Blog Archive October 2014
Jeff The front page will look a bit weird over the next few days as I take a few days to update it to give a better quick view of the internet as it relates to cattle.
Long story short, I'm working on making the front page of the site something worth checking daily while you drink your coffee.
The sale watch thing is getting ported over here and the eight highest selling lots across all of the sales we monitor will be updated throughout the day. There are links to all online sales going on right now and I'm keeping the links to all of the blogs we monitor on the right hand side of the site.
The daily web summary thing will come back to the right of "Yesterday's Sale Results".
So this is making the rounds today…
…as an example of evil animal rights people targeting agriculture.
My question is why is it the HSUS offering that bounty and not the ag-centric organizations that claim they are concerned with animal welfare?
The time to put effort into fighting organizations like the HSUS isn't the few weeks after they find a video of animal cruelty. That allows those scum bags establish the narrative.
The way to fight back is for the news to be that the industry itself found a case of cruelty and acted swiftly to punish it rather than sweep it under the rug.
Turn it into something the industry is actively fighting against instead of sitting back and reacting to.
A colloquialism commonly used in bull banners and advertisements to denote an unknown birth weight.
85 is club calf for unknown - as in “we really don’t know, here’s a generic number since you seem to be hung up on knowing the birth weight of bulls that weren’t actually weighed at birth”.
While some may think this is misleading that is because those people are suckers (idiots, rubes, noobies, marks, etc) that think calves born into club calf operations are routinely weighed at birth.
The problem isn't the bull owners, it's the people who are unable to accept the fact that they don't actually know the birth weight on the bull they are using. If it weren't for these suckers, the bull owners wouldn't have to lie in the first place because any rational person knows that club calf bulls that come from operations that weigh their calves are rare at best.
I’ve got an almost guilty obsession with pop-science/psychology books like Predictably Irrational, anything Malcolm Gladwell writes, You Are Now Less Dumb, the Freakonomics books, etc. Basically if it’s a book where a reference to a random Daniel Kahneman study might pop up I’m going to be listening to an audio book of it shortly.
I’ve started to notice an alarming trend in these books though. Neurologists and psychologists are evidently afraid that you people are oversharing too much of your life on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Grindr, and Instagram.
What is oversharing? It’s what it sounds like, the habit of people, typically laid at the feet of millennials, to share each and every thing about their lives on social media. I’ve also heard one or two comments about too many pictures posted to Facebook in regular conversation.
Let’s be clear on something…
It does not apply to cattle related pictures.
There is no such thing as too many baby calf pictures.
I -and everyone reading this right now- look at baby calf pictures of random people we’re friends with on Facebook but live six hours away the same way grandmothers look at baby pictures of their only grandchild.
We get a weekend away from jackpots and shows so we spend the night swiping down to see if anybody has posted pictures from the jackpots and shows we didn’t go to.
Do you have a picture on your phone with a calf in it?
Put it on your Facebook page.
I’m not being sarcastic; you cannot put enough pictures of your calves on Facebook.
Just stop tagging everybody you know in them.
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $120,000 - Bull sired by I Believe
- $70,000 - Heifer sired by Mr HOC Broker
- $67,000 - Heifer sired by Hard Whiskey
- $62,500 - Heifer sired by Monopoly
- $61,000 - Heifer sired by CRR About Time 743
- $59,000 - Heifer sired by I-80
- $58,800 - Heifer sired by TR Mr Firewater 5792 R ET
- $41,500 - Heifer sired by LCX Unleashed Keepsake
- $40,000 - Cow sired by Hooks Shear Force 38K
- $39,000 - Heifer sired by Journey
Can I share some stupidity?
Ever since we lost a calf crop to a suddenly sterile bull I’ve been pretty hard ass about making sure we get our bulls tested each year.
My dad whines about how much of a pain in the butt it is to get the bulls in to the vet’s office and how easily something could go wrong with mature bulls and unfamiliar surroundings. I remind him that a sterile bull would cost us about $35,000 in lost calves nowadays and that if he would like to learn how to massage their prostate, I have a microscope.
So I got an appointment for 9 AM last Wednesday and made sure I had the bulls ready to go since I can’t stand being late for things.
