Last week Jerry York and I spend some time in eastern Oklahoma, southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas setting up our next WLJ tour. Neither of us have ever spent any time in this part of the country yet we discovered that it is huge cow-calf and stocker country. We were at the south end of the Osage country where the blue stem grasses flourish. Just a little further east, you get into the challenging fescue country. Producers there hate it in July and August, but they like it the rest of the year. We learned that there is quite a bit of fall calving in this region.
We stopped by the Joplin Regional Stockyards on sale day—Monday is when they sell feeder cattle and they had 6,000 head that day, selling mostly in small lots. We were told by management that there were 27 order buyers in the seats. This market is impressive, with pen space for 9,000 head of cattle under roof with air conditioning. I’ve never seen anything like it in in all my travels. They attract cattle from a wide area.
Jackie Moore, owner of the market, has an impressive operation that performs quite a service for the cattle industry. He brings in a lot of light calves—both steers and heifers—in a kind of stocker backgrounding deal. The cattle have plenty of pasture to graze but they also have access to feed in very simple feed bunks. He takes on a lot of high-risk cattle that require extra care, and has a heck of a good hand managing the operation, Bruce Hall. Bruce said their death loss is around 1 percent. They sort them up into load lots and sell to cattle feeders.
In this part of the world they can carry about one cow to two acres, so its very productive country. They also graze a lot of Bermuda grass which they had to seed, and a lot of guys have planted other grasses in with the fescue to dilute the summertime toxicity, which is common in other parts of the country. Most everyone has a love/hate relationship with fescue.
Some of the commercial operations we visited were remarkable. Gary and Kathy Wilmoth run a large commercial cow herd on a couple thousand acres—considered a big outfit in this region. They are also very progressive. Every female has been DNA-tested, and if a replacement heifer doesn’t fit the specifications they are looking for, she doesn’t make it into the herd. They watch calf production very closely and expect to wean a 750-lb. calf or larger. If that cow can’t do it, she’s gone. These folks have more records on their herd than a lot of purebred operations.
Next, we slid into the Ozark Mountains to visit an old acquaintance, O.D. Cope, who is a long-time subscriber. O.D. got into ranching the hard way as his father died when he was 15 and left him with a brush-covered hill ranch that he managed to clear off and make work. He’s added several other patches of pasture along the way. His three sons are involved in the operation today. O.D. has a fall-calving cow herd, which is a little of this and a little of that, and runs a few yearling cattle. He also has the only alfalfa stands that we saw in the area.
Another impressive call was down in Charleston, AR—Jim Moore, a commercial Angus operation, who keeps remarkable records on his cows and calf production. He retains ownership of his cattle and markets them on the U.S. Premium Beef Grid. He told us that while he does pay attention to calving ease and the growth traits, he is starting to pay more attention to carcass quality traits, intramuscular fat and ribeye area. I can’t remember exactly how his carcasses graded but they all graded Choice with a high percentage of Certified Angus Beef (CAB) and an extremely high percentage of Prime with a few Yield Grade 4s. He said when he started selling on the grid he saw a difference of $800 between the lowest and the highest value carcass. His goal is to produce nothing but CAB and Prime.
Perhaps one of my favorite stops was to see an old friend, Mike Armitage. Mike and I got started in the publication business about the same time. He worked for the Record Stockman for a while as a fieldman and for the American BreedsJournal for a stint. Then he started trading bred cows and heifers, hosting a big female sale a couple times a year. Over the years Mike was able to put together his own operation and now runs a cow herd on about 5,000 deeded acres in eastern Oklahoma. He also assembled a Quarter Horse brood mare band of around 100 head. It’s great to see a good friend achieve his dream.
This will be a great tour for 2018. I’ve only mentioned a few stops and there are many more. We’re planning on starting the tour May 20 from Tulsa, OK, and we hope to see you there. — PETE CROW
