Talking Cattle! My Breeds and Why I don’t have Purebred

how's it going guys welcome to today's video in today's video we are talking all about cattle so more specifically we're gonna be talking about breeds of cattle what breed my cattle are and the differences between cross bred and purebred cow so a couple weeks ago I shot a video that was all about kind of my history and how I got here and everything but one kind of key detail that I left out of that was the history of this herd of cattle so you guys may remember I mentioned in the previous video that my grandparents came out here in 57 but the cattle didn't make it out here until about the mid 70s I want to say it was somewhere around 1975 my grandpa told me that he bought fifteen purebred Hereford heifers Hereford heifers try to say that now a lot of you have probably heard of Hereford cattle and they're still fairly popular today but back in the 70s Herefords are like what Black Angus are today Herefords everybody had Herefords that was the only breed to have in those days so that's what we started with here now as you've noticed looking at my cattle they are almost exclusively black now I say almost exclusively black because clearly number 18 there is an example of a variation from that solid black and especially her that's solid red red white bass bracha face kind of see peaking back there and we've got a couple of black white face as well so a little over 40 years ago this herd was pure bred her furred and now 40 years later this herd is mostly Black Angus so let's talk about how that happened and why now to the best of my knowledge the different Bulls that we have had here since 1975 are Hereford bulls obviously my grandpa told me once about a short horn bull Red Angus bulls I've seen I believe I've seen a Charlet bull out here once this I'm just going back from memories you know when I was a little kid since I've kind of been in charge of things I've used Red Angus Black Angus & Hereford pretty much exclusively now from a producer standpoint you want dart cattle you want black hided cattle because for whatever reason they always bring a premium in the sale ring and I think the reason for that is that the Black Angus breed Association has done a really good job marketing that breed you hear a lot of times you hear about certified Black Angus there was even a restaurant called Black Angus and that people that know nothing about cattle have probably heard of Black Angus so it commands a premium so with that being said you might ask yourself why even bother breeding to any other breeds why not just breed only Black Angus cattle have purebred Black Angus mothers and breed two purebred Black Bulls and then you get that premium every time right it makes perfect sense but there's a good reason why we don't do that now I'm getting a little ahead of myself when I say we I'm talking about commercial cow-calf producers obviously there's a place in the industry for purebred breeders we need purebred breeders to get purebred Bulls and the reason why we want to use purebred bulls is because pure breads are predictable so when I say they're predictable what I'm getting at is I can go down to a black gold Black Angus sale and I can buy a bowl now when I buy that bowl I can look at his EPD sheet EPB is expected progeny differences and what that tells me is basically what his calves will do as far as how heavy they'll be when they're born how heavy they will be when they're weaned how heavy they'll be at their yearling weights and a lot of other data there is they now even have a docility score for Bulls so you know if you're getting a crazy bull or a gentle bull they have the expected milk production they have scrotal circumference which is just an indicator of how productive a bowl will be if you're going to use them for breeding so they have all kinds of data that you can learn about these animals and the reason is is because purebred is basically inbred I mean that sounds kind of like an icky word people don't like to use but the reality is is to get a purebred animal you have to keep breeding like animals to like animals to create that breed so at some point you will cross over those lines and you it has to be inbred in order to be purebred so over the years through inbreeding we have created all these breeds and we've done a great job making these animals very predictable we know what color they're gonna be we know how big they're gonna get we know how fast they're gonna grow basically all the relevant data that we want on these animals we have it now it almost sounds like well I mean pure breads are the best right because you know they're so predictable that can help us with management decisions we kind of can bank on what the animals are gonna do and you know there's a lot of reasons that might make that attractive but as with pretty much anything in life there's a trade-off so first and foremost it's probably worth noting that nobody's really been able to create the kerf the perfect cow yet and it's not for lack of trying but I think what happens with the different breeds is that they they start to kind of chase after one trait and then that's all they focus on and in in getting that trait that they're after they end up losing traits other desirable traits you know a good example of this is Wagyu cattle why you cattle have really highly marbled meat really expensive meat that's where Kobe beef comes from but from what I've heard from people that have actually tried to raise them on like range conditions those cows can't even take care of themselves they don't know how to survive without humans now for some people that might work but for a lot of ranchers that won't work we need cattle that know how to take care of themselves so basically in a nutshell I don't want to get too scientific with this but when you have purebred cattle you give up a lot of hardiness a lot of toughness in the breed there is a way to measure this and that is it's based on the percentage of chromosomal pairs that are alike or dislike so if you have a purebred black bull breed a purebred black cow each one of those chromosomal pairs get their chromosomes from the same breed so they are 0% different now you take that same black bull breed him to a purebred Hereford cow now you have a hundred percent different chromosomal pairs so this is referred to as heterosis 100 percent heterosis is good zero percent is bad 100 percent would be a hundred percent cross bred whereas 0 percent would be purebred so the other way you might hear this referred to is hybrid vigor which I like that a lot better because it's a much more descriptive term and it actually tells you kind of what what you're doing hybrid vigor that makes perfect sense you get two things that are not alike and you put them together and it creates a strong more vigorous animal so I could go on on that stuff forever but you know we're not we're not gonna get too in-depth and all the genetics and science and all that stuff I am going to tell you a little bit more about these counts so like I said they started from Herefords and over the years they've been bred to black bulls mostly now what I've been trying to do is go black bulls every three or four years and then on the fifth year say we'll switch it up and go with like a Red Angus or we'll go with a Hereford so that way I can maintain a decent level of hybrid vigor but I'm also keeping cattle that are mostly predictable and mostly black hided and that way I'm to me that I'm kind of getting the best of all the worlds and that's really what we're trying to do with cross bred cattle so it stands to reason that as we walk through these cattle you will see mostly all bikes but like this girl for instance has a little bit of white on our chin you won't show it to us there we go so more unlikely she got that from her furred somewhere that now here is a great example this is basically just a black Hereford so her calves will most likely be black they could be red depending on the bull but yeah as we walk through here we're gonna see those kinds of differences and this girl I'm thinking she looks very Red Angus to me not just because she saw it red but just a few other things that jump out so that is kind of what we're looking at over here alright guys well I hope you enjoyed checking out the cows with me and talking about breeds and cross breeds and purebred and all that other good stuff that we went over today till next time I hope I'll see you again on farmer Tyler ranch [Music]

Channel: Farmer Tyler Ranch

Views: 97,780

Keywords: cattle breeds, hybrid vigor, heterosis, cattle, breeds, farmer tyler ranch, angus, hereford, purebred, crossbred, purebred vs. crossbred, talking cattle

Id: xWN_URfQLjw

Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 12 2019