We have three bulls to get tested this year a big Simangus, a midget yellow clubby bull, and 20-month old Brahman. The smaller bulls were fighting with each other but not as bad as the big red bull so they were put in the front section of the trailer. Unfortunately the yellow bull is a lot lower point of attack and can throw the Brahman around if he wants to. I didn’t want to waste much time with them in there together so I made sure to get on the road as quick as I could.
They’re working on the highway at the intersection with the farm road we live on. Right as I got to the intersection the tar truck drove by giving me a choice of driving over hot tar (the gravel truck wasn’t even visible) or letting the bulls fight for a solid twenty minutes while I took a detour down rough gravel and rock roads.
I chose to drive through the tar; it couldn’t make that big a mess and I want to stress again that really can’t stand being late for things.
Mistake one.
We started cleaning the thick layer of tar off of the wheel wells as soon as I got home. The bulls had all tested just fine with the understanding that “just fine” for a 20-month old Brahman bull isn’t what it is for other breeds.
After an hour of scrubbing, spraying, and ruining clothes we were just about done. In fact, there was basically just one little spot of tar left on the front right fender.
My dad reached for it the wash rag in his left hand.
I went for it with the pressure washer.
We met in the middle.
Mistake two.
Our next choice was a difficult one since we live almost exactly between Pleasanton and Floresville. Both towns have quite a bit of traffic related to oil field stuff and the distance to the emergency room is just about the same both ways.
With the fear of the old Florseville hospital still impacting us, we chose to go to Pleasanton.
Six hours, a considerable tab to the taxpayers (Medicare), and two Ebola “screenings” later we finally got to leave. We’d have been out in a mere three hours if it weren’t for the fact that the pressure washer sprayed water up his hand underneath his skin. They didn’t notice that until he was about to be discharged and had to call in an orthopedic surgeon to consult and give him two antibiotic IVs.
All in all, the fiasco wasted the entire day after 10 AM.
Because I didn’t want to be 20-minutes late to the vet.
You can say I was stupid and irresponsible a few times Wednesday and deserved to have a day wasted to teach me a lesson.
But you know what?
Every now and then you have to stop and think about what your priorities are. What is important in your life? What do you stand for?
I got those bulls ejaculated at 9:00 AM
Not 9:15 AM.
Not 9:30.
At 9:00 AM.
I think we can all agree that I know what matters in life.
What happened to that bull’s semen?
It didn’t get expensive and hard to find, it just disappeared.
If you have some OCC Machinist semen you’re interested in selling, call me at 210-380-7459 or e-mail me at jeff@cattle.com.
You guys up there get them every now and then, a calf that has an inexplicably long sheath or too much dewlap to reasonably sweat off. He’s a good calf otherwise, he’s just not clean enough for a Midwestern show steer. Maybe you can ship him south?
Anybody can spot a long sheath and loose skin on a steer, what you want to look at is the ears. What exactly are we talking about when we talk about the ears? Here’s a basic primer if you don’t deal with many Americans…
Length, shape, and set are what you need to look for.
Length - It’s not just length but a longer ear is extremely important. If you get them long enough, the shape really doesn’t matter that much because they’ll hang lower just due to the weight.
Shape - Look at the way the ear leaves the skull. Does the base of the ear stick straight out, almost horizontally? That’s exactly what you DON’T want. An almost bell shape dropping out of the skull is what you are looking for.
Set - Where do the ears set on the skull? The lower the better.
Why?
Because that’s what the more stingy of the classifiers have decided indicates an American influenced calf.
It’s a great indicator but don’t let anybody fool you into thinking it’s entirely consistent. We tried swinging for the fences and wasted one our best ½ Brahman cows on Solid Gold this year. A ¼ blood calf ought to be enough to class but the son of a gun has the smallest ears on the place right now.
While it’s not hard to breed the character out of Americans by accident, finding the straight exotic with character is rare.
Houston pays out a ton in added money. In fact, if you took your additional premium check from this year to the bank and got pennies it would almost literally be a ton of money at 1,924 lbs. The additional premium check is actually more than the guaranteed payment this year.
But for a bit of perspective on just how high cattle prices have gotten, think back to the time when placing in that 6th spot at Houston was profitable because the guaranteed $2,250 was a good price for a calf. You don’t have to think back too far, just a couple years.
At Monday’s live cattle cash price that’s a premium of $32.90 over slaughter for a 1,350 lb calf.
