Angus Herd Talk
Discussions with Registered Angus Breeders across America about their operations, breeding philosophies and herd sires used in the past and present.
Angus Herd Talk
Lucky 7
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In this episode I talk with Jim Jensen from Lucky 7 Angus about the history of his herd and feed efficiency.
Welcome to Angus Herd Talk. I'm your host, David Yackley, and we're starting season four with Jim Jansen from Lucky Seven Angus in Boulder, Wyoming. Lucky Seven could possibly be the preeminent feed efficient herds in the world. Hey, welcome to the show, Jim. Thank you, David, and glad to be here. Let's start out with where is Boulder, Wyoming?
SPEAKER_02Well, you drive as far as you can until you can't find people again, and you're at the end of the road, and that's where we're at. Boulder, Wyoming is in the mountains of Wyoming. Population, probably bigger today, but we always used to kid because it used to be 75, including cats and dogs, because there was definitely not 75 people. We are in the coldest place in the United States, average daily temperature, 22-day growing season. The only people that ever settled here were outlaws and school marms. So if you look at the the TV show Yellowstone, it may be tough enough where they were at, but there wasn't no Dutton's here. Those Dutton family wouldn't have got 40 acres. It's a little tougher country than they had. But it was it was extremely fun to watch that because everything that happened on that show pretty much happened to my great-grandpa. I mean, he housed the hole in the wall gang. He did the sheep wars. He did not have the train station, but he did have Boulder Lake, and I think he used it. And I don't behold him for any of this stuff because back then that was survival. Literally nobody on Earth in 1895 was going to move to the coldest place on earth except for outlaws. And so that was survival back then. You know, the the fun thing about it is old Beth Dutton, she'd have never made it out here. Them school marbles stuck her in the they'd have stuck her in a tub and had her mouth washed out with soap and she'd have been saying hail Mary within 20 seconds. So old Eric, Ellen Ritchie, she would have she scared me more than any of the outlaws. She was way tougher than they help.
SPEAKER_01Did your great grandfather did he rant?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he moved here in 1895 from Denmark. That first winter, interesting enough, he didn't have no place to go, and he had three cows. I think it was three cows and seven horses. And he actually lived underneath a rock in a dugout, didn't have any walls or nothing. Made him a fire, I guess. And then that country there would get up to four feet of snow and probably could have got up to 50 or 60 below. And we're talking from the end of October till the end of April, some of that event can happen. And literally every day he left his dugout, and all he did all day long was shovel snow so they could eat, so they could get down to the grass. And that's how we got started. From there, he must have been, you know, he had to be tough. I think they called him a gentle man, but he was very tough. He ended up owning most of the Boulder Valley, and I don't think he could have been a weakling to do that. You know, you're fighting some pretty tough characters back then. And so he was a gentleman, but he was a very tough man, I believe.
SPEAKER_01When did the Angus get introduced?
SPEAKER_02Well, we were definitely a Herford breeder. Everybody in this part of the world were Herford breeders. Matter of fact, we run in a lot of in-common BLM and forest service permits, and everybody was Herford. I got my start in the Angus. I was 14 years old and I bought a Hereford bull. I put $4,000 in the pot, and my dad did. I had a really good set of cows I'd worked for my whole life. And he had some registered cows. We bought the best bull we could out of Montana. Brought him home and he ruined every damn cow on the place. Just a horrible deal because they're overfit, overfat. He was pretty when he showed up. Looked like an anorexic milk cow, that nice next ball, and he dried up every cow that we had. And so it was shortly after that I started buying a few cows. And I just I we started buying a few black Angus bulls just for calving ease. And I ended up buying some cows, and I just got fortunate enough that I bought some registered Angus cows for the same price as commercials. And I sold the bulls before they hit the ground for $2,500. And back then that was a big ticket. And so I seen some light there. I made the decision at that point. We would never race a bull like that guy that sold me the Herfer Bull. We were always willing to race bulls in tougher conditions than every single commercial guy, so they were guaranteed to work. And so as I started growing my business, that was our mentality, and that's the way we did it.
