Blog Archive May 2014
Jeff 
Bulls that have sired at least 5% of the steers sold online in one "season" (spring or fall) where there were at least 1,000 steers sold in online sales
I overlaid the cumulative rainfall map on the drought map, this is awfully pretty...
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $10,000 - Heifer sired by Mr HOC Broker
- $8,250 - Heifer sired by Wang Chung
- $7,500 - Bull sired by Man Among Boys
- $6,500 - Bull sired by Bodacious
- $5,750 - Heifer sired by Charisma
- $5,600 - Heifer sired by Solid Gold
- $5,500 - Heifer sired by Monopoly
- $5,250 - Heifer sired by Tank
- $5,000 - Heifer sired by Monopoly 2
- $4,750 - Heifer sired by Monopoly
Twenty most commonly used descriptive words on the sale descriptions currently on BWOS and CW...
- great - 581
- good - 487
- champion - 408
- big - 392
- sound - 358
- stout - 236
- power - 226
- bone - 182
- maternal - 181
- right - 167
- best - 162
- top - 159
- reserve - 133
- grand - 130
- better - 129
- necked - 128
- more - 126
- fronted - 121
- front - 113
- square - 112
Total words counted - 122,025
I'm going to post a PDF booklet of all breeds (there will be about 20 when its all said and done) here in a few months.
CLICK HERE for the PDF
If you’re on Facebook and have friends in Texas you saw the announcement about Battle of the Cattle last week. If not, CLICK HERE for their Facebook page or go to their WEBSITE.
The basics of it are that they’re putting on six shows this summer/fall with a slightly different format than your standard Texas jackpot show (it's not just a Texas series, it's open to Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Arkansas)...
Two judges – which has been great the three times I’ve seen them do it over there in Fredericksburg/Kerrville. They also haven’t skimped on the judges just because there were two in the same ring.
Three classifier system – It's nice not only for keeping the trash out but getting a feel for your own potential classification issues down the road.
Ten breed format – I’ve disagreed with the way the American breeds were cut up in the past with this format but I think they got it right now with three exotic classes (smoke, colored, black) three british classes (Shorthorn, both Angus, both Hereford) three American breeds (Brangus, Simbrah & Gert, ABC) and Brahman. Most years you need to separate Brahman steers to give them a chance. This year, it’s probably being kind to the ABC breeds to keep the Brahman steers away.
There was still some predictable confusion regarding exactly what the Battle of the Cattle is or is not. I went ahead and asked some of those questions directly and they were kind enough to send me a reply yesterday…
Is this a show series or a new sanctioning system meant to go head to head with the TJLA?
Battle of the Cattle is a show series, not to be confused with, in comparison with or in contention with any other organizations out there. We are…simply put….a fresh, positive movement geared to offer another cattle prospect show series option to families.
Is the date/location of your first show being within 45-minutes of the Belt Buckle intentional?
We were graciously offered the Bell County location because they wanted to host a steer & heifer show during their Bell County 4th of July PRCA Rodeo event. It’s going to be a great way to kick-off our Battle of the Cattle show series – what’s more American that fireworks, a parade, a rodeo & a stock show?
If it is a new sanctioning system, how will ranking be handled?
We are not a sanctioning system.
Are you accepting new shows? What’s the process?
We will eventually add a few more locations, in order to offer the Battle of the Cattle show series across the state of Texas, with plans of including ones in neighboring states. We will personally put on each show in the series in order to assure exhibitors the same top-notch quality at each show.
Other species?
The Battle of the Cattle board members are all long-time cattle raisers, so we have an extensive knowledge & passion for the beef cattle industry. At this time, we don’t foresee adding other species.
Other Details…
A Little More about Battle of the Cattle
Battle of the Cattle – We’re on a Mission….
The Battle of the Cattle was formed in order to put on prospect shows that are enjoyable, family-oriented, professional, well-organized and fair for all exhibitors. We will provide FREE hands-on, educational clinics at each show that will help inform the youth & their families on topics such as nutrition, daily care, show preparation and showmanship. We will strive to hold all of our show officials to a high standard of excellence – from our board, to our classifiers and judges. We will use a two-judge system, in order to ensure the most knowledgeable, fair system for evaluating cattle.
One of our biggest goals is to provide money, prizes & give-aways for exhibitors.
We understand firsthand the financial challenges and sacrifices that stock show families face and we want our prospect shows to be an opportunity to reward them for their hard work!
We also want to establish a scholarship fund, in order to reward outgoing senior showmen, as well as start a Crisis Fund in order to be able to provide assistance for fellow stock show families in the event of an unfortunate situation.
WHO WE ARE :
We are an association with board members who understand the livestock industry, each with a passion to provide prospect shows.
