Cattle.com

Blog Archive December 2010

Most Active Cattle Forums of 2010

  1. Steerplanet 32.7%
  2. Cattle-Today 30.5%
  3. Ranchers.net 26.5%
  4. Advantage Cattle Services 4.9%
  5. 5BarX 3.9%
  6. Clubcalves 1.1%
  7. Breedersworld 0.3%
  8. EDJE 0.1%
  9. Showsteers 0.0%



Best of Cattle.com 2010

While doing a “best of” for stuff you wrote yourself is a bit vainglorious (16 points) here are my personal favorite blog posts on this site from the past year.

#10 – Tattoos vs Cane Codes
December 6th

I’m only including this one in the hope that one of the bull stud owners will see it again and think “hey, that’s a good idea, I should change that on our website”.

#9 - Morning Stuff
January 11th

Just the first part.

#8 – What does a show steer cost?
November 2nd

I’ve always wanted to see some research on that subject but I think that’s about as close as it’s going to get.

#7 - Screw Claw
June 17th

I liked that blog post because it was an excellent example of people who know what they are talking about all disagreeing with each other.  For the record, the bull in question hasn’t developed the issue again since we had his foot trimmed and found an abscess that caused him to walk on the outside of his heel.

#6 - Friday
October 15th

At some point we will start testing people before they are allowed to read this blog and this post will be the test.

#5 – Matt Lauter Video Series
May

Not really a blog post but a series of blog posts.

#4 - USDA Grading Announcement
April 1st

Because I really am getting tired of terminal steer shows being graded on stuff you don’t eat.  Did I say graded?  I meant judged.  Graded would imply they are being judged based on carcass merit.

#3 - Medina Valley Club Calf Sale
March 23rd

Just because of how absolutely preposterous the situation was.

#2 - Gold Fish
July 8th

More feedback both on this site and from people coming to me to talk than anything we’ve done.

#1 - ( Cattle Chute )
September 7th

I didn’t know people I interact with in “real life” read this stupid blog until that post.


Our Top "Clubby" Keywords of 2010

Some little nuggets from Google Analytics about how many visitors various show cattle oriented keywords sent us over the past year…

#45 - “Embryos on Snow” – 465 Visitors
#47 – “Brad Hook” – 449
#52 – “womanizer bull” – 395
#54 – “monopoly bull” – 387
#60 – “heat wave bull” – 363
#70 – “dream on Simmental bull” – 326
#75 – “irish whiskey bull” – 297
#77 – “walks alone bull” – 289
#81 – “heatseeker bull” – 275
#84 – “leachman’s saugahatchee” – 265
#85 – “meyer 734” – 263
#90 – “who made who bull” – 252

That’s in no way, shape, or form an indication of how many searches each of those terms gets on Google.  It’s the amount of people who find Cattle.com in the results and end up here.  Our top referring term is “cattle.com”.  "Cattle" is #3.

The fact that I included all of the ‘clubby’ terms in the top 90 of our keyword referrals and the top one is at 45th goes a long way in explaining the cattle site visitor report for those who wonder how we rank so high.


2010 Most Viewed Denver Videos

After combining both the views here on Cattle.com and our Youtube channel, the most viewed videos from The Yards in 2010 were…

  1. Smilin Bob
  2. Salty Dog
  3. Uno Mas
  4. Walks on Water
  5. Holy Smoke
  6. Boardwalk
  7. Blind Side
  8. Sahara
  9. AKA
  10. Black Powder
    Stands Alone

Stands Alone was thrown in with Black Powder because they were within 2 views of each other, essentially tied.


Notcattle.com

I don't want to sound overly sensitive, that's what pregnant wives are for until they edit comments out of this post, but I'm just a tad bit offended by this...

notcattle.com

 


2010 – The Year of the Online Sale & Blogs

Online Cattle Sales

Yes, online sales have been around for years.  Both DVAuction and Liveauctions are over five years old now and both better than ever.  However, the incremental spinning of those flywheels finally built up a momentum that turned into a new industry standard this year.  What was the tipping point that nudged everything over the edge?

