In response to last week’s Getting Your Money’s Worth article, Steve Campbell with Tailor Made Cattle sent the following email.
Kit, when my father and mother were married in 1950, my father told my mother NOT to ask a rancher how many cows he had. That was like asking how much money do you have! He told my mother to count his bulls and multiply by 50 – and she would be pretty close.
This implies that most ranchers were running 50 cows per bull in 1950. Seventy-four years later, status quo ranchers are only able to run 25 cows per bull. What changed?
For the past 50 years, the status quo beef industry has been single-mindedly focused on increasing weaning weights – at the expense of reproduction. As a result of this incessant selection for bigger and bigger weaning weights, cows and bulls are 40% larger in size – and much less fertile.
I have heard from a credible source that many of the high-growth bulls being collected by the big-name AI studs can only produce minute amounts of semen per collection. In contrast, Pharo Cattle Company™ has had many bulls consistently produce 200 to over 400 units per collection.
Quote Worth Re-Quoting
“What’s right isn’t always popular. What’s popular isn’t always right.” ~ Howard Cosell