Everybody Culls the Cheap Ones

Standards do not mean much until they cost you something.

 

Everybody culls the cheap ones.

It’s the open cow nobody liked anyway. The DSC bull calf that was born with weirdly fused pasterns and no future ahead of him. The flighty heifer that was never going to make the replacement pen (in part because you couldn’t even get her into the replacement pen). Loading those cattle onto the trailer does not prove you have high standards. It proves you’ve done this cattle thing for more than just one year and have some common sense.

The test arrives when the fault belongs to an animal you really want to keep. The expensive donor cow, the one you have sold embryos out of the last few years, but has come up with a poorly structured udder at the ripe old age of five. The past champion who has never bred on schedule, and next year will calve in mid July. The high dollar herd sire whose feet get harder to defend every year he is around. You know which ones I am talking about. Every breeder does.

Sadly enough, that is when breeding philosophies get flexible. Put enough money or reputation into an animal and breeders turn into remarkably creative excuse makers. Her teats have only ballooned on two of her quarters, so the udder is still 50% functional. The bull gets around fine on softer soils. The weakness gets a nicer term, and the nicer term somehow sticks around, and worse, gets bred straight into the next generation.

Here is the part people skip past: a calculated compromise is a NORMAL part of cattle breeding. No cow is perfect. Sometimes you manage around a fault instead of eliminating the cow outright, and that is a management decision, not a deflection. Take a female with a higher than average birth weight EPD (BW), the genetic prediction of how heavy her calves will be when they come into the world. That number alone does not justify turning her into hamburger. Breed her to a high accuracy low BW bull each year, and her calves will likely come out manageable while she keeps contributing everything else she does well. Managed. Documented. Deliberate.

A permanent excuse is different, and it is how a problem becomes a cow family curse. This happens when you stop calling something a compromise at all. The weakness gets renamed, softened, or explained away until it is no longer treated as a cost. Instead of managing it, you multiply it. That is how a fault stops being a simple management decision and becomes baked into a cow family’s identity.

At BSG, not knowing the difference between the two cost us entire cow families once we got our standards in check.

If you had told us the Monicas, maybe our top cow family back when we were exhibiting cattle on the halter, would disappear from the pastures at Greens Fork, we would have laughed in your face. Afterall, they traced back to the original Monica, LCS Monica 001, the only full sister to HS Rodeo Drive 062WR. These Monica females were supposed to be stacked for all the power, marbling, fertility, and longevity that Rodeo Drive cattle were known for, at least in our mind. The truth turned out to be something different. We had several Monicas, and they all had the same glaring faults that we made excuses for with every generation.

The Cherrys carried us through the late 1990s and the first decade of the new century, and then things came apart when we put them under honest production testing. The Queens never made much impact once the stakes got higher, and their tenure in Greens Fork did not last long.

There was no grand purge. Nobody stood up and argued we needed to cut an entire cow family from the herd. The bar simply moved up, and yesterday’s success bought them nothing in the present era of higher standards.

A breeding program is not a family reunion. Nobody gets a permanent invitation to stay because of the name on the pedigree.

Cattle should never earn their place because of WHO they are. They should earn it because of WHAT they are.

Oh, and moving a problem to somebody else’s pasture is not culling. That is distribution. You are not helping anyone when you sell what you cannot stand to keep to an unsuspecting breeder. Don’t do it.

The Rosewoods of Indiana have been at BSG since the first Shorthorns jumped off the trailer at our farm in 1994, and they are still earning their keep. That is not nostalgia. That is longevity, and it deserves its own blog post, and Lindsay Sankey does a fine job telling the story [It’s a Wonderful Life – Jean’s Boots].

So here is your assignment. Go look at your own herd inventory. Every breeder can tell you what he refuses to tolerate, right up until the check gets big enough or the name gets famous enough. Show me the famous donor, the herd sire, or even the cow family you wanted to keep and refused to excuse, and I will show you the actual standards of your program.

-Luke