SPEAKER_01So you happen stanced into the register world. Didn't really do it on purpose.
SPEAKER_02No, I've always been kind of an opportunistic. I mean, when I used to go to the movies and understand when you go to the movies when you were back a kid my age, it might be one time a year, and I would be underneath the seats walking around trying to find a loose change on the ground. I would never watch the movie, I'd be underneath there finding money. And so I was always opportunistic, and it didn't take very long to figure out if I could, you know, sell a $500 calf or I can sell a $2,500 bull before it hits the ground. There's something here that could work here. And there was a huge need for it because especially here where we're at, very few bulls are capable of making a living here. And so it just kind of clicked.
SPEAKER_01With those original registered cows, can you trace the lineage on your current cows all the way back to the handful?
SPEAKER_02I I think well you have to because we never left them, you know. So yeah, we bought other cattle at the end, but absolutely you have to do that.
SPEAKER_01Do those cow families still permeate through Lucky Seven?
SPEAKER_02A few of them, probably not so much as that much, but we bought a few cattle later. I think we bought 17 that first year or something like that. And then every year for a few years we bought more. But absolutely, I can trace back some of them back there that we started with, you know.
SPEAKER_01That's pretty dang cool.
SPEAKER_02That is, you know, and we even went back to some cattle that see when I you get into this business, you don't have a brain cell. It takes you 15 to 20 years to get your first brain cell. So you do stupid stuff all the time. And and I actually bought rubbish McKenzie cows, and that was the stupidest thing in the world because they were that's when they went to the kettle, were way too big. And for whatever reason, those cows absolutely were good cows, and they were some of the cows that are still tracing back today, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01Did I hear this correctly? Do you say a 22-day growing season?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, frost to frost.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01When is frost or frost for you guys?
SPEAKER_02You know, it all depends. I mean, I've seen it snow the 4th of July, and I've seen it snow the 10th of July. It can go anytime. But the average daily frost or frost, with you know, usually you don't give many frosts once you get to the 20th of June, and then you start frosting again in August. Let you know, it all kind of slides. Like I said, I've seen it snow the 4th of July. So it I don't know.
SPEAKER_01Do those grasses there in that part of Wyoming just kick in overdrive?
SPEAKER_02You know, they're they survive, that's the main thing. So if you'd had an alpha alpha crop or some sort of other crop, you know, they would have got highly damaged, you know. They just slow down and stop growing when it gets that cold. You know, it's our grasses are just like anything else, it has to have some heat units to grow, but when it's extremely cold, it doesn't die. It just it just slows down for a couple days.
SPEAKER_01What are the grasses that you grow there?
SPEAKER_02Oh, you know, you there's a lot of wild grasses. Everything's basically wild grasses, but you have some of your meadow foxtails and some of those types of grasses in your meadows, and then you got some buffalo grass type stuff out there in the rest of the places, and then you got some of your cheat grasses and some of the stuff that you really don't like either. But a variety of wild grasses, very few tame stuff.
SPEAKER_01Can't you get any clovers to grow up there?
SPEAKER_02You know, we get depending on the year, we can get a lot of clover.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, at times we can get some clover. Okay, I always like talking feed stuff with people. And then do you have to ship all your hay in with that tide of a growing season? No. Can you actually grow for it?
SPEAKER_02We're a little different today because back in the day everybody they run their cows out on the BLM, then they go to the forest, the high elevation, second half of the summer, and you take them off your hay meadows and you grow grass, then you put the hay up and then you go to feeding it. Well, that's just kind of the way it was. We probably I must be about 30 years ago, I decided that I wouldn't want why would I grow one ton of hay and feed four ton of hay to the winter? Why wouldn't I try and find a place where I could do the opposite? So we I went out and I basically I damn never go went to jail because I wrote a whole lot of hot checks on that whole deal trying to figure it out. But we bought a place in Riverton, which is a little better. It's only 5,400 feet, have some little farm ground and whatnot, and we can grow four tons of alfalfa in that place, and it only, you know, with especially with our feed efficient cows, we can feed less than a ton per cow. So we absolutely flipped the narrative. And so we did that about 30 years ago. And so we do things a little different than the typical people right here.
