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Post by btlrupert on Jun 15, 2015 10:17:39 GMT -6
I spent yesterday afternoon looking through all of my A.I. magazines and ads. Don't ask me why other than I was bored. Was pondering some mating's for the coming fall. I have come to the conclusion if we would all use the A.I. bulls listed and all of their glorious traits, cattle breeding would be a piece of cake!! The A.I. studs are much smarter than we are!!! :-/I was so disgusted when I finished it was unreal. Forced me to eat two bowls of ice cream! I am more convinced that buying bulls from sound programs where you can see the dams and progeny in the real world is the way to make progress. Guess I am getting old and grumpy but that's how I see it! Opinions welcome!
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Post by George on Jun 15, 2015 11:33:21 GMT -6
I think if a person sticks to some of the PROVEN bulls in the AI studs OR from breeders, they can generally make greater progress than relying solely on an unproven bull picked from a breeder.
But homework needs to be done and goals kept in mind.
I also think if you breed your 5-10 best cows to those PROVEN bulls, you will likely be able to raise your own future herd sires, rather than buy them from someone else. And you have the benefit of much better personal knowledge in the cows (dams) of those bulls.
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Post by btlrupert on Jun 15, 2015 11:51:46 GMT -6
You make sense George,! I got so frustrated it seemed all bulls had been puffed and fluffed they did not even look like a darn bull! Just a grumpy old Southerner !! I do think this nasty fescue here would blow the wheels out from under most of them!
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Post by Glenn on Jun 15, 2015 11:58:30 GMT -6
I'm not sure I agree with George on this one. I increasingly see AI as just another "marketing gimmick". I have zero faith in EPDs so even "proven" EPDs are suspect to me.
1.)Get to know your fellow breeders. Pick some you trust. Follow their cow families. Buy with confidence.
2.)Get to know your cattle. Know your cow families. Use your bulls with confidence.
My 1-2 punch for success!!!
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Post by George on Jun 15, 2015 13:02:02 GMT -6
I'm not sure I agree with George on this one. I increasingly see AI as just another "marketing gimmick". I have zero faith in EPDs so even "proven" EPDs are suspect to me. 1.)Get to know your fellow breeders. Pick some you trust. Follow their cow families. Buy with confidence. 2.)Get to know your cattle. Know your cow families. Use your bulls with confidence. My 1-2 punch for success!!! I edited my other post to include breeders as well as AI studs. Expanding my thoughts, I think that a breeder could use bulls like Harland and 3027 and do better than they will buying and using 99%+ of the unproven bulls out there, whether they are AI stud bulls or bulls bought from other breeders. There, again, I emphasize that a person needs to do their homework and examine their goals in their choices of AI bulls. Also, everyone must take anything I say as someone who is primarily concerned with building a cowherd. My primary goal is not selling bulls or producing showring winners, although both should be a byproduct of building a really, really good cowherd. But I generally don't get very excited about using a bull until there are a number of his daughters in production.
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Post by btlrupert on Jun 15, 2015 15:07:46 GMT -6
Understand! My goal is to blend two line bred lines and it makes it more difficult. We have to be so careful as to the bulls we put on fescue it is not even funny! I do have a few outcross cattle and used 755T on them. My only strategy now on picking a service sire or young clean up bull is look at conformation of the bulls dam, production record and half sib daughters to the bulls I consider. I guess if it was a perfect way it would not be as fun!!
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Post by George on Jun 15, 2015 16:15:49 GMT -6
Understand! My goal is to blend two line bred lines and it makes it more difficult. We have to be so careful as to the bulls we put on fescue it is not even funny! I do have a few outcross cattle and used 755T on them. My only strategy now on picking a service sire or young clean up bull is look at conformation of the bulls dam, production record and half sib daughters to the bulls I consider. I guess if it was a perfect way it would not be as fun!! Yeah, looking at pedigrees can really limit you - when you have a program in mind. This year, besides already excluding Titan 23D, I have made the decision to exclude using any bulls that have M326, Durango, or 719T in their pedigree. My choices for possible AI sires have gone down by 90% or more.
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Post by larso on Jun 15, 2015 16:35:20 GMT -6
AI does allow you to use a bull and see how his off spring perform over your own herd with out the expense of purchasing a sire and then finding out he's not what you expected. The truck load of bulls that I transported last week, if I was to have a choice of one of them it would not have been the most expensive one it would have been the one that sold for only $8000's. Spending $40,000 to me is a huge gamble and that is where AI pays for itself and as George says do your research 1st. IMO.
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Post by btlrupert on Jun 15, 2015 17:30:13 GMT -6
Agree. However I am limited on cattle that work on fescue so have to lean that way. The benefit I have is I can visit southern operations and see management methods I can't see it in an AI catalog. Seeing perspective bulls dam walking around in the pasture here in the South where it hit 94 today helps. If cattle have hair we are screwed! Guess I'm becoming more hard headed everyday .. No size fits all other than we all want to produce a quality product.
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tff
Fresh Calf
Posts: 45
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Post by tff on Jun 16, 2015 5:37:40 GMT -6
George, Why have you chosen to exclude m326?
