Ryan Noble of Yuma, CO’s Noble Ranch put up a picture of a cute baby Angus heifer calf at the beginning of his Cattlemen’s College presentation.
“She’s a dandy, and she’s pretty like her mama,” he said, giving a detailed description of the calf’s visible qualities.
“What’s your guess—and I emphasize the word guess—is she going to make a great cow or is she going to make a great feeder?”
Noble ran through the timeline of what the “great cow” choice would mean: about 950 days before that pretty heifer calf could prove her worth as a commercial cow when her first calf is harvested.
“That’s a considerable amount of time to invest in an animal without any idea how it’s going to perform,” Noble pointed out.
“So, you need to ask yourself, in this day and age, ‘Is it really feasible to spend large amounts of capital on an inferior production system that will take you almost 1,000 days to analyze whether its effective or not?’”
Noble positioned this possibility opposite his preferred genetic evaluation program. He described the $28/head cost of the test as an investment in information he can use now to better his commercial herd.
Among other things, he said that genetically screening potential replacement heifers for desirable traits when they are young had dropped his ranch’s culling rate significantly.
“We went from a three-year average of about 15-17 percent cull rate to meet our expectations to less than 2 percent just because we measured, and changed our course.”
He said that genetically profiling your commercial heifer calves comes with returns on investment even if the calf becomes a feeder. By tracking carcass traits and grading potential—something offered in most genetic profile tests—you can quickly shift strategies if there is a problem.
“Luckily for us, marbling is highly heritable and is easy to fix. But you cannot fix what you don’t measure. … You don’t want to measure marbling on the packer’s rail. It’s an expensive place to learn you may be raising low-marbling cattle.”
Of course, for the cow-calf rancher to know the true quality of their genetic investment means they have to get information back. This generally means retained ownership.
“Often times, smaller operations don’t think that that’s an option for them,” said Shawn Tiffany of Tiffany Cattle Co. of Herington, KS.
“But a good feedlot will partner with you and get that data back to you.”
He acknowledged the worries many commercial operators have about the change in income flow, but pointed out that a good feedlot partner will also help with that.
“In our experience, once people start retaining ownership, they typically don’t quit,” he added, describing the information and the changes that can come from it as addictive.
“There’s this misnomer out there that you have to be big to innovate, and that’s not true.” — Kerry Halladay, WLJ editor