SPEAKER_01I just pulled up a satellite map of Riverton. There's actually a lot of irrigation in that part of the world.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and they've got a lot of crop ground and stuff over there in Riverton, under pivots and stuff. It it's known for some of the best alfalfa in the world. So, you know, it just made a lot of sense to go to a place where you could make better feed. And instead of feeding four tons and growing one ton per acre, we flipped it to where we're feeding one less than one ton to the cow and growing over four tons. So I always tell everybody if you really want to make a living in the cattle business, you need to know your business model. You've got your pure competition, your oligopoly, and your monopoly. And people need to understand that every single rancher in the United States are a pure competition. And that means the only way that you're going to succeed and become better is you have to be more efficient than the guy right beside you. You have to build in a widget cheaper than the guy right beside you. That's the only thing. And you know, there are a lot of seed stock people out there promising these premiums and all of that. It never works because you're a pure competition. The only way you can make money is be more efficient than the guy beside you. And we've modeled our whole entire pure red operation over what a commercial rancher does. And so we are, even though we're seed stock operation, we are one of the most efficient operations you'll ever find, is especially for our area.
SPEAKER_01We're gonna jump back to that in here in a moment, just so the listeners know. Boulder is about maybe is about 100-120 miles north of Rock Springs, Wyoming. Off the 80s. Is that about right? About 120 miles, and then off to the west, another 120 miles to Jackson.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, there we go. All right, so I just wanted to clarify that. And then you have the the rent the ranch in Riverton, and then we before we started this episode, you told me about you purchased one in Oklahoma as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I had one of my best friends, he was kind of going through a divorce, struggling, and so I told him to come up and help me for a while. And everything in the south was really extremely drought out, and we were actually drought out that ourselves. And so after work one night, we started drinking beer, and he talked me into thinking that Oklahoma was the most opportunistic place in the world. And so, as we're drinking a beer, I got to thinking about it. I said, Well, we're one close, we're closer to ending the drought than we were before the drought. I said, This is an opportunity. So, over a beer, I flew down there and talked my banker into buying some land in Oklahoma, and we were gonna get 200 acres. What my thought was that we would just use that as a factory to build embryos, you know, and we were gonna get enough to get 200 cows. I've never been known to do anything small, so by the end of the day, we ended up having a place that would run about 1,600, 1,800. Yeah. Where at eastern Oklahoma, the Red Oak, Oklahoma, uh, Stigler, Oklahoma area.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02Which is a whole different ball game. So you're taking we probably run cattle at the high, the coldest place on earth at above 7,000 feet, better than anybody. But now we go down to sea level in one of the hottest, most humid places in the world. So, I mean, we went totally opposite when we did that.
SPEAKER_01Big difference.
SPEAKER_02Big difference. Yeah, and so there's a there's a lot of, you know, the first thing that you find out is you go down there, and if there's a spear of grass, my cows get fat up here. But when you go down to that part of the world, it can look like there's grass and they'll starve to death. Uh, you know, and so these guys are saying, oh, you're gonna have to supplement those cattle. And it's like, no, there's grass, there's no way, you know, and then as an absentee owner, you're gonna get your butt kicked because that's I've seen it happen around me, but I never ever thought I would be the guy getting my butt kicked. The only difference is most of those witch fellowists that buy those absentee ranches they don't know they're getting their butt kicked. So I did know I get my butt kicked. I can see it.
