My 5 Worst breeding mistakes!

[red]

Gonewest- as I said it's from my own little corner of the world.  I've only used Hostage once. Have 1 Hard Core calf on the ground. Money Man is an easy claving bull & has the records & the EPD's to prove. I've gotten a 100# & a 112# calf from him. It's all based on how you feed, your own cows & environment. I've also had great luck w/ Cherry Bomb but this time have a cripple. You can breed 10 cows to one bull & get a huge range of results. That's why I changed the title of the thread to MY worst breeding mistakes. It's on us not the breeder.

Red

 

[Kelly]

I've seen some Hired Man calves at Trausch's and they looked pretty darn good to me.  Smooth shouldered, worked real well on Heat Seeker daughters, 50% of them were baldies.  Joe Sullivan is pretty happy with his too.  Maybe you should wait until the calves are at least a month old before he's classified as a poor breeding choice.  :

 

[kanshow]

I've seen some Hired Man calves at Trausch's and they looked pretty darn good to me.  Smooth shouldered, worked real well on Heat Seeker daughters, 50% of them were baldies.  Joe Sullivan is pretty happy with his too.  Maybe you should wait until the calves are at least a month old before he's classified as a poor breeding choice

  What about those that look like barn burners as babies and then grow up to be a big let down?    We had a Mo Better heifer that was really fantastic as a baby up until she hit a year of age.  Now she is just an average heifer - nice but still average.  I'm not dissing the bull - she was out of a first calf heifer and born unassisted.  She had/has growth but just doesn't have the power I wish she had.  My fault for not picking the right cow. 

 

[Kelly]

I didn't say any of the Hired Man calves I've seen were barn burners.  They are very very young and still have cords hanging from their bellies.  Time will tell I guess.  Not every bull throws 100% everytime, no matter how good the cow is. 

 

[kanshow]

Sorry Kelly!  I wasn't even talking about Hired Man - I was referring to calves that look like they'll amount to something and then don't. 

 

[knabe]

not only that, but great bulls can't even produce a calf better than themselves.  no matter how good the cow is.  cunia.

 

[Show Dad]

Then is it a great bull?

 

[OH Breeder]

I said on the other post on the other web site, too many people take an average cow and want to the bull to produce a super star. Very rarely do you find a bull that will do that. Then people are disappointed with the bull but need to look at their cows harder. Also on another sight, someone said, I had to do a C-Section on a heifer bred to calving ease and now I want to flush her. She is fine made and needs powered up. To get power you are going to have to have some bone and muscle.  IF the heifer had a c-section the first go around and is fine made she ain't going to have a power house on her own the second time. Many babies that I have seen don't come out as peanuts and turn into a mack truck.
I think this business is a real gamble many of the times, I would prefer to gamble with more comfortable odds. Use a calving ease bull and look at the females BW's. Even then you aren't assured it will be what you want.
The worst mistake we ever made was using the wrong straw of semen on a heifer. The bull is popular and is well known. We were told not to worry about it that is BW EPD"s were 1.2 and that shouldn't be any big deal. But, the heifer her self had a BW of 98#s. Needless to say it was one of the worse things I have seen. C-Section went bad the cow hemorrhaged and torn intestines. The calf shoulder locked and the heifer swelled around him. Lost cow and calf. The calf weighed 155#'s. We always check and double check the straws of semen. I couldn't blame the bull, it was our fault.

And I step down off of my soap box..... :-\

 

[Telos]

Well, this is certainly one of the more thought provoking threads we've had in a long time.

What some consider "Saints" others might view as the "Devil's Advocate".

I remember telling Knabe that Cunia as popular as he became, never really produced his replacement or even a national champion in the showring. Maybe that was true but some of that I'll stand corrected and say he has had a tremendous influence. Cunia genetics still have the ability to downsize and add muscle... But with this comes some  issues like monkey mouth, too strait structurally and perhaps a few other negatives. He has definitely been a bull of great influence in both steer and seedstock production.

Anytime we breed these animals for a specific look or phenotype you deal with other problems that seem to bite you in the rear. Like OB said, it is a gamble. We too often ignore the odds when a potential showring winner is part of the equation. Heavy muscled and sound structure in many cases appears to be antagonistic and breeding show steers has become a race to see how thick and also keep them as sound as we can make them. There is a price to pay when we get in this mindset and the odds usually are not in our favor. Therefore it becomes a numbers game and small breeders are at a disadvantage. Show steer or "clubby" genetics has really segregated itself from the functional more fault free type of beef genetics that helps benefits the commercial segment of the industry IMO. I do not know if we can ever figure out a way to validate Show Steer production and make it an integral part of a profitable cow/calf concept.

 

[knabe]

. Heavy muscled and sound structure in many cases appears to be antagonistic

just for fun, i had my horse chiropracter come over and look at my heifers and massage one.  this heifer has a muscle thickness that is about 3-5 inches down from her hooks to her pins, that almost seems to be subtly double muscled.  the total package bull calf, has a tremendous amount of thickness here, making him look squarer hipped than his thickness through his pins would suggest.  we massaged on that muscle, and pulled on her tail, rocking her forward and back (something routinely done with horses).  immediately, her tail set relaxed and she was freer moving.  i think i said it before, but the total package calf is very sound on his pasterns, compared to his half sister who we massaged on,  in the pasterns.  since my cows aren't true big pasture cattle, this may become an issue.

i feel there are very few individuals that can create something better than themselves.  improvements are generally made by filling voids, fixing weaknesses.  to me, there are so few great one's, if there is such a thing, that it's not worth wasting time on.  great cattle seem to not be extreme in any one trait, hence the much used "balancer" marketing strategies, especially by people who were around some of the "great" cattle such as leachman at ankony during one of it's heydays.  to me, the sign of a great one, is his ability to pass on traits that seem to be linked for some reason, and perhaps that they are homozygous for dominant, as well as recessive traits.  again, why line breeding should be practiced more.

 

[simtal]

glad I ain't the only one who thought that dream catcher was a good one only to have some horrid calves.

 

[CAB]

  Well we got our 2 biggest disappointments this year out of the dams of our 2 best calves from last year. WOW, I had this mating evidently messed up. I bred a 1/2 simi and a chi cross cow to Dr. Hook. I was told that he would size down and thicken calves. He made them bigger and narrow IMO. Has anyone else ever used him much, and if so what will he work on? I almost feel like DNA testing these 2. I can't imagine that Dr. Hook could throw these 2 calves. Told my wife that, I was glad that the 3rd cow that I bred to him didn't stick. I think the neighbors bull has a chance now. One of those times that I have to shake my head. Was really looking forward to these calves. Ouch!!!!

 

[JSchroeder]

One of the best local calves I've seen was a Dr. Hook X Simmi/Chi.

 

[CAB]

I've seen a few good ones, but man my cows must not be good enough. LOL. Oh, not funny.

 

[JSchroeder]

Then the bull that hits a homerun in your herd shoots a blank on the same cows in the next guys herd....aint that the way it works?