Widespread acceptance of Maxanet.

No longer do you need to a team of coders or a large outsourcing bill to establish your own auction service.  All that’s needed is a good mailing list, a few hundred dollars and BAM, you are competing with the big boys.  I’ve lost count of all of the new auction services that now exist.

For the record, I have two large projects underway for launch in early 2011, one of which is a service similar to Maxanet that is tailored toward cattle.

Blogs

Blogging turned the corner this year as well.  Right on scheduled with that whole 3-4 years behind the rest of the Internet theory I’ve been espousing for 6-8 years now.

Our spider checks every post from when a blog started...

Not counting this one, in 2009, 9-cattle oriented blogs combined for 570 posts.  Most of them about Brahman cattle, Ranch House Designs new sites, or updates to EDJE sites.

In 2010, 27-cattle oriented blogs combined for 3,471.  Most of them about whatever Brad Hook sees while driving, pictures of steers/heifers out of Lautner bulls winning shows, or some new turquoise jewelry Crystal Young has found.

Matt Lautner alone has more blog posts this year than all of the blogs we track had in 2009 and his first post wasn’t until April.  Brad Hook was close to passing up that 570 mark as well but he didn’t even start his blog until September.

Blogs are now the news source of show cattle.

And the only place that aggregates them for you every hour on the hour so you don’t miss anything?

Cattle.com


Slick Shear Day

His first attempt at a multi-part instructional series of videos on fitting...


Hay for the Reindeer

I’m not a fan of tradition for the sake of tradition and quite frankly, when I hear people talk about ‘establishing’ a tradition my eyes start rolling.  Traditions are something you just do long enough that 5-10 years down the road you realize it’s become a tradition.  My favorite in that category of traditions is putting out hay for the reindeer.

(Forgive me if every farm family does this and I just didn’t realize it.)

I’m not sure which one of them thought of it, but my parents took the whole 'leave milk and cookies out for Santa' thing one step further and we always made sure to leave hay out for the reindeer.  It was a Christmas Eve thing to bring the hay over and put it in the back yard.

My dad would always make sure the cattle were on the home place the week of Christmas.  He’d take the bale away with the tractor and let the cows come in and finish off the scraps to make it look like the reindeer were there.  By “make it look like the reindeer were there,” I mean put a bunch of divots in the lawn and crap everywhere.  The size of the poop was always explained by the fact that Santa’s reindeer were different than normal deer.

I live in a subdivision for now so putting a full round bale and bringing the cows into the yard to finish it off is not exactly feasible.  However, we did put out a square bale.

The first thing Luke told Santa at the mall was that we have hay for his reindeer.


Groupon

Honestly, I'm a little surprised there isn't already an ag oriented rip off of this site.


December Cattle Site Visitor Report

After a power outage knocked out my internet access for 24-hours (well, reset the clock on my computer which caused Vista to not ‘authenticate’ and prevented me from getting online, it took me 10 hours of effort to realize that, no lie), I got back online to find that Quantcast has updated their data…

  1. Cattle Today Sites 22.25%
  2. CattleNetwork.com 21.40% (5)
  3. Beefmagazine.com 12.72% (4)
  4. Cattlerange.com 11.37% (3)
  5. Cattle.com 7.69% (2)
  6. Showsteers.com 6.87% 
  7. Steerplanet.com 6.56%
  8. Drovers.com 4.04%
  9. Clubcalves.com 2.62%
  10. Cattlepages.com 2.36%

Based on November traffic data.

Don’t be alarmed by drops in the percentages, that’s due almost entirely to CattleNetwork and Cattle Today traffic.

Just about the time I think we might want to consider shutting down this report because of a lack of trust in Quantcast's data, they go and show the sudden drop in traffic to this site in almost exact detail...