SPEAKER_01Different types of grasses. I'm down here in West Tennessee. So our grasses aren't quite as similar as that part of Oklahoma, but I think that's a lot of Bermuda in that area. They do a little bit of fescue in there as well. Those cows can actually starve to death on Bermuda.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and there's times of the year they do exceptionally well, and once we kind of figure out what we're doing, you know. But yeah, you get into whenever it starts turning color and we get in the fall, they will damn sure starve together on grass.
SPEAKER_01It's not very nutrient-dense, especially fescue. Fesca's it's not the best grass in the world for raising cattle. I know it grows like a crazy down here in the spring and the late fall, but I grow a lot of annuals down here. My cows seem to do better on it.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01They will actually walk past 40 acres of fescue to go find the one Johnson plant.
SPEAKER_02Oh, I could see that, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, cows are smart. Cows are always going to go to the best.
SPEAKER_01You're running these three ranches. Are all three of them seed stock or do you do commercial cattle?
SPEAKER_02We run a lot of commercial cattle. We ran a time up to 2,800 head of cows. So, of course, when we're only selling 400 bulls, a lot of those are commercial. When we got into Oklahoma, we had mostly commercials, but we have started producing some ball cabin cows that have cattle. You know, we started with the product of saying, remember, we were going to make this a factory to create embryos, so we started putting embryos in a lot of those commercial cows. And so right now there's a lot of registered cows down in the Oklahoma deal. Everything in Wyoming. We run about 1,300 headed cows in Wyoming, and all of those cows are all registered. And I would say probably 65 to 70 percent of the ones in Oklahoma are at this point.
SPEAKER_01Do you bring those progeny back from Oklahoma?
SPEAKER_02The bulls back. The ones we think that are sellable bulls, we'll bring them back and run them through the summer, put them in the high country, do all the testing and necessary, you know, put them out there on several thousand tough acres and do the high elevation testing and everything to make sure that they are capable of you know doing what our customers need them to do. So I'm pretty much stay there, other than we we do take bulls back and forth, breeding bulls.
SPEAKER_01How far out from sale date do you start the feed efficiency test?
SPEAKER_02The feed efficiency test, you know, we have right now we had the grow safe system. We were the first individual Angus breeder in the United States to own one of those, and it had 16 units. We could test about 100 to 10, you know, 12, 13, 20 calves, but with as many bulls as we do, we start testing in the fall. So you kind of take your first calf efforts or calf first, you know, and you put them through there, and you kind of then take the next bunch and the next bunch. And so we feed, generally speaking, from the 20th of September till probably the first part of June on these tests. And then this year, and I don't know, most people don't know it, but these cross a systems are horribly in, they're just not very accurate. They're really tough to make work. So this year we are the only breeder in the United States, individual breeder, to buy a Rick II discover system. This system's gonna be probably 100% more accurate. So depending on what the age of the animal and how our design works, you know, we're gonna try and get those cattle, you know, pretty similar to the same time when we test them because that gives you a better idea, you know, kind of makes a closer evaluation tool than having them six different age groups.
SPEAKER_01The other day, you and I had a great conversation on the phone about the feed efficiency testing and the growth safe. I almost kind of wish I'd hit record, just recorded that discussion we had, because it was really eye-opening. Things I had never even thought about and it and a couple things I had actually thought about that could possibly happen on why they're not accurate as what we want to believe they are. What do you think the the accuracy is on it? Maybe 60%, 80%?
