Cattle.com

Blog Archive November 2014

Top Web Sale Lots Week of 11/24/2014

Top individual sale lots of the past week...

  1. $39,000 - Heifer sired by Blaze of Glory
  2. $25,000 - Heifer sired by SCC First N Goal
  3. $21,500 - Heifer sired by Dameron First Class
  4. $20,500 - Heifer sired by SCC First N Goal
  5. $17,000 - Bred Heifer sired by Irish Whiskey
  6. $16,500 - Heifer sired by CNS Pays to Dream
  7. $16,500 - Heifer sired by Paradox
  8. $16,500 - Bull sired by Liquid Courage
  9. $16,000 - Heifer sired by CNS Pays to Dream
  10. $15,000 - Heifer sired by Sooner


National Western Bull Videos

I’m putting a stake in the Cattle.com bull videos.

Last year we called it off after I couldn’t get a firm yes or no from the people in charge in Denver by the week before Christmas.  This year, I’m not going to try.

Why?  There are a few reasons, none of them related to cost, nothing to do with the National Western itself, and nothing to do with the bull owners.

The main reason is times have just changed.

The videos we used to shoot just aren't nearly as relevant or necessary as they used to be.

In 2006, when I first went to Denver, videoing a bull on your phone and instantly uploading it to Youtube was science fiction.  My Treo was a cutting edge phone back then; iPhones weren’t even announced until 2007.

In 2015, there will be a dozen stall pictures of everything in the yards posted in HD before we even have a chance to download video from the camera.  In the time it takes us to get the tripod level, anybody can post a decent quality Vine.  Access to technology has come a long way in the past eight years and while I still go back and watch them from time to time, there isn’t nearly the need for what we were doing that there used to be.

If you own a bull and you don’t post at least a dozen pictures/videos during Denver weekend, you are doing yourself a disservice.  Don’t know what you’re doing?  Hire one of the kids you sell calves to do it for you.  If I were in charge at the National Western, I’d put up signs suggesting people do exactly that with a “#BullAlley” hash tag.

I’m going to share everything I can find here.

I want to say thank you to a few folks that made the bull videos possible for nearly the past decade…

The guys at the National Western have been great about letting us go in and shoot video each year.  The restrictions rights for video and photography have evolved with the National Western like they did with other livestock shows but they’ve always made an exception for us without asking for anything in return.

The bull owners have put a lot of trust in us with something that they had tens of thousands of dollars invested in.

Wade Fisher busted his ass doing great work for no pay.  That dude is BUSY and put in a lot of time on those videos the past few years.

And lastly, thank you guys for watching them.


Unclaimed Scholarships Post

This is just about the most argumentative post regarding scholarships you'll ever see...




Bull Price Conversion Chart

We bought our first decent club calf bull at Kris Black’s back in 2009.  He did well for us for what we needed him for at the time and he’s branded several steers over the years in both exotic and american breeds.  He wasn’t a maternal bull by any stretch of the imagination but we've had a few good calves out of the handful of daughters we kept.  Long story short, he was a good bull for us.  

We paid $6,200 for him that year, I remember because back then that was just enough to get listed in the “top buyers” list for The Showbox.  

That was in 2009 “bull dollars”.  Nowadays that wouldn’t be enough to touch anything that catches your eye at an auction for a reputation operation.  Quality for quality, what is that $6,200 in 2014 “bull dollars”?

Approximately $11,000.

The following is the percentile rank for the price of bulls in each year using data from the sale of 24,879 bulls sold in sales with online broadcasts or that were held exclusively online since 2008 (the first year we had over 1,000 bulls in the system).


Percentile 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

1,671 1,392 1,935 2,369 5,312 5,714 6,486
0.975 $10,000 $7,335 $6,900 $10000 $12500 $13000 $15,456
0.95 $7,445 $6,000 $5,500 $7,410 $9,000 $9,500 $10,500
0.925 $6,500 $5,250 $5,000 $6,500 $7,750 $8,000 $9,250
0.9 $5,750 $5,000 $4,750 $6,000 $7,000 $7,250 $8,500
0.8 $4,750 $4,000 $3,820 $4,750 $5,500 $5,800 $7,000
0.7 $4,000 $3,500 $3,300 $4,000 $4,750 $5,000 $6,000
0.6 $3,500 $3,100 $3,000 $3,600 $4,000 $4,500 $5,250
0.5 $3,000 $2,800 $2,750 $3,250 $3,750 $4,000 $4,750
0.4 $2,700 $2,500 $2,500 $2,900 $3,250 $3,500 $4,100
0.3 $2,300 $2,200 $2,100 $2,500 $2,900 $3,000 $3,600
0.2 $2,000 $1,900 $1,900 $2,000 $2,500 $2,500 $3,000
0.1 $1,600 $1,500 $1,700 $1,600 $2,100 $2,000 $2,500

The percentile prices for bulls out of club calf genetics tend to be a touch lower than the prices for seedstock operations but are quite close.