WHAT WE ARE STRIVING TO ACHIEVE:
We are trying to “Raise the Bar” for cattle prospect shows, Reward Excellence in our Youth & create a positive impact for our youth in the cattle stock show industry.
OUR GOALS:
The goals of the Battle of the Cattle organization are to (1) provide cattle prospect shows using a 10 breed format for steers and a 16 breed format for heifers, three-classifiers, and a two-judge system (2) educate youth on the basics of showing cattle through free hands-on seminars (nutrition, daily care, clipping & fitting, show preparation and showmanship) and the importance of their role in the beef cattle industry, and (3) to raise money in order to reward the exhibitors with monetary awards and prizes.
OUR FORMAT :: IT’S WHAT SETS US APART
Our shows will have ONE RING (one for steers/one for heifers), 3 Classifiers and a 2 Judge System. Our steer shows will follow a 10-breed format. Heifers will follow a 16-breed format.
All youth, in grades 1-12, from Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana & Arkansas who are members of 4H or FFA, will be allowed to become members of the Battle of the Cattle Association. Exhibitors will need to become a member in order to show. Annual Memberships are $50 per exhibitor. Our members will receive a Battle of the Cattle T-shirt & a FREE 1 year-subscription to the Show Circuit magazine.
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $50,500 - Bull sired by Monopoly
- $22,000 - Bull sired by Monopoly 2
- $11,001 - Flush sired by The Man
- $11,000 - Bull sired by Man Among Boys
- $10,000 - Heifer sired by Unstoppable
- $7,750 - Bull sired by Eye Candy
- $7,000 - Heifer sired by DF Waco 6W ET
- $6,750 - Heifer sired by Jesse James
- $5,750 - Steer sired by Man Among Boys
- $5,750 - Heifer sired by Man Among Boys
Please remember that you are highly encouraged to brainwash your children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews with these things.
You know you have them, everyone does, well at least they did.
We even had one on our farm’s Facebook page as well that by pure 100% coincidence popped up when a certain college kid thought I had wronged him (I didn’t, quite the opposite actually). Everybody I’ve seen with more than a small handful reviews on their Facebook page had at least one 1 star review. It wasn’t something worth getting your knickers in a bunch over; it’s just part of doing business online.
When people have the opportunity to take pot shots without putting their name on it, somebody is going to do it.
The guy that makes a living calling b.s. is probably a bad example but when I leave a negative review of something, I leave my name on it. Like these sons of dogs…
- Lemon Tree Dental Facebook Page
- Lemon Tree Dental – Canyon Golf
- There’s another on Angie’s list if you subscribe to it. There are other complaints similar to mine but mine all have my name on them.
…you can read the issues I had with those guys on any of those links. I only left the Google review originally. Since then I’ve taken the measured approach of only leaving a negative review on other sites when I got a bill for it or when they reply with another disagreement with my dispute. That includes a BBB complaint and another review that I can't seem to find online at this time.
Yes, I have a gap in my teeth. It doesn’t matter though because I’m married. Leaving that jerk’s office was the most violated I have ever felt. I wasn’t mad, I was speechless. At the very real risk of being extremely overdramatic I felt like Annabella Sciorra after she leaves the OB at the beginning of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.
$8,000 in work. That’s how much he was trying to make off of me. I called bull shit on it and got a second opinion. That second opinion said my gums are in “really nice shape for a 35 year old” and I’d only need braces for cosmetic reasons.
But back to Facebook.
At some point last week, Facebook removed the ratings that were not set to public.
They’re still viewable to friends of the person who left the review but their non-friends won’t see them any longer. This impacts your negative ratings more than your positive ones for a very logical reason.
People are more likely to leave a "public" privacy setting for positive public reviews and the cowardly little shits that leave negative ratings under "private" settings are now relatively silenced.
What does this mean?
The amount of ratings you see on your Facebook page can very easily be different than the amount of ratings other people will see on your page.
And Dr. Ajala can kiss my rear end.