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Post by George on Jun 16, 2015 13:08:46 GMT -6
George, Why have you chosen to exclude m326? I was wondering if someone would ask me about that! I really have nothing against any of those bulls. It is just that it seems almost everything in the breed goes back to one or more of them right now - and I decided I wanted to breed/offer something that is different. I have one nice About Time daughter, a bred heifer, that is the only female that I currently have in the herd that traces back to any of those bulls - and I'm probably just going to sell her - if someone will pay me what I think she's worth.
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Post by mrvictordomino on Jun 16, 2015 14:29:04 GMT -6
George, Why have you chosen to exclude m326? I was wondering if someone would ask me about that! I really have nothing against any of those bulls. It is just that it seems almost everything in the breed goes back to one or more of them right now - and I decided I wanted to breed/offer something that is different. I have one nice About Time daughter, a bred heifer, that is the only female that I currently have in the herd that traces back to any of those bulls - and I'm probably just going to sell her - if someone will pay me what I think she's worth. I don't have anything by those bulls either George
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Post by George on Jun 16, 2015 15:21:19 GMT -6
I don't have anything by those bulls either George Danny, LOL! And I'd bet the Deewall's don't have any in their herd either! Now, I just started on Glenn today, telling him that he needed to "branch out" from his Line 1s. I don't know how much progress I'm going to make with him though.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Jun 16, 2015 19:46:35 GMT -6
I'm not impressed by some of these new bulls the AI studs are promoting. Really hard to justify investing money in AI in a sire that either doesn't have calves on the ground yet or daughters in production. I agree with one of George's posts above about doing your research and going straight through a proven breeder when selecting AI sires. That's what we've done lately and our new herd bull is a product of AI to a bull we did a lot of homework on and bred to one of our best cows and we have another AI bull calf in this calf crop if he keeps on the track he is on we may keep him too and just do some selective AI with what we have left in the semen tank.
It boils down to this, breeding AI to a proven sire is probably on the surface less risky than breeding to an unproven yearling bull. At least with a proven AI sire you have some calves from different programs you can evaluate the performance on and have a good idea what you might expect. You can either buy or breed what you think is a great bull but until you get some calves out of him and some daughters in production you really do not know what you have. Just look at some of these full sibling flushmates out there you can get semen on that used the same "batter" in how they were bred but they do not perform equally. You can see it in your own herd probably, when you breed the same bull to the same cow do you get an equal sibling? Probably not, you can probably say that 1 was better than the other.
If you are a line breeder it's obvious that you are going to be really limited to what you may select for AI but for a small select breeding herd like ours where we are not line breeding if we only ran our 20+ cows with the same bull every year we'd be changing out herd bulls more often than about the 3 or 4 years that we currently do so we try to AI our best cows looking for some kind of outcross that can be our next herd sire. Everyone has different breeding and management philosophies, if you are going to AI you are probably going to find bulls you like better by finding breeders who run programs that you like and have genetics and practices that you feel you can implement into your program without drastically changing who you are. A bull stud AI salesman is not going to be able to give you the insight you are looking for as much as the guy that bred and uses that bull can.
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Post by btlrupert on Jun 16, 2015 21:01:46 GMT -6
Well said!
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Post by tumblingrunfarm on Jun 29, 2015 21:47:26 GMT -6
I would like to see bulls such as 103T and the 2105 bull used again from the old Rock Hollow Farm program. But, the thing is how do you market those older genetics? Even the older Remitall bulls like Boomer and Governor as well. So many people today are chasing these small framed bulls that look like show steers. Danny at JMS Polled Herefords has a great bull, 202 that I think would cross well on Remitall genetics.
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Post by hoekland on Jun 30, 2015 0:37:18 GMT -6
I'm probably a month late with my reply, but Hereford breeding would have been easy if pigment was no issue and all Herefords were either horned or polled.
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Post by larso on Jun 30, 2015 14:32:40 GMT -6
Couldn't agree more Harley, I've marked good bulls and kept IMO inferior ones purely because of cosmetics but I don't have a chance in hade's of selling a poorly marked calf. I think it is one of the biggest issues holding the breed back. At the end of the day we are selling animals to produce beef not animals to be displayed in a zoo.
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Post by strojanherefords on Jul 1, 2015 0:03:54 GMT -6
I'm probably a month late with my reply, but Hereford breeding would have been easy if pigment was no issue and all Herefords were either horned or polled. If there is a rhyme or reason for eye pigment, I would sure like to know.
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Post by hoekland on Jul 1, 2015 0:51:16 GMT -6
I'm probably a month late with my reply, but Hereford breeding would have been easy if pigment was no issue and all Herefords were either horned or polled. If there is a rhyme or reason for eye pigment, I would sure like to know. No functional reason whatsoever, BUT it sells bulls. If our predecessors selected for eye pigment the whole stigma would have been laid to rest ages ago the way they've laid it to rest in simmental (proper simmental cattle, not the angus lookalikes)cattle.
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Post by larso on Jul 1, 2015 2:14:33 GMT -6
I've said this before that there was supposed to have been research done in Aus. some years ago where they found that eye pigment only contributed to reducing the chance of eye cancer by 10% how they worked that out I don't know and if you asked me to find it I wouldn't know where to look. It's all about the eye setting but if you have a look at most of the bulls in AI mags. it not easy to find the bull with the ideal eye setting.
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