Top Web Sale Lots Week of 11/17/2014

Top individual sale lots of the past week...

  1. $30,000 - Heifer sired by Yardley High Regard
  2. $26,501 - Heifer sired by I-80
  3. $23,000 - Heifer sired by W/C Loaded Up
  4. $22,000 - Heifer sired by JS Sure Bet
  5. $13,000 - heifer sired by Irish Whiskey
  6. $12,500 - Heifer sired by BSF Opportunist
  7. $10,000 - Heifer sired by Bushs Unbelievable
  8. $9,750 - Heifer sired by NJW 98S R117 Ribeye 88X ET
  9. $9,500 - heifer sired by TH 22R 16S LAMBEAU 17Y
  10. $9,000 - heifer sired by ZKCC Chopper


How To Catch A Cattle Thief

We thought we had a cow stolen one time.


It was a really nice SimAngus female, tag #125, that just didn't show up one day at what we call the Loma Vista place.  We searched everywhere for her but didn't find her.  We had a pump jack stolen from there a few months earlier and it wasn't a leap to assume calm cow could be stolen from the place.

Two months ago, when the relatively steep tank we had installed a year before that cow went missing went dry, we found out that Allflex ear tags last quite a long time underwater.

We also figured out what happened to cow #125.

This podcast from Planet Money isn't one of those situations.  It's actually an EXTREMELY interesting listen...



The "Cause" of Heifer vs Bull Calf Crops

We’re only about 40% through our calving season but so far we’re having one of those heifer years that anybody attempting to raise show steers has.  There are people worse off than us in that regard but what hurts us the most is that of the good ones, the heifer ratio is significantly higher than the 65% of the rest of the crop so far.

Any time this subject comes up, the subject of how the sex of a calf happens does as well.

What did we do wrong?

Was it the bull?

Was it the time of day?

Forget that silliness.

I’ve talked about this before but after running Showcattle.com for over ten years now, I will never in my life believe anything short of a gargantuan university study regarding any of these old farmers tales.

It’s pretty basic psychology.  You are naturally prone to think something you do has control over the sex of a calf just like you’re naturally prone to think your actions influence everything.  You can’t see the actual sperm contacting the actual egg so your mind jumps to conclusions that you had some sort of influence on the sex of the calf.

For example, here’s the actual VB code used to generate the sex of a calf on Showcattle.com…


dim a as decimal = rnd()

dim sex as string

if rnd() < .5 then
sex = “Male”
else
sex = “Female”
end if


That’s it.

All it does is generate a random number between 0.00000 and 1.00000 and then assign the sex of the virtual calf to “bull” if it’s under 0.50000 and “heifer” if it’s over that number.

No fancy time of day or heat cycle type algorithm that considers whether the moon is high.  No first year bull bias toward heifers.  No “put the ai gun in this far for a heifer and that far for a bull”.

Nope, just a purely random 50/50 shot at a bull or heifer.

But do you think that prevented people from coming up with b.s. theories on what impact all of that had on the sex ratio of their calf crops?  Not one bit.

It happened with such regularity that at one time I just let the stories go because I couldn't control them.

After getting fed up with it, I’ve gone so far as to ban people and send their money back because they kept misleading other users on the site about how the sex algorithm works.

You are doing the same thing as those guys when you see a heavy bull or heifer concentration in your calves and jump to the conclusion that buying a bacon and egg taco the morning you put the CIDRs in is what caused it. 

But it happens in real life ALL THE TIME as well.  I don’t even waste time arguing that in person, I just nod and say “yep, lots of folks have those theories”. 

Do you want to influence the sex ratio of your calf crop?  Buy sexed semen.

Otherwise, pray.

If that’s not your style, go buy some of that Heifer Plus snake oil that was going around half a decade ago while you wonder why so few of your cows stuck to their AI service.


Top Web Sale Lots Week of 11/10/2014

Top individual sale lots of the past week...

