Cattle Genetics – Neal Ranch Documentary

[Music] hi my name is michael neal hello my name is jared neal me and my dad and my brother run a brangus commercial herd out of st francisville louisiana neil ranch is a trade name that incorporates all our businesses together going back to our roots my grandfather phil and my dad craig started a commercial cattle business in the late 80s to the early 90s my brother michael and i became really involved in it in 2004 we were trying to create mostly a closed herd we brought brangus bulls into the operation we started breeding briana's bulls into the commercial cattle over the years the herd has pretty much became all branches and ultra black close to being a purebred herd no other cattle females that have been attitudes in 2010 my husband michael and i started another division we call it mid-south cattle from the very beginning our main focus was to produce the best cattle that we could kind of became my passion learning and it's totally different world than the commercial side of the cattle so it was a lot of education which as of today we're running roughly fourteen hundred commercial francis cross cows breeding roughly 500 commercial brangas cross heifers two or three hundred of them help us to go back and i heard every year and the other 200 be sold commercially to people who want to use them as replacements the most enjoyable part is when you take a cop and a bull and you crosston and you do ivf for embryo transfer and you can go right in the pasture 10 months from now and they all brothers and our sisters that's the enjoyment [Music] the female y'all video that's our full brother wow see what the green jacket is in here yeah but they got another one out here come on guys a lot of our operations we do something that ninety percent of people in the business don't do we raise replacement heifers off of heifers that means their her first calf will be a replacement effort we breed our heifers top genetics brangus bulls and their heifer calves will make replacement cows these heifers that go through all the heifers the first time get ai artificial insemination ten days later they'll have a bull put with them to clean them up whatever it don't take but there's always bulls naturally breeding also there's two or three things that makes it successful is genetics management cattle have to have cats the right bulls breeding your cattle putting pounds at the end of the day you know she has to be a mama she has a producer calf every year if she can't produce a cab every year she needs to go our heifers are our priority the steers are our bike products we're trying to raise the replacements well in the big picture i mean we're raising bulls that eventually the company and all that's getting bulls back my name is garrett thomas and i'm the owner and founder of high point sales and marketing they have a large commercial operation and they use bulls from mid-south within their own uh program so that kind of allows them to constantly keep themselves in check so they're as they move the standards up for neil ranch and what they want to produce they kind of apply that and and offer those same benefits to their customers whenever they're raising bulls for them see he has big scrotum a lot of bone his sheep is perfect meaty calf and his epds are through the roof have a plan you need to cull hard don't fall in love with old betsy cause she's just a good old cow whether she had a calf the last four or five years she got to go we put no one else's chaos with our calves no one else's goals with our blood it's all family all three of us it's a closed deal [Music] so you see like this female right here this female will be flushed in her future we'll go in we'll harvest the eggs out of her breed them and then put them in different cows to create calves just like her she's a phenomenal female the whole process almost takes four years to get a bull into our production sale it's about a year of planning then transfer into the cow then the baby calf is born and you get the joy of tagging that baby calf and then that baby calf grows for a whole year and then you scan it and you weigh in it and you see the whole process and when that bull is two years old he finally comes to sale and he gets to have his final home gives you a lot of enjoyment we'd call their operation a seed stock operation so they basically sell the bulls to commercial producers and the calves that come from those bulls at the commercial producers operations that's what essentially goes into the food chain when you go to a grocery store you see select and you see choice and prompts choice and prom that's what you're trying to raise that's the most that's the meat that's got the most marble in there lisa can take that heifer run her numbers made it with a bull in the computer because it's a system and it gives a projected epd of what that calf is going to look like number wise is what it's supposed to come out there's a lot of tools she can use today that she uses a lot of that to her advantage of creating these offspring and these cow and his tools to our benefit we can follow our camps out when they go to feedlots if the doubt data's there we get anywhere from a 87 to a 95 conception rate and raise anywhere from nine into 95 cap crop every year usually do better than that um they're being a little conservative on that hi my name is troy spencer i'm a mixed animal veterinarian with my practice located in mansur louisiana