For the typical 1,320 card weight (~1,390 actual weight) steer that's a loss of $17.84.
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $106,000 - Heifer sired by Little Cedar Aviator 503X
- $80,000 - Heifer sired by GVC STATESMAN 4R ET
- $70,000 - Heifer sired by CYT Maxim 9202 ET
- $60,000 - Heifer sired by VH MR BG 1104
- $58,000 - Heifer sired by I-80
- $51,000 - Heifer sired by Yardley High Regard
- $50,500 - Heifer sired by Yardley High Regard
- $50,000 - Heifer sired by BK XIKES X59
- $37,000 - Bred Cow sired by STAR TRF BATTLE CHIEF 356P
- $36,000 - Heifer sired by Little Cedar Aviator 503X
You can fool yourself into thinking you don’t need a separate office but the fact that I’ve been able to write the last two sentences without yelling at my wife or kids to leave me alone is proof that I do.
I can’t come up with some stupid chore that I need to do at the ranch (“hey, there was a calf born a week ago that doesn’t have an ear tag, I should stop what I’m doing, drive 45-minutes down there and tag him”) because I’m actually wearing decent clothes.
Right here <--------
See that right there? That right there is when I would have taken a nap if I were at home. But I’m not at home and it’s a 20 minute drive to the house.
I’m not freaked out by Eboloa. Do you know why? Because there’s no TV here in my office. I know the market is tanking but only because the energy trader next door has been cussing a lot.
I’ve lost five pounds in the past two weeks. Partly because I started running in the morning again (because I have an actual schedule) and partly because there’s not a bag of chips 20 steps down the hall.
I stopped watching Walking Dead 5 minutes into this season. Without a reason to have something playing on the TV in the background I realized that there are better things to do with my time than watch four guys get knocked out with bats before having their throats cut and bled out over a wash tub. Don’t even ask me what’s happening on Doctor Who BECAUSE I DON’T KNOW.
Have you seen that sale watch thing is updated daily now?
Have you seen me post each day?
Are you not entertained?
I feel like an adult again for the first time in quite a while.
You folks may or may not be disciplined enough to work from home.
It only took me a decade to realize I’m not.
From the Wall Street Journal via MattLautnerCattle.com...
It's nice that the pigs in showrings today are closer to the pigs videoed from the 50s/60s than the pig from the 90s at the 1:35 mark.
Let’s define clubby heifers as anything out of one of the bulls with more than 5 steers sold in an online sale this fall. That list of sires is 42 bulls long, 90% of which are some derivative of a Heat Wave line.
There have been 1,201 heifers that meet that criteria sold in online sales between Setpember 1st and today.
The average prices of clubby heifers for that time period is $3,942 and the average price for the steer mates (out of the same 42 bulls) is $4,045.
That average is up from $3,428 in 2013, an increase of almost exactly 15% which feels frankly feels a bit low compared to the price of commercial heifers this fall relative to last fall.
Most popular sires of clubby heifers this fall…
- Man Among Boys - 238
- Monopoly - 232
- I-80 - 140
- Believe in Me - 77
- Unstoppable - 72
Sires of at least 5 clubby heifers with an average price over $4,000
- Solid Gold - 6 - $7,458
- Yellow Jacket - 8 - $6,062
- Salty Dog - 9 - $5,233
- Thriller - 14 - $4,582
- Monopoly - 232 - $4,575
- Man Among Boys - 238 - $4,497
- I-80 - 140 - $4,256
- FSF STARBURST 058 - 8 - $4,225
- Dakota Gold - 5 - $4,070
Would you guys up in the midwest look at somebody funny if they said "yeah, he's a really great calf, his ears are just a bit too small"?
I think it's a Texas thing.
Yeah, it's probably a Texas thing.
I don't know, maybe obsessing over whether a new born calf has adequate ear length, a bell shape, and a lower set on the skull is something normal people do.
Probably not.
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $58,000 - Heifer sired by Lut
- $37,000 - Pair sired by O C C Juneau 807J
- $36,000 - Steer sired by FSF Starburst
- $35,000 - Heifer sired by Dameron First Impression
- $34,000 - Heifer sired by S A V Brilliance 8077
- $32,000 - Steer sired by Medicine Man
- $31,000 - Heifer sired by Monopoly
- $29,000 - Heifer sired by S A V Brilliance 8077
- $27,500 - Heifer sired by Big Mac
- $26,000 - Cow sired by Leachman Right Time
There were 236 bulls that were listed as the sire for steers sold in online sales in September of this year.