  1. $130,000 - Bred Heifer sired by AAR Ten X 7008 SA
  2. $105,000 - Heifer sired by AAR Ten X 7008 SA
  3. $65,000 - Heifer sired by AAR Ten X 7008 SA
  4. $65,000 - Pregnancy sired by Baldridge Waylon W34
  5. $55,000 - Heifer sired by GAR Prophet
  6. $52,500 - Heifer sired by AAR Ten X 7008 SA
  7. $50,000 - Heifer sired by AAR Ten X 7008 SA
  8. $45,000 - Heifer sired by AAR Ten X 7008 SA
  9. $45,000 - Heifer sired by Plattemere Weigh Up K360
  10. $45,000 - Heifer sired by AAR Ten X 7008 SA


Beta Agonist News

Zilmax Closer to Returning Commercial Feedlots

I have no idea what impact this may have on the show cattle world, I doubt it’s coming back in the way it was available before, but Merck announced last week that they 

More information can be found on the Merck website, “Merck Animal Health Provides Update on Zilmax Five-Step Plan, Announces Next Steps

Merck, you are a huge company, you have no business putting auto-play music on your website.

FDA Being Sued over Ractopamine

No, not because of any problems found in it.  They’re being sued because HSUS doesn't think its approval complied with NEPA, the all-encompassing law that keeps thousands of environmental engineers, consultants, scientists, and their managers employed billing one government agency $50-100/hr to tell another government agency that they considered the environment.  I know, I did that for the whopping 18-months that I actually used my college degree.

For those unfortunate enough to know what the acronyms mean, Topmax was FONSI’d in 2003.The HSUS is trying to force a full EA/EIS.

Here’s the full complaint that was filed in a California (where else?) district court last week…


My favorite part is in the part where the HSUS explains why they have a stake in it in the first place…


HSUS members have an aesthetic interest in keeping the areas where they hike, watch birds, swim, and live free of manure contaminated with Ractopamine, antibiotics, and steroids. HSUS members who eat meat also have a consumer interest in avoiding the health risks of drug-contaminated meat.


Yes, they are suing in part because they don’t want manure contaminated with Ractopamine to be on the same trails that they hike on to watch birds and swim.

Here’s how you use this in your daily life…

Make sure the HSUS knows that literally every single inch of the pig barn and large portions of the steer barn are covered in it.  It ought to work better than an ag gag law at keeping them away.


Top Web Sale Lots Week of 11/3/2014

Top individual sale lots of the past week...

  1. $29,000 - Heifer sired by Head Hunter
  2. $22,500 - Steer sired by Walk This Way
  3. $18,500 - Heifer sired by Dameron First Class
  4. $17,550 - Steer sired by Believe in Me
  5. $17,500 - Steer sired by Grizzly Bear
  6. $16,502 - Heifer sired by Man Among Boys
  7. $16,500 - Heifer sired by Man Among Boys
  8. $16,500 - Heifer sired by I-80
  9. $16,000 - Steer sired by Super Duty
  10. $16,000 - Heifer sired by SCC First N Goal


Ag Internet Traffic Devices and Browsers

The below charts show trends in the October traffic for Cattle.com.  The overall traffic for the site continues to increase for that month but the changes in what kind of traffic that includes are surprising to me.

In fact, despite overall traffic for October being up by about 10% from 2012 the amount of people who visit this site on a desktop computer is down 32% in that same time.

I’m not posting this info to tell you about our traffic as much as I’m assuming our little site gets a fairly decent representation of a small cross section of the cattle related traffic on the internet.

Is your site mobile ready yet?

Percentage of Traffic by Device Type


Percentage of Traffic by Browser

(small market share browsers prevent this from totaling 100%)



Man Among Boys Semen Prices

Based on semen sold in 104 online sales between October 10th, 2012 and October 30th, 2014.



How I Met His Mother

The statewide races in Texas are pretty much a foregone conclusion but I live in a house district that is tightly contested so I made the one block walk over to the elementary school to vote yesterday.

As always, there was a group of people standing right outside the clearly marked campaign boundary line doing their thing.  An old Hispanic lady was campaigning for one of the district attorneys running for office here in the San Antonio area asked me to vote for him.

“I can’t, he seems pretty dirty to me” I replied.  I said that in part because he was convicted for selling drugs when he was younger.  I believe people can redeem themselves but getting convicted of selling ecstasy does exclude you from certain future jobs, district attorney of a decent sized city being one of those jobs.

He’s also take crap tons of money from a personal injury lawyer in Corpus Christi.  That seems all sorts of wrong to me.  Thomas J. Henry is a pretty sharp dude and there are a lot better ways to fight child abuse (his stated reason for the contribution) than giving over a million dollars to the district attorney’s race in a city nearly 100 miles away.

“God bless, have a nice day”

Mainly because on site campaigners annoy me, again I popped off, “Nobody gives $1.2 million dollars to the campaign of a DA in a city two hours away for no reason.  Dude is dirty” as I continued to walk past.