SPEAKER_02Well, so what I would say is after I mean, I'm a very big student in feed efficiency. I mean, feed efficiency, in my opinion, is the number one trait that well, feed efficiency and longevity is the two traits we have to concentrate on. All the other traits are just to sell bulls. But I study everybody's feed efficiency data and all of the feed efficient people. Most people are feed efficiency testing or only feed efficiency testing just so they can sell bulls. It's just a selling tool. They don't care what the data is, it's just a way that I can sell high-dollar bulls and they don't know what they're doing. And then there's a few people that are trying to do it right, and then there's to our level, which we were the highest R-squared growth safe system in the world. R squared means accuracy. And we have Steve and Belade's data, Jihar, which are managers in the winter place, and they will break your leg if you mess things up. But I would suggest that most people's data is about 33% accurate. I would suggest our data is in the high 70s, and I would suggest that our data is much more accurate than everybody else's. But our goal is to what can we happen when we get this new system up where we can go to the 100%? I mean, we've watched feed efficiency from our ranch to the neighbors' ranches, and we're just blowing the doors away. But with these inaccuracies, it's really hard to say, okay, I'm going to test my numbers with your numbers. It just can't happen. But when I can look at my cattle and I can raise twice as many cows as the neighbor in the exact same area, I know we've grown and went forward a lot. But now that we actually have a system that's going to give us incredibly accurate stuff, I don't know where we're going to go. I mean, nobody knows. It's never been done in the cattle industry.
SPEAKER_01What are the things that make the test currently inaccurate?
SPEAKER_02So when we first bought this system, I think our data for the first six years was probably horribly inaccurate. So what you don't understand is that if you overfeed, it doesn't get a read. So that data is not there. So you're feeding technically to make this work properly, you have to feed at a lower level and you have to feed exactly 12 hours of pork. Well, every single person in the world is going to have a hired man that wants to overfeed because he doesn't want to feed 12 hours of park and he doesn't want to do it exactly right, or you put a few too many animals in there. If they stick their head too high in into that machine, it does not work. According to the GrowSafe system, 82% is accurate. So if I have 16 nodes out there and I feed at 6 o'clock at night, it's going to be the same exact 16 animals stick their head in that thing first. And if they're not getting those reads that day, that morning feeding and that night feeding, it makes it 100% inaccurate. The second thing that we find is that if you go to any of these systems, they don't have a lid on it or anything else. And so there's all of these animals kicking feed out. Well, you don't know if that animal's kicking two pounds out a day, 15 pounds out a day. You have no idea. So there's a lot of those animals that were probably extremely feed efficient that are kicking a bunch of feed out rooting in there and trying to find some feed in there. And so that data is absolutely inaccurate. And then when I say it's 33% accurate, that means that 33% of them are doing exactly what they're supposed to do, and that that's your 30% accuracy. But in our situation, we make sure we don't overfeed them and we pay a lot of attention to those types of issues. So I think that we can push ours to in the high 70s or at least into 70% accurate. But this new machine is going to be an absolute game changer for us.
SPEAKER_01Those early bulls, they're going to get a free ride. The cattle hierarchy is certain animals will always feed first and other ones will feed last and always kind of descended in an order. But yeah, you'll get those bulls that go in there and they're always going to be first. And so if they if the feeder is fed too high, those same bulls almost every day are going to get a free ride.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and the first start of the system, like I said, I when any whenever you're doing some of those things, you ain't got a brain cell. A lot of times it takes several years to grow your first brain cell. It took me 20 years to get my first brain cell in the registered business and start having some discipline and doing things the way they really should have been instead of just listening to the establishment and all their stuff. But we would get an animal and he would be the number one feed efficient bull in that test. And then we would get a female, she would be the number one feed efficient bull, and I'd breed them together and they weren't feed efficient. But now that we know how to do it, and there's another thing, you have to learn how to and know how to digest that data. What is feed efficiency? Is it RFI? Is it feed to gain? Is it conversion? What is, you know, what is that feed efficiency number? But we have a place where we know how to accurately digest and put some computations to that stuff. And we believe we've got the feed efficiency. And so now we've got three and four way crosses that you can set your clock with. If I cross this to this. Genetic, I guarantee you it's going to be feed efficient every time. And so I think we're the only breed here, breeder in the world that's ever got to that poor part. You know, but y'all you got to understand that a lot of the breeders were breeding it for sellability. And so they were always still breeding to the high end. This is a bull I can sell. This is a bull I can sell, so I'm going to use them, say they're feed efficient if they become feed efficient. We went to a point where we would not breed to one that wasn't feed efficient. We take it extremely serious. And we do not breed to outside sires. If they're not proven feed efficient, they don't go through there. We haven't done that. We've got probably sometimes up to eight, nine generations of feed efficiency right now, proven feed efficiency. And you can absolutely set your clock with it. And I don't know what it's going to happen if we get to 100% accurate data with this new RIC-2 discover system.