However, 53% of the 1,412 steers sold online that we tracked this September were out of just five bulls.
18.7% of calves were sold as sired by Man Among Boys, the highest percentage of calves sold in September of any bull other than Monopoly in 2012 (23%).
16% of calves were sold as sired by Monopoly or Monopoly clones, twice as many as the third most popular bull.
Believe in Me ranked #5 in September of 2012, #2 in 2013, and was #3 in 2014 with a 7.3% share of the calves sold in September.
I-80 moved up from #7 in 2013 to #4 in 2014 with a 6.3% share.
Unstoppable moved from #9 to #5 with 4.7% of the calves sold.
Heat Wave and Walks Alone still hang strong at #6 and #7.
Other bulls listed as the sire on at least 1% of the 1,412 steers sold online that we tracked in September…
#8 – Walk This Way 1.6%
#9 – Eye Candy 1.6%
#10 – Monopoly Money 1.5%
#11 – Jesse James 1.3%
#12 – Two Tone 1.2%
#13 – Fu Man Chu 1%
Houston printed their exhibitor handbook online this week and included the classification stats like they've done the past few years. (which is really nice of them to do and you should thank them for it)
Let’s be clear for the yankees that there are breeds you know are a classification game going in and by “breeds” I mean Angus. About 2 in 5 steers that enter the Angus classification exit as the bottom end of the AOB class.
It’s just how the game is played in that breed. The jocks sell every lower end solid black clubby bred steer as a potential Angus and take credit for the ones that slip through. Personally, I thought it was relatively noteworthy that the reserve champion in San Antonio was actually out of an OCC bull.
But Angus was barely edged out for the title of most classed out this year by…..Simbrah?
Most heavily classed out breeds in Houston 2014
- Simbrah - 50%
- Angus - 44%
- Santa Gertrudis - 38%
- Brangus - 37%
- Shorthorn - 27%
- Polled Hereford - 24%
- Brahman - 21%
- Hereford - 19%
- Red Angus - 14%
- ABC - 11%
- Simmental - 10%
- Chianina - 9%
- Limousin - 7%
- Maine Anjou - 6%
- AOB - 1%
- Charolais - (Are you kidding? Who would TRY to get into Charolais?)
There’s an old barn tale that Houston picks out one breed a year to really just mess over in the classification lines. I have a tendency to write off such conspiracy theories but it gets pretty hard to do when you look at the numbers.
Gert had 38% kicked out? They averaged just 13.6% in 2011-13.
It really does appear that there are breeds that everyone thinks they are knowledgeable about but that just randomly get kicked in the teeth by a group of classifiers in a particular year.
Over the past four years, the six biggest outlier years for specific breeds in Houston relative to the other three years are…
- 2014 Santa Gertrudis – 278%
- 2014 Shothorn – 221%
- 2012 Red Angus – 204%
- 2013 Brahman – 172%
- 2013 Simmental – 170%
- 2014 Simbrah – 169%
Those numbers are relative to how many steers are typically classed out in that breed. For example, Santa Gertudis cattle were classed out at an average rate of 13.6% in 2011-13. In 2014, they classed out 37.8% of them which is 278% of normal.
What can you do to make sure your breed isn’t one that has to wait until March to find out the classifiers think it’s something other than what the rest of the barn does?
Pray.
Or just show your Limousin Chianina Simmental Maine-Anjou Santa Gertrudis Charolais cross as a Charolais.
About two years ago a relatively well known south Texas preacher that I went to high school with told me he taught his kid that is the same age as Luke to play chess. Insulted that any kid could possibly come close to the intelligence of our precious little snow flake I immediately taught Luke to play.
Like a surprisingly high percentage of five year olds, he took to it extremely quickly. He’s not great but he knows more strategy than I do and was chomping at the bit when I told him there are tournaments. There was one here in San Antonio this past weekend that had a K-1st grade section so we spent Saturday sitting around a chess tournament (don’t tell me how the A&M v Mississippi State game went, I still haven’t watched and can’t wait for the excitement of a great game).
