Leachman Cattle of Colorado | The American Rancher

[Music] coming up you look at right now the cost of land the cost of feed extremely high in the beef industry and then these traits become more and more important and how do we lower these costs our sears came at 620 and our heifers were 590. we're seeing the results on the field rather than just on pieces of paper see how a legacy of herd profitability begins with proper trait selection next on the american rancher [Music] hello and welcome to the american rancher i'm pam minnick on today's program we'll hear from lee leachman of leachman cattle in colorado leachman produces over 2 500 bulls per year but lee's passion is to help ranchers become more profitable with proper trait selection leachman explains that ranchers can build a cow herd that will have lower cost better reproduction and higher valued calves leachman cattle calls their plan ranching legacy 2030. recently lee sat down to visit with economists and other top industry experts to discuss the key drivers for cow-calf profitability so today we're going to talk about the factors that drive profitability in commercial cow-calf ranches in particular given that we sell genetics i'd like to focus on the factors that are influenced by genetics and joining us on the show today are stan beaver from ranch kpi who's widely recognized as an expert in ranch management he served as a texas a m extension economist for 27 years and has helped out a lot of ranches that we're acquainted with and also logan hoffman who's the beef extension associate at colorado state university and these two guys have worked extensively with ranchers to help them better understand the financial performance of their cow calf operations good morning guys it's it's great to have you joining us today martin lee yeah thanks for having us lee so let's start out with the big question of the day and that is as you guys study these different ranches what are the key factors that drive profitability in those cow calf operations stan why don't you tackle that first well yeah you know first and foremost uh we would love for every cow to lay down and have a calf get bread you know lay down and have it and then finally wean that cap couple that then with the cost to raise that cow or maintain that cow through for a year and then ultimately what's it cost to wean that calf so and i always talk about the three-legged stool which is productivity the cost to get that productivity and then ultimately uh coming back to you lee you know what what kind of price am i going to get for that quality animal and hopefully i produce i like to think of framing that mindset and in the the the idea of maximization versus optimization and uh you know for so for so long kind of the battle cry is maximize maximize maximize and what maximization speaks to on the productivity level is is revenue but optimization brings in a full picture of profitability and so weaning weights or just the weights of the cow in general you have to couple that with the per unit expenses or else you're looking uh only at half the picture and so i would just challenge folks to think about optimization rather than maximization and in kind of selecting for bulls and how the you know the cows are going to react to that and also how the offspring are going to do because of that you've heard me say this before you know i i ask ranchers typically okay so you know if you're going to focus on winning weights what's the greatest influence for winning weights and again you know if we think about the top three things we would love to think that you know my genetics you know all of that all my management is the greatest influence of what those weights are that's not to say it's not important because they are my goodness once i get a calf on the ground i want that to be the best performing calf that i've got again that's what your objective for owning the cows and how does those winning weights influence you know what i'm doing in order to keep these cows right one thing i get asked a lot by ranchers is what does it really cost to keep a heifer back to replace a cow that's moving out of the herd as you would expect what you're doing is accumulating those costs to that replacement heifer over the course of three calendar years for two years so she finally weans a calf now what's it cost and what's all those costs uh that have accumulated but by the time that female finally gets added to the to the balance sheet on any particular ranch you're looking from a low of about thirteen hundred dollars uh up to goodness in in some cases you know approaching two thousand dollars and then be that group of branches that would probably be better off uh just buying their own replacement heifers and trying to develop them so as i look at this kind of summarizing this deal from a genetic standpoint i kind of always think it comes down to a handful really a handful of things i mean we want that cow to reproduce more which is where you started out stand more calves more reproduction we want to minimize the amount of turnover particularly unwanted turnover and the young end of those females i think we really as as you talked about logan we want to we want to optimize the stocking rate and minimize the amount of expensive purchased feed or expensive raised feed that we have to feed them and then and then still have a product that's heavy and and also valuable in the marketplace right i mean it's got to be all those things is that did i leave anything off that that kind of short list some people have heard me say you don't control what the average price of calves are if the average price of calves are going to come down from two dollars to a dollar fifty there's not much you're going to be able to do about it from a from a cow calf rancher standpoint but what you do in fact control is whether you're above or below the average and from your standpoint as a seed stock operator you know i want to have those genetics that are that are going to give me that calf that the market is demanding i want to be on the high side of that average price not on that low side of the average price so genetics