The visitor numbers are wrong, they're never accurate, that's why we don't put visitor numbers, just traffic percentages.


Cattle Site Visitor Report

Until Quantcast gets around to updating their estimates, the cattle site visitor report will be taking a vacation.  Without Quantcast, it's just Compete and Google Ad Planner data and not comparable to the past.

However, Compete is updating their estimates reguarly and has November info online.  You'll notice the drop on Cattle.com that I mentioned a few weeks ago.  We had our lowest traffic month in several years.

We really kicked ourselves in the rear with the way I handled the server switch.  Search engine traffic is just now starting to get back to normal.


Thursday

Denver Interviews

Josh Ramsey has volunteered to help with the interviews this year in Rachel’s place.

200-300

I did a quick search of the AI sire database and that’s how many new AI bulls come out each year across all breeds.

Another Great ZNT Post

Letter from AMAA Breeder

I probably shouldn’t say this but it would be a stretch to say I believe 5% of the birth weights put on banners in Denver.  If I’m looking at calving ease on a bull for AI, I wait for accurate CE EPDs a few years after he comes out or a reputation for heifers. 

In herd, we try bulls out on the cows first and if they have that calving ease growth pattern (little runts that look like completely different calves two weeks later) they get to breed the heifers.

Just Two More Weeks

I don't make resolutions, but did this year and that was to not buy any more cows.  Showing a profit every few years is something that CPAs who care whether you get audited or not are very fond of.  There have been some very close calls, but it looks like I’m going to make it.

I almost failed mid-January when I was tempted HARD by a Maine cow over at Dan McIllhaney's.  In fact, I was supposed to call him back as soon as we get done with Denver to finalize things.  My wife telling me she was pregnant when I got home (we eventually had a miscarriage) put a nix to that.

I would have failed at Black’s if I'd remembered which cow was actually in the ring before Bonham said “sold.”

I’d like to thank whoever got the American cow at Glover’s for avoiding yet another extremely close call.

Twins on the way are the only thing that kept my hands off the bid button on the insanely cheap pregnant recips at Camp Cooley.


Yogi Bear Alternate Ending

This is the kind of stuff I have to resort to in order to post each day.


Denver 2011

I was a day late on staying at my favorite hotel, but we’ve got our plans set for Denver again.

We’ll be shooting video both Friday and Saturday while the bulls are on display.  I’m not a fool, the only reason half of you know about this site are those videos.  This will be the fifth year we’ve gone and we’ll be adding to a library of 178 videos of bulls.  It started in '07 with me just taking a small camera and shooting everything I could.  Ever since then I’ve tried to improve something about it each year.

While getting a fair representation of the bulls has always been the priority, I realize how much the bull owners have invested in them and want to improve the quality of our videos to make sure everyone gets a fair shake.  With that in mind, we’re teaming up with Wade Fisher from Ideal Video Productions to shoot and edit the videos this year.  He’s been doing video and auction work for several years now and you can view of his work on his site at Ideal Video Productions.

The hope is that Wade will not only improve the quality of the videos, but he’ll help ensure we get every bull (that the owners let us shoot) since he’ll be focusing solely on that. 

Rachel Cutrer won’t be able to assist with the interviews this year because she'll be sticking around Texas due to having a baby on the way and the timing of the Ft Worth Brahman show.   I'll be focusing on the interviews as much as I can.


Bull Run

You have no idea how much I was sweating when this was the lead story on the local news last night...

My father was supposed to haul the Dr. Sully bull we bought from Sullivan’s sale this summer to the same packing plant that day.

Of course, when I realized they said he got away I knew it couldn’t be him because he couldn’t outrun my two year old son.  We didn't buy him for his looks but that bull wasted away harder than anything I’ve ever seen once he got to our place.

It was still quite a relief to see a Charolais bull run across the screen.