She replied in a surprisingly unoffended tone “sir, my son is a man of god”

And that, newly elected Bexar County district attorney Nicolas LaHood, is how I met your mother.


Sire of the Most High Sellers

It’s a common line in advertisements but who has actually sired the most high sellers this fall?

We tracked exactly 300 online sales with steers in the months of September and October this year.

Of those 300 sales, there were 316 highest selling steers because of sales where the top selling lot was a tie between several lots.

When clones are lumped in together with their originals (yeah, sure, 90% of the Monopoly and Heat Waves are from the originals, whatever you say Midwest steer guys) those 316 steers were sired by 93 different bulls.

The eight bulls that have topped 5 or more online sales the past two months are…

  1. Man Among Boys - 64
  2. Monopoly - 55
  3. I-80 - 23
  4. Believe in Me - 22
  5. Unstoppable - 18
  6. Heat Wave - 16
  7. Walks Alone - 8
  8. Yellow Jacket - 5



Saturday

I’m writing to you from american steer country.

There are good exotic steers that come from here, plenty of them, but people don’t drive from all over the state the week after Houston to buy exotic steers.  They drive down here to go to Lucherk’s and the other consignment sales that weekend for solid american steers.

During the jackpot shows I believe it’s in the contract for judges that they have to compliment the exhibitors and breeders on the quality of the american steers no later than the medium weight Santa Gertrudis class but preferably during the Brahman drive. 

While americans taking grand or reserve has happened quite a bit in the past, over the past year it’s almost become a rule of thumb that the grand or reserve grand champion (“grand” doesn’t apply to breed champions in my dictionary) at a jackpot is going to be an american, many times a Brahman.

It doesn’t mean the steer is the 2nd best steer at the show; it’s just a tip of the hat by the judges.  If the jackpots in this area placed a top five, the 3rd-5th place overall would likely come from the americans.

We got to benefit from that relatively new tradition on Saturday…



(No, I didn’t know that was going to happen, I recorded both the grand (HERE) and reserve grand selections while I was helping with the ring.  In fact the end part there where you see the camera shaking is probably me peeing my pants just a little bit.)

I’ll be honest, I was pretty darn happy about it.  “**** eating grin” was the fairly accurate description that was thrown my way a time or two.  

Tag #2, or “Jeff” as they have so creatively named him, hasn’t been beaten in class but he doesn’t yet have the size to consistently compete with the bigger steers in the Simbrah breed.  Frankly, considering the quality of the medium and heavy weights, I would have been just fine with that calf being #3 in the Gert Simbrah drive.  I would have been pleased as punch for him to be one of the three Americans considered for reserve grand.  

Heck, I was okay with the fact that the calf was the #3 steer on his own show string.  The young lady with the gray steer was the one that typically shows the calf from us.  She’s a heck of a stick and during some friendly banter between breeders I was told I’m cheating by having her on our calf.  Unfortunately, her #1 didn’t provide a good look in ring A that day and her gray ABC is the kind of calf that typically has a lot better shot at an overall banner.

Now I’m going to tease her to no end that she needs to let her little sister show if she wants to get the calf right.

--But I want to be clear that's not what I'm here gloating about today--

Do you want to know what I was most proud of this weekend?

A kid that has never even been to our place to look at calves winning junior showmanship.

He’s tried hard, really hard, almost too hard, to do better at showmanship over the past two years.  His mind has been filled with so many tips and pointers that through two weeks ago he got to the point there was just too much going on.  He was rushing to get the feet set right, head right, and look at the judge.  I had him setup him up for me once.

I told him “stop, now do it at 90% of that speed”.  That’s all.  And it worked.

I wanted to hug that little guy when he got out there and walked around like he owned the show ring.

Forget anything his family might have worked with him on, I’m going to take 100% of the credit for that.


Top Web Sale Lots Week of 10/27/2014

Top individual sale lots of the past week...

  1. $70,000 - Heifer sired by Remington Lock’n’Load 54U
  2. $68,000 - Heifer sired by Daddy's Money
  3. $48,000 - Heifer sired by GOET I-80
  4. $45,000 - Heifer sired by Remington Lock’n’Load 54U
  5. $41,000 - Heifer sired by Purple MB Womanizer 14U ET
  6. $33,000 - Heifer sired by MINN Hard Whiskey 591Y
  7. $27,000 - Bred Heifer sired by WAGR Driver 706T
  8. $25,000 - Heifer sired by Mr HOC Broker
  9. $25,000 - Heifer sired by WLE Uno Mas
  10. $25,000 - Steer sired by Monopoly


Past Posts