we've we've checked some second calf heifers that'll get up to 98 on a hole there above 90 just about all the time on the commercial herd the most important thing for to have a successful herd is nutrition this pasta is rye grass and clover planted it hi my name is craig neal and i'm brenda nell and we're the founders of the craig neal and sons farm cattle all they do is process grass and you can get them to eat more grass than what you got to buy to feed them then you can come out if you don't do that you're never gonna come out you've got to plant stuff that's gonna give you the most forage we've been learning for 40 years we changed things that don't work because we didn't did everything wrong and once the rye grass plays out some of these fields will shut off and bale it and make haylage out of it commercial cattle stay with the pvm tubs and a mineral trough with the purina wind and rain mineral in it all year round your mineral has to match your soil type your area where you live like we need mineral with a lot of copper in it up here we were having a lot of trouble with with foot problems and then we realized that it um this soil was deficient in copper so we started feeding perino wind and rain which is high in copper and we don't hardly hardly have the foot trouble that we used to five thousand acres that we lease which comes from people have been owning land for hundreds of years up here as long as that landowner is there and they're proud of what you're doing to their place you're there you're not going anywhere there's no more than an inch of topsoil any of this ground up here so when we're planting rye grass and we're preparing the land for winter grazing very little disking is done we try to leave most of the pastures with native grass in it an advantage of doing that is when the raw grass plays out the native grass will take over in early spring and summer and the cow will continue to graze throughout the year what i'm holding here is a scenic preservation award that we received in uh 2016 for just beautification with the land that we have up here we have mostly two types of grass it will be baja grass or some common bermuda the oily grass in the wintertime is rye is what we plant we'll plant more raw grass than what we actually need and we'll graze it and then we'll take a certain percentage of it and shut it off in february and then we make a solid stain if you've got land that's not producing any grass is costing you the more calories you can put on land more income you have a day in a year if there's no grass there then half of the year you're not even utilizing that place so it's very important to have the grass the more native grass is sitting on the land it also prevents erosion which erosion is a huge problem in these hills so we can establish solid standard grass in our places we also eliminate a lot of erosion from running off in the pond settlement run out of it on rotational graze and we found over the years that the smaller we can break these pastures down the more benefits you get out of grazing it also helps in pinning the cattle and setting the cattle up when it's time to pin and when we're shipping we pregnancy tests we host field days and events we have tours and we just try to promote the beef industry in general and educate our customers in any way we can you try to teach them epds you try to teach them the way to raise cattle we have a lot of resources that we've met across the united states in the registered business and we incorporate those into an educational program for our customers i just think it's awesome that when we first started we had a handful of cattle and as michael came into it and then jared came into it to see what they've taken it to the many many more next levels and to just see going from a handful of cattle to what we have today but to be in the cattle business it has to be in your heart if it's not in your heart and you don't need to be in a calendar it seeps from rapport i guess you could say that their drive to do is to get up in the morning to be here and be here all day and even come home late in the evenings i mean it's literally a daylight to dark job that is their passion that's what they want to do they can't see themselves doing anything else they got to like it and both of them do the pride of them ride through the cattle i know that we have made it to this point genetic wise the way the herd looks to where we at i think that's the biggest change to get to where we at today hoping that the next generation will take an interest in it could happen not i don't know can't force anybody to do anything well i went through a phase in my life and after so many years of being in a construction business and owning other businesses at the end of the day when you got away from all the headaches you came back to the farm you ride around and wash the cow and look at the cow and watch the cattle graze it's more enjoyable it's it's with everybody's cooperation michael jared craig my daughter-in-laws myself the grandchildren makes all the difference in the world to be working with your family it was a lot of money it was a lot of mistakes [Music] costly mistakes a lot of them but the only way you're going to learn [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Louisiana GLCI

Views: 2,592

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Id: rQrxjHunbfs

Length: 11min 28sec (688 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021