I had never been to a chess tournament before so I didn't really know what to expect. Admittedly, there is a LOT less beer at those things and for some reason it’s not a requirement that every girl have their britches blinged out. But there are an awful lot of similarities between steer shows and chess tournaments…
There’s a rush when the waiting room opens to get to the spots closest to the outlets and then a lot of sitting around waiting. In fact, take the beer out of the equation and the staging areas for parents are just about the same.
There are those families that you know you won’t be able to compete with, typically any of them with an Asian last name.
Luke has too much of his daddy in him and would rather chit chat than do anything productive. Several times I looked into the game room and saw him and his opponent just laughing and waving their arms around rather than actually playing chess.
The barn chatter isn’t that “so-and-so spent $xxx,xxx on his steers and has fitters out there working them every day”, the chatter is “the Lin family makes their kids practice 6-8 hours a day”.
Just like steer shows, I’m in no way prepared for my family to make the sacrifices a person has to make in order to end up at the top of the heap.
There are odd smells that float by every now and then. Instead of manure from oddly fed cattle it tends to be more of the curry influenced BO variety.
Unfortunately, there are also crying holes and people who know how to game the system.
Going into Luke’s fifth match it was almost a certainty that he was going to get a trophy for 10th place (there were 27 in his k-1st grade section). The only thing that could prevent him from it would be if another match ended up in a draw.
Unfortunately it turns out that somebody taught their six year old how to get a draw out of a game and the girl that went 1-0-4 edged Luke’s 3-2-0 out for 10th. Luke cried his eyes out for a while but was already asking about more tournaments he can go to. Nothing compares to that beaming smile with no front teeth after he won his first competitive match though.
The bad part?
I realized I don’t really like playing chess.
Maybe I can hire a fitter for that part.
After eleven years I’ve finally decided to try an office (executive suite) out.
This isn’t the first time, I looked for an office back in 2005 but San Antonio isn’t Silicon Valley. A tech guy in his mid-20s looking for office space isn’t taken seriously here. In fact, one lady straight up told me she doesn’t rent to internet companies back then because the previous guys brought their bikes to work.
I’ve also flirted with going to an executive suite before, primarily around the times the kids were born and my mother-in-law living with us for a few months was a real possibility. Previously, it’s always been something I thought about because I was frustrated or overwhelmed and wanted to escape.
This time though I’m not really escaping anything and I’m not emotionally invested one way or the other. It’s time to try it for two months and see what kind of impact a professional environment will have. There are too many side projects that I’ve had sitting for too long and I’ve turned down too much work because my halfhearted approach to productivity hasn’t been working.
There are a couple milestones I’m using to measure whether this will work out long term. Just to name a few I need to go from “medium choice” to at least “high select” (regular exercise schedule, no naps, lack of snacking), launch a few new sites, update a few sites, get video edited on a regular basis, and have a blog post each day.
Working for yourself requires more discipline than many would imagine. Working from home, especially with three kids and a stay at home wife, requires a level of discipline that I simply don’t have.
Now, instead of a three year old holding class for her dolls, I’ve now got an energy trader next door.
I get to listen to podcasts on the way to work.
There’s fresh tea and water with lemon and oranges available 24/7 just a few steps down the hall.
There are at least four Mexican nationals on the same floor so I can leave the top button on my shirt unbuttoned and still look conservative.
I think the thing that struck me the most about it is when Tessa (one of our three year old twins) came to see the new setup yesterday. She looked around the room and said “Daddy, there’s nothing to do here. What can I do?”
Nothing Tessa.
That’s the point.
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $90,000 - Heifer sired by C Miles McKee 2103 ET
- $55,000 - Bred Heifer sired by NJW 73S M326 Trust 100W ET
- $48,000 - Heifer sired by NJW 98S R117 Ribeye 88X ET
- $35,000 - Heifer sired by C Miles McKee 2103 ET
- $29,000 - Heifer sired by NJW 98S R117 Ribeye 88X ET
- $24,500 - Steer sired by Fu Man Chu
- $24,500 - Steer sired by General Lee
- $21,000 - Pregnancy sired by C Miles McKee 2103 ET
- $19,000 - Heifer sired by C Miles McKee 2103 ET
- $18,000 - Bred Cow sired by SHF Phoenix M33 P68
Past Posts
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