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $26,000 - Steer sired by Man Among Boys
- $17,501 - Steer sired by No Surprise
- $13,500 - Steer sired by Werewolf
- $8,500 - Bull sired by ABC Bandido
- $7,500 - Heifer sired by No Surprise
- $7,251 - Steer sired by No Surprise
- $7,000 - Heifer sired by Hoodoo Slasher 1144
- $6,000 - Pair sired by OCC NO Fault 901N
- $5,800 - Pair sired by SA 680R Rancher 8184 075
- $5,800 - Pair sired by SA 854E Emblazon 419 625
I fixed a problem that allowed for animals of the same weight to end up in different classes on the CountyShows.org weight breaking tool…
Here are the weights of the Charolais steers from San Antonio this year if you want to run some more numbers through it…
1000
1005
1010
1100
1135
1140
1151
1163
1170
1170
1172
1174
1177
1177
1179
1179
1179
1179
1180
1180
1181
1184
1189
1190
1190
1190
1192
1193
1193
1194
1194
1195
1195
1196
1220
1224
1245
1246
1250
1250
1260
1265
1265
1265
1271
1274
1275
1277
1277
1279
1279
1280
1280
1283
1285
1285
1285
1285
1286
1288
1289
1289
1289
1289
1290
1292
1293
1310
1322
1324
1336
1342
1345
1349
1349
1349
1350
1355
1357
1370
1375
1375
1390
1400
1420
1444
1495
1495
Why so much attention to weight breaks?
Because I’m a computer guy at heart and that means I like playing with numbers.
And it's May.
I started doing these late last December and stopped. Why? I folded under the pressure. You have no idea how hard it is to find somebody that can do a legitimate drawing of a cattle breed and some of them are drawings that wouldn’t win too many shows if you know what I mean.
Unfortunately Brahman, Simbrah, Maine, and Chi were the pictures that weren't quite up to snuff and are coincidentally some of the breeds I'd catch the most heck for getting wrong.
Today’s coloring page, Beefmaster.
CLICK HERE for PDF.
If you need advice on how to color it, here you go...
Next week, Brangus.
The few production beef guys I run into seem to be unanimous in their opinion that Zilmax will never come back to the market. That doesn’t mean it won’t though and as Drovers pointed out last week, Merck is still working through the process of bringing it back.
The relevant part for show calves is this;
Training for certification will require participation of a feedyard’s consulting veterinarian and nutritionist along with the operation’s management. Once the product returns to the market, Merck will control the product and limit its use to certified feedyards.
The long and short of it in the context of show steers is that if it comes back it will go back to the pre-Showmaxx days when only the jocks that knew somebody in a feedlot could get it and they would sell little envelopes of it for a couple hundred bucks.
So yay, the world is a better place now, thank you Temple Grandin.
I’ll just say “you can’t” and take the risk that the 1 out of 100 of you that advice is not correct for won’t be too mad at me.
Why?
Because claiming that it “opened” somewhere is kind of disingenuous. It hasn’t really opened anywhere in the traditional sense of the word. There have been over a hundred one time showings of it but to say that it has opened in places implies that it will be playing for more than a day.
In fact, while it’s “opening” in over 110 different theatres across the country, it’s only showing more than twice in half a dozen of them and that includes small independent theatres in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Nearly 90% of the places it is opening in are only showing it one time.
Why?
Because marketing it as a movie was a stretch and misleading to anybody that expected it to be released in a manner similar to other movies. They didn’t even go through the effort to get an MPAA rating and a better description than “movie” would have been “77 minute commercial for agriculture”.
That’s not because of some anti-ag bias in the general public. Overwhelmingly positive films funded by the industries that are painted in that positive light aren’t exactly the biggest box office hits around. You’d be just as suspicious about a movie highlighting the great people that work in the automotive industry if it were funded by GM and Ford as the general public will be about Farmland.
For what it is though, an open love letter to family farms, it’s pretty darn good.
I drove an hour north to Austin to go watch Farmland last Thursday. I’ve been looking forward to seeing the movie for a while now but I wouldn’t say I was nearly as excited as many. If you want to see me that excited you needed to see me when I realized the gay guys up the street were selling their fat clothes in a garage sale last week.
At the only showing within several hours of me there were right at 120 people in the 400 person theatre with a rather healthy Farm Bureau presence. I know that numerous people drove several hours to see the movie because I recognized several groups that were in no way local to Austin. In fact, I’m going to say with a fair bit of certainty that this movie will be the only time I randomly run into dairymen that live five minutes away from us at a movie theatre two hours from the ranch.
Before my thoughts, I should point out that I have a natural disdain for these propaganda type documentaries to begin with. Whether it’s this, Food Inc, anything Michael Moore has ever done, or whatever the cause du jour is - my eyes tend to gloss over at the idea of paying somebody to sell me on their political beliefs.
The long and short of it is that if you are reading this site there’s an extraordinarily high chance that you’ll like the movie in the same way choirs like hearing their pastor preach.
I liked it quite a bit myself.
The Good
Going into it, I was afraid this would be some variation of the Facebook “we’re farmers because we love feeding people, aren’t we great?” cliché. In a refreshing twist, you actually hear from young farmers about why they like to farm, and they get it right - you grow up doing it and you love it.