plays a big role there up next you look at right now the cost of land the cost of feed that's extremely high in the beef industry these traits become more and more important how do we lower these costs learn more about improving your outfit's bottom line here on the american rancher welcome back to the american rancher in this segment lee visits with two of the industry's leading geneticists about how commercial herds can better select their replacement heifers to build a legacy of increased profitability so in our first session today we heard about the keys to cow calf profitability from stan beavers and logan hoffman they spent a lot of time talking about fertility and longevity cow feed costs and just the overall productivity of that cow including how many pounds she produces and how that all comes together and you balance that with the cost to look at profitability in this session we're lucky to have dr kent anderson from zoetis and dr mark allen with us um to talk about strategies on how to genetically improve these key profit drivers these are our two guys who i think are two of the best minds in the industry regarding cattle genetics and so we're really lucky to have them you know i think a lot of ranchers do a pretty good job picking their bulls but i just think this whole replacement selection procedure is is very inaccurate i know when we pick our seed stock we have all these epds we could look at that rate them on all these different traits and then we make decisions based on combinations of those traits and then i watch my commercial customers walk out into a pen and try to do all that visually so it's an exciting time i think to be in the commercial cattle industry because we're having all new tools available to commercial ranchers to select replacement heifers and advance their cattle program so i want to start with kent anderson and ask you kent to explain to us the background behind how inherit select was developed by zoetis and what that product will do long story short uh you had this wonderful resource of over 1.4 million animal records that come from a variety of breeds and crosses thereof the desire to make those predictions genomic enhanced and we had that technology and some experience with dairy and the two of us came together and we genomically enhanced then the lcoc evaluation and then the the really fun thing was during that process we got to thinking you know we have the opportunity here to bring genetic evaluation to commercial cow calf producers and other commercial segments of the industry hence this companion but separate evaluation to the lcoc was born called inherit that enables commercial cross-bred replacement heifer candidates to be tested and get access to all of the same individual trait as well as index predictions and parent verification and genomic predictions of breed composition to finally then usher in this technology for commercial producers can just give us an overview of the trait categories and the kind of information that we can extract from that analysis for us a commercial producer on their herd so there's 15 different individual traits that range from the production measures of earth weight weaning weight yearling weight to the maternal traits where we're really putting a lot of effort and those would involve everything from mature cow size teat and utter soundness as well as milk and weaning weight and as a side note a very exciting development on fertility and then also one of the strengths of your database as you know that really excites us is the massive amount of dry mary information to attack the cost side of beef production and so we have that as well as post-weaning growth and then the full complement of carcass traits um to enable us to genetically design cattle to perform on grids and formulas so it's very comprehensive and then we um through that product can give the customer access to dollar ranch and dollar profit as well as the zoetis indexes and some of the other features i mentioned previously you look at right now the cost of land the cost of feed that's extremely high in the beef industry and we start getting pressure on the overall carbon footprint that that we're being held responsible for these traits become more and more important how do we lower these costs we have to think the ability of the commercial rancher to utilize inherit and have genetic information on their females as it relates to dry matter and intake and mature weight um reducing cost bring mature weight lower and uh the genetic differences and actual dry matter intake those cows that eat less but still do what they need to do is is huge and i think it's i think it's a big part of one of the great advantages of this database the the sheer amount of data and quality of data that's allowed this product to be built yeah i sure think we've made tons of progress as an industry improving growth rate but we really haven't had any control on the mature weight and the feed intake and you know without putting those in check we're just going to go into orbit i mean obviously we can select for cattle that grow faster and eat more but they're not really the ones we want we want the animals that grow faster and and do it from a cow base that's moderate and and do it in a feedlot where they really convert well these are key these antagonists you know we select for animals that decreased fat stay away from yield fours and fives however in the cow herd that's antagonistic you know we would like to have females that tend to carry a little fat a little easier produce that fat on those low quality forages and breed back so it's uh these maternal indexes like dollar ranch are going to be extremely important in the future for those that are retaining replacements as you were saying all that talking about these replacement heifers i started to make a list of the things that we can't see when we go to pick those replacement efforts right we really can't see how good their t-nutter quality is going to be as they age we can't see how much feed they're going to require to stay in body condition we can't see what their lifetime productivity is going to be we've all