle Times.
Hey, I’ll be honest; this type of thing helps a guy like me out. It also helps out people like Liveauctions and DVAuction that need high speed Internet access to server their customers. I still think it’s wrong.
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Sire Price Report
| Sire | Ratio | Lots Counted |
| CNS Dream On L186 | 173.62 | 38 |
| RED FINE LINE MULBERRY 26P | 173.30 | 13 |
| SLC Sooner 101M | 173.25 | 14 |
| Who Made Who | 170.67 | 42 |
| TJSC Hot Commodity | 164.46 | 12 |
| Hairy Bear | 159.58 | 10 |
| DCC New Look 101 | 154.87 | 20 |
| Heat Wave | 154.72 | 291 |
| Cherokee Canyon | 152.04 | 14 |
| Lifeline | 151.87 | 35 |
What is this?
I look at it as a bit of an EPD for sale price. These numbers represent the prices of calves sired by each sire vs the average price of similar lots in public auction of 9,186 cattle over the past five-years. Steers are compared to steers, open heifers to open heifers, bulls to bulls, etc.
A ratio of 100.00 indicates a bull's offspring sold for the average of other similar cattle in the same sales. A ratio of 173.62 indicates a bull's offspring sold for an average of 73.62% more than similar cattle in those sales.
Does this mean I think Who Made Who is better than Heat Wave? Heck no. It means that in the sales we have stats for his offspring performed better against the sale averages for similar lots. That's due largely to the fact that virtually all of the information we have is for female and bull sales.
A bull like Heat Wave tends to be hurt by this due to the type of offspring his reputation is established on. There are very few steer sales in the index because people just don't like to publish that info and that tends to hurt terminal sires such as Heat Wave in this index. We don't take individual high sellers into account because there's nothing to compare them to and the entire index is nothing but a comparison. However, his offspring in the form of heifers, cows, embyros, and pregnancies still average a whopping 54% more than their relative sale averages.
*Statististical weighting is applied to counteract the tendency of bulls with more lots to move toward to average of the sale.
- By Jeff | Comments (0)
Recently Updated Sites
Not to toot my own horn but the recently updated sites thing we put up last week is now my favorite feature of this site. I had basically stopped checking random cattle sites because of the staleness of most of the content. That's not a slam on anybody, it's rare that you need to actually udpate a site. I'm visiting a good dozen or so a day now that I know there is something new to see.
I've added the amount of sites in the list of sites checked that have been updated in the past 48-hours to the box on the front page of the site (look to your right). If you click that link, it will take you directly to the list that has the date those sites were updated.
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February Cattle Site Market Share Report
- CattleNetwork.com 26.11%
- Cattle Today Sites 24.89%
- Cattle.com 8.88% (4)
- Beefmagazine.com 7.79% (5)
- Showsteers.com 7.36% (6)
- Cattlerange.com 6.93% (3)
- Cattlepages.com 2.75% (8)
- Primetimeagrimarketing.com 2.57% (7)
- Steerplanet.com 2.27%
- Clubcalves.com 2.26%
There wasn’t much of a change from last month, just the usual jostling among the ranges. The third party tracking services that we use to compile these stats also picked up the near double in traffic for Cattle.com between this January and last January that Google Analytics and our on log tracking showed.
Obviously, the
I’m starting to think that EDJE’s decision a few months ago to switch the focus of their comped advertising space to stuff such as cardboard cutouts is starting to impact traffic to their main portal EDJECattle.com. It’s been a few months since it’s been in the 3-8 type ranking that it used to bounce around.
One note, we don’t use Alexa data for these stats because it’s absolute crap.
- By Jeff | Comments (2)
Liveauctions.tv
Liveauctions.tv is now putting up full sale reports broken down by lot.
Now THAT is worth every cent of $50/year. If you don't get their e-mails, the reports can be found HERE, but you have to subscribe to get to them.
Here's a small sample of the information they're providing...
| Lot Number | Lot Appendix | Lot Price | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A | 5000.00 | Bulls |
| 1 | B | 2700.00 | Bulls |
It's pretty darn quick too considering the fact they already have February 2nd sale results up.
My official worthless opinion has changed from "seriously?" to "the subscription is worth it and necessary if you care to educate yourself".
I just wish I didn't have to listen to Celine Freaking Dion in the e-mail they sent out about it.
- By Jeff | Comments (1)
Web Marketing
Other than wasting time reading various forums, the site I visit most often each day is Wemasterworld.com. There's a thread on that site that anybody messing with a website should read...
Beginners guide to website marketing 2009
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Average Age of Website Content
So far the CUS (cattle site update spider as I like to call it) has checked the front page of 1,000 cattle oriented websites. I knew EDJE has about 10,000 links on their front page but I really didn't know there were that many cattle sites out there.
The interesting stat is that on average those sites have not been updated in 190 days, just over six months. That doesn't apply to or say anything about any one web developer, state, or breed, just the overall "staleness" of cattle oriented website content.
- By Jeff | Comments (0)
Recently Updated Cattle Sites
This past weekend while waiting around at the ACCBA steer sale sift I talked with various members about how they use the Internet for their operations.
Without fail, the number one problem they had with the way they use the Internet was that they got tired of visiting sites that hadn’t been updated in forever. They wanted to see updates as they came along but didn’t want to have to check sites every day just to see when they occurred.
Well that’s the kind of thing that gets me going….
We’re developing a page that lists recently updated sites across all of the web developers. You can find it here;
It DOES NOT index and list ASP, PHP, or other dynamically generated sites because it checks headers and those types of pages all return a last modified date of whenever the page is fetched.
Currently, we only have sites listed on Showsteers.com in the index but that will be increased later today and as time goes by.
"So what? Everybody has a recently updated sites page."
Not like this. This list isn't restricted to one web developer and it doesn't depend on somebody to add the page to their list of updated sites. It checks each morning for site updates and lists the sites that have been updated on the fly.
- By Jeff | Comments (3)
Traffic
We prety much doubled in traffic from January of 2008 to January of 2009 with a 95% increase in visitors.
Top 10 Cattle.com visitor states and increase in visitors from January of 2008 to January of 2009.
- Texas, 99.4%
- Iowa, 94.7%
- Illinois, 129.3%
- Kentucky, 243.9%
- Oklahoma, 128%
- Indiana, 146.5%
- Tennessee, 183.2%
- Missouri, 147.6%
- Ohio, 86.9%
- California, 123%
If you have a website and care about whether it's doing you any good, call your web developer and tell them you want access to Google Analytics data. The stats I posted above are very basic stats compared to the detailed stats you can find out about who visits your website.
All it takes to install Google Analytics on your site is to copy and paste some very simple code.
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