The people featured in the movie were a relatively diverse group (as far as young farmers go) of pig, chicken, crop, organic, vegetable, and cattle people. It rather nicely shows how issues that impact a young woman raising vegetables in Pennsylvania are similar to the issues a man raising organics in arid areas or cattleman in Throckmorton face.
They did an excellent job of displaying the transition of a farm from one generation to the next. In fact, of everything the movie did, it probably did this the best. Whether it was the sudden loss of a farm’s patriarch, fathers and sons working next to each other, or the feeling of knowing that your farm will be safe in the hands of the next generation it hit the nail on the head. The nails that it hit included the fact that if you aren’t born into it, it’s pretty much impossible to get into the owner side of farming in today’s world.
In contrast to other ‘documentaries’ like Food Inc. and whatever b.s. commercial Chipotle is putting out it uses actual people doing the actual work to make the points it wanted to drive home. They didn’t need to resort to animations of stuff; they showed the actual people doing the actual work. They showed pigs in a CAFO as well as baby chicks being dropped off in bulk.…..and didn’t apologize for it.
The movie also didn’t avoid issues like animal cruelty or GMOs, showing a surprising amount of videos of animal cruelty while discussing the subject.
The Not So Good
For this movie to accomplish what it so blatantly wanted to accomplish (a counter to Food Inc.) it needed to be funded by anybody but Monsanto. It could have been funded by militant terrorists, Nazis, Big XII football fans, Donald Sterling, it doesn’t really matter. Unfortunately, since Monsanto contributes to USFRA, the movie will immediately be dismissed by a large group of people.
I don’t agree with the demonization of Monsanto but I also realize that in the particular arena of public opinion that this movie is trying to do battle, simply being associated with the company is enough to damn it in the eyes of many.
Secondly, and this one is the big one, the movie missed numerous opportunities to make points based on something more than sentimentality. One spot that stood out was when they discussed the various organic and natural labels and how confusing it is to try and figure out what they mean. Instead of spending a few minutes going into detail on what the labels mean they just put up a graphic of the different labels and said they’re confusing.
Rather than speaking of specific studies and/or detailed statistics regarding GMOs, they glossed over the subject with a “you do what you want and I’ll do what I want” attitude.
That’s just a bit lazy. Perhaps James Moll didn’t think the audience would be able to properly handle such nuanced and complex issues if he threw too much at them.
Perhaps I was expecting too much from a movie that just wanted to shine a light on the heart of agriculture rather than argue with the Chipotle’s of the world.
Top individual sale lots of the past week...
- $26,000 - Steer sired by Man Among Boys
- $20,000 - Heifer sired by CRR About Time 743
- $17,501 - Steer sired by No Surprise
- $16,000 - Steer sired by Born Free
- $14,300 - Steer sired by Solid Gold
- $13,500 - Steer sired by Werewolf
- $12,500 - Heifer sired by KJ HVH 33N Redeem 485T ET
- $12,500 - Steer sired by Solid Gold
- $10,500 - Steer sired by HL 100
- $8,750 - Bull sired by I-80
How does the average price of steers sold online change throughout the year?
Weekly average price vs the yearly average based on just over 13,000 steers sold online over the past five years…
The peak is the 4-6th week of the year (post Fort Worth-pre San Antonio) and it goes down at a steady pace throughout the spring.
A relatively similar trend can be seen in the fall where the prices overall are lower than the spring prices.
Past Posts
- 8/2020 [1]
- 10/2019 [18]
- 9/2019 [35]
- 8/2019 [32]
- 7/2019 [33]
- 6/2019 [35]
- 5/2019 [34]
- 4/2019 [34]
- 3/2019 [36]
- 2/2019 [32]
- 1/2019 [35]
- 12/2018 [36]
- 11/2018 [33]
- 10/2018 [35]
- 9/2018 [35]
- 8/2018 [35]
- 7/2018 [36]
- 6/2018 [33]
- 5/2018 [31]
- 4/2018 [10]
- 3/2018 [4]
- 2/2018 [3]
- 1/2018 [4]
- 12/2017 [5]
- 11/2017 [4]
- 10/2017 [5]
- 9/2017 [6]
- 8/2017 [4]
- 7/2017 [9]
- 6/2017 [16]
- 5/2017 [8]
- 4/2017 [7]
- 3/2017 [10]
- 2/2017 [19]
- 1/2017 [23]
- 12/2016 [4]
- 11/2016 [8]
- 10/2016 [7]
- 9/2016 [12]
- 8/2016 [9]
- 7/2016 [9]
- 6/2016 [12]
- 5/2016 [9]
- 4/2016 [13]
- 3/2016 [17]
- 2/2016 [18]
- 1/2016 [18]
- 12/2015 [10]
- 11/2015 [11]
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