picked out our favorite replacement heifer who's the big good-looking one that's born early and come back and find her open after the first calf i mean that's happened to all of us um and and we really can't see whether she's going to produce a calf that's going to be a calf that's really going to have a tremendous amount of value in the feedlot and on the rail coming up our sears came at 620 and our heifers were 590. so i mean we're seeing the results on the field rather than just on pieces of paper we'll hear from scott bell and his son casey to see how their family is putting leachman's plan to work you're watching the american rancher welcome back to the american rancher scott bell and his son casey ranch outside of dolores colorado they've been using leachman genetics and zoetis inherit dna tests to improve their cowherd and build their legacy of herd profitability over the years i've just been trying to build up the genetics in them and get better calves on the ground easier more fish and cows smaller so i started looking around and found leachman cattle company and i'd heard of them before we ran 170 mother cows gone solely to leachman stabilizer bulls and put them on all of our cattle and are very very impressed with the results most of them are low pack cattle and by crossing them with these stabilizer low path bulls have been a great benefit to us i think you know one of the things that uh that we ask ranchers is you know as you look at all the different ways that you have been looked at genetics over the last 15 years i think really at the heart of it and and kind of i love that about your family and and all the families we get to work with at the heart of it we're trying to make investments today that are going to give us a better chance of doing what we love tomorrow right pretty exciting when you have a new calf off of the heifer to check on her and that calf is up and vigorous within just a couple of minutes we weaned a little bit early i think our steers came at 620 and our heifers were 590. uh we're shooting for a 20 000 profit cal herd that's our goal so tell us about what you found buying those females and how that worked always a challenge to take cattle out of a seed stock environment and put them in a commercial environment well i know when you sold those uh heifers to us you want them back you didn't get them sorry those are the best females that we've got in the herd they're easy cavers great moms i can't say enough good about them their confirmation is amazing what we're trying to do now is replace the cattle that we have that are not leachman and get get more of the stabilizer blood in our in our cattle herd because we're it's proven itself to us all the phenotypes the mother care the milk the protection that the mother gives to that baby you know a lot of people get a mutt dog from the pound or something and it ends up being the best dog that you've ever had and i think when you start getting into hybrids and everything you get the best of those breeds and you don't uh you're not hanging on to all the bad stuff that comes with uh purebreds like you look at a a purebred golden retriever or uh german shepherds they have problems with their hips and stuff like that it's the same concept with cattle you you get rid of all the bad stuff in a breed and evolution takes over and you get the best stuff out of those four breeds and crossing with angus we get the best out of the angus as well so i ran a business as a construction uh worker independent for my whole life and i always looked for the best way to do things in my company and i always hired the best subs that i could because i wanted the final product to be the best that i could and so we built a lot of custom homes we built a lot of steel buildings for commercial buildings for companies and all the time i look for the very best craftsmanship from my subs i look for the very best material and i always went overboard when i built something and that's what i see in in your company lee is everyone goes overboard to help you to gain more knowledge to learn how to raise the better animal and to be the top of the the cattle business and we're that's why we're excited about it we want to continue to work with your group and i call them the family because you guys treat us just like family just as soon as we knew it was it was amazing but and that's what you're trying to do it seems like to us is help us to improve our genetics so that we can have the best cattle that the country can provide thank you for joining us in the program today if you're interested in learning more about these topics or hearing from our speakers today there's a seminar recorded online that's a long version of today's program and you can find that at leachman.com of course we want to invite you to come out and join us for our upcoming sale that's next week saturday march 20th we're going to inspect cattle all day and it'll be a chance to spend time with us and see the offering on sunday march 21st we'll have 200 replacement heifers that'll sell that day through the auction on monday march 22nd we'll be offering 500 high dollar profit stabilizer bulls so come join us for all our hospitality we'll be social distancing but it'll be a leachman sale event and of course if you can't join us out here in fort collins during the week of the sale we invite you to protest to participate through our representatives who can buy and bid or help you pick out cattle in the sale and of course you can watch on superiors click to bid where you'll see videos of all the sale animals and you can bid on them remotely so come join us we'd love to earn your business thank you to find out more about the annual leachman bull sale log on to leachman.com and to find out more about us visit our website theamericanrancher.com or connect with us on facebook i'm pam minich for our entire american rancher team thanks for joining us we'll see you next [Music] [Applause] time [Music] do that was superior

Channel: Superior Productions

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Length: 22min 3sec (1323 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2021