Pet Peeve #28: Strahynge Naime Spehling

Please read the disclaimer at the end of this post before reading if you have given your child one of these names.

Do you want your child to be special, different, and unique?

Teach them to say “yes sir” and “no sir.”

Teach them to give a crap about school and respect their teachers.

Whatever you do, DO NOT do it by intentionally misspelling their name and then expecting the rest of us to accept it. 

To be clear, I realize there is a bit of irony in a guy with the last name “Schroeder” who pronounces it “Schrader” to jump on people for strange name spellings.  It’s a German name and a matter of different pronunciations between languages.  But I don’t spell my name “Shoutoasdare” and tell people it’s pronounced “George.”   

Giving your kid a misspelled name does not make them unique.  It just means they will have the pleasure spelling their name EVERY time someone asks. 

DISCLAIMER:  This is about kids that haven’t been named yet.  It’s not about your child; your child’s name is special and unique.  It’s so adorable, we all love it.


Another Great ZNT Blog Post

It would be a bit disingenuous coming from a South Texas bloke such as myself but Zane is making way too much sense again...

http://www.zntcattle.com/2010/12/what-does-hair-taste-like.html


Best of the Barns

Take a moment to check out the Best of the Barns Awards currently being put on by the ladies over at RHD...

http://www.bestofthebarns.com/

I can't stand asking for votes so I'm debating whether it would be dishonest to attempt to win by means of automated programs or not.  I'm leaning heavily toward yes but it's just so much fun watching polls get skewed by automated scripts.

One time a few years ago I messed up an ESPN poll so badly (it was a basketball poll and every question where A&M and/or Texas were options had A&M #1 and Texas last) that it was deleted.  Technically speaking, what I did was a DDOS attack.


Cattle Moos

On the admittedly short list of things cattle sounds can tell you...

Pairs

When sorting pairs, the pens go eerily silent when everyone is back with momma.

Heats

The teaser bull will start bellowing as soon as you’ve got all of the females in a standing heat out of the pen.


Tattoos vs Cane Codes

While modifying the recently updated sites spider (RUSS) to properly check the prices of semen at the various suppliers, I noticed something a bit perplexing.

There are different types of information and marketing jargon on every site.  Obviously, each supplier decides the different types of information they want to provide on the bulls they supply on their websites.  Everyone lists the breed and name and after that birthdate and registration number.  The next most common piece of information they provide is the tattoo.

WHY?

I can only think of one time in my life that I needed to know the tattoo number of one of my own females.  Herd bulls?  There are so few of them that forgetting which bull is which has never been anything close to a problem.

That’s on cattle in my own herd.  Why in the world would anybody ever need to know that BR Midland’s tattoo is 11?  Who cares that Dream On’s tattoo is L186?  It’s in his name.

When will I, or even the bull stud, ever need to check the ear of a bull to make sure he is who he is supposed to be?

On the other hand…

I can think of a couple dozen times I’ve needed to know what the cane code of a bull is.  Now THAT would be something that would be EXTREMELY useful to have on a bull stud’s page.  I had to waste a bull owner’s time just last Thursday to ask what the cane code on his bull was because I hadn’t written it down when it came in.  (Oh hey, BTW, it was wrong; I guess the bull stud wrote it wrong on the cane.)

Do you know what one of the rarest pieces of information online is?

Bull semen cane codes.

It’s why we started putting the bull semen cane code database together here.

Why is the tattoo information so easy to find while cane code info is virtually non-existent?


November Cattle Forum Activity Index

For the time period 11/1/10 to 12/2/10

  1. Ranchers.net 43.09%
  2. Cattle-Today 24.81% (3)
  3. Steerplanet 22.61% (2)
  4. Advantage Cattle Services 7.67%
  5. Clubcalves 1.26%
  6. 5BarX 0.39%
  7. Breedersworld 0.14%
  8. EDJE 0.02%

Overall forum activity was down another 17.5% from October and 29% from the same time period last year.


Past Posts