Sorry, I haven’t had much time to write, trying to get the catalog put together for our annual SELECTION DAY Sale on April 21. Looks like we will have about 40 head of Braunvieh and Hybrid females including a group of 21 commercial half blood Braunvieh Influence Bred Heifers, F1 and F2 Hybrid bred heifers, FB,PB and Hybrid Open Heifers and a select group of PB and Hy pairs.
There is going to be right at 60 head of bulls and some of the best that we have tested for several years.
We want to invite everyone to come and eat with us on April 21 at the ranch, Fayette. Whether you come just to look or look to buy, you are welcome and we would like to show you what we have and visit about what you do.
We are also getting ready for a bus tour group from Indiana. They are going to stop by on April 3. It will be a good excuse to practice getting things straightened up for the sale.
Until next time,

I am sure getting alot of emails and phone calls so I know there are at least some that are reading this. It is rewarding to know that the interest is out there. Now if we can just get the comments and questions on this Blog, we will be able to help more people. Believe me, I don’t mind getting your emails and phone calls and if that works better for you, continue.
You should be able to put a comment and/or question on this blog, though, with no more effort. You don’t even have to use your real name and your email address will not show up on the Blog so you won’t get spammed.
I know by the counter on our website that you are out there. Try it.

For those of you who have received your “Progressive Cattleman” issue this week, believe me, a camera does add about 30 pounds. If they keep wanting to take pictures, I’m going to have to start demanding make-up. I really don’t have that many wrinkles, the sun was in my eyes.
Now you have heard all the excuses, I think they did a real nice job of describing our philosophy on keeping Controlled Grazing simple. I truly think the reason it is not “standard” practice is the fact that most of the institutions, grazing consultants and “graziers” that have written more than one book, have made it sound complicated and harder to do than it really is.
It is not an all or nothing deal. What ever improvements you make, large or small, it shows up as more forage to graze and/or a longer grazing season for you which means less hay for you to feed.
I won’t say that you can’t make a mistake, because we sure have. But, as I told a customer yesterday on the phone, if you ease into it the first year and make sure you have some back-up acreage to go to, you will be amazed at the difference.
Improved grass is just one of the benefits. A larger one in some operations, is the decreased labor. We think it takes about one half the labor to run the same number of cows.
It really can be as simple as planting some fence posts and stringing some wire and moving cows around.

Finished loading the steer calves today that were delivered to our Calf Roundup on January 27 and 28. We sold and loaded the heifers about 10 days after they got here. We had to hold the steers until Feb. 23 because the buyer’s pens were full.
It worked out pretty well. The steers gained from 55 lb. to 81 lb. per head while they were here at an ADG of 2.36 lb. at a cost of $.83 per lb. That was tremendous. The weather worked for us and so did the market.
The check for 265 head of steers that weighed from 450 lb. to 890 lb. was almost $280,000 (two hundred eighty thousand dollars). Boy, what should good bulls be worth this spring?
We have grouped and marketed over 17,000 calves for customers since 1994. We hold the Calf Roundup two times annually, in January for spring calves and August for fall calves. The calves are sorted by weight (not color) and sold in load lots to the buyer.

Two years ago we added Age and Source Verification to the Roundup program to offer buyers calves that have the EID tags applied and are verified by Micro Beef Technologies of Amarillo, Tx. Most of the groups that we have marketed are raised by 12 to 20 customers and sired by 10 to 25 of our bulls, both purebred and hybrid.

We have received some tremendous carcass results from some of these groups. It is available on our website.

You know for a grass farmer, we are sure using alot of hay. Ground 4 loads (8 bales) today and will have to do close to that tomorrow. We depend on fall rains to be able to stockpile several paddocks of fescue for dry cow grazing in the winter, and we never got it last fall. As you all know, hay is kind of in short supply this winter, mainly because of the Texas and Oklahoma drought and the prices it was bringing there. We are going to be around 100 bales short, even after stretching it with DDG’s, corn syrup (yellow water) and 2 year old wheat haylage in a vertical mixer.

The vertical mixer has been a big help but is too heavy to feed with in the pasture so we use a Kelly Ryan wagon to feed on grass. We put up 2 old liquid fertilizer tanks two years ago to take advantage of the cheap ”syrup” from ethanol plants to help us grind hay. As soon as we put them up, the price went from $5/ton to $60. We still use it, but use water as well.

Hopefully, if the weather stays good, some extra hay will show up and we will get through. It’s sure been a good winter so far.