SPEAKER_01Do you test your entire herd?
SPEAKER_02No, we have way too many cattle to do that. So what we do, generally speaking, is I pick out what I consider as the 70% of the top. And so we just test them. And then I mean, I don't care. I'm not the guy that's trying to sell a high-dollar bull. That doesn't trip my trigger. What I want is I want everything to be feed efficient. So the way you do that is I need to know which ones are the most feed efficient so I can propagate those. And so we taught there's no reason for me to test the bottom 30% because I'm not going to use them anyway. So what my plan is as a seed stock producer is that every single one of our cattle are dominant. And the only way that can happen is I every time choose the best one. It's not about coming to my sale and buying the best bull for me, it's about coming to my sale and have every single one of them do what they're going to do for you. And you don't have to make a decision, just buy. And that's the way my philosophy works. Instead of saying, oh, I'm going to sell a $600,000 bull. No, I don't care about that. I want every one of them to go out there and make a living and work for the commercial rancher and buy it.
SPEAKER_01Got it. I should ask that question a little better how I did it. Do you test your cows?
SPEAKER_02No. The problem with testing the cows. The problem with testing the cows is you have to feed somewhat of a grain ration. You have to have somewhat of a grain ration in there. And the last thing that we will do on our ranch is to feed cows to our grain to our cows. And so if I wanted to feed my heifers, then I'm overfeeding those heifers and I'm doing a disservice to the heifers. So we, after a while, figured out no, we're feeding these heifers. We're not allowing them to be cows like Mother Nature needs them to be cows. We'll turn them into converters of grain instead of converters to grass. Cows are supposed to be converters of grass. The industry's tried to change them into converters of grain, and that's why we have so many wrecks in the world because of that. And I would be the last one to say, yeah, I'm going to turn my cows into converters of grain. That's not the way they were designed.
SPEAKER_01What is your ration for the bulls?
SPEAKER_02So what we run the bulls on is we do it all by two different things: protein and net energy gain. Our bulls are fed somewhere like the yearland bulls are fed somewhere between a 41 and a 45, depending on how cold the weather is and whatnot. And to put that in perspective, most seed stock bulls are fed at close to a 60 NEG. And when you get into a feedlot ration, that's a 63 somewhere in there. Or no, sorry, 53 starting at 53. I had that wrong. Most seed stocks are over a 50, and you start a feedlot ration at 53. We're at the low 40s to the fact that absolutely no matter what animal it is, it'll never get over a 45 NEG. So that equates to, you know, one to two percent grain when you get into some of those rations.
SPEAKER_01On your selection process on these bulls that are going to make it to your cell, which I believe is do you sell every March? Is March? Yeah, first Saturday in March. March is a cell. On your selection process on these, what are the other things that can call a bull out?
SPEAKER_02So, first of all, we have always concentrated on feet and legs. I always told them if they don't look like they can outround you, if that bull doesn't look like you can outrun your rope force, I don't want to buy him. So we've always been strong on the feet and legs. So they have to have feet and legs. Of course, udder is absolutely important. And then you start looking at cows that can produce time after time. You know, they're repeatable cows, those really good cows. So you want to look at those issues, and then we go back into feed efficiency. So what I do is I go out there when I'm bowling my bulls, and I'll say, I only want the top five or ten percent. So if they're not in that top five or ten percent of feed efficiency, I don't want to even look at them. So I put five to ten percent, and then I go back in there and I look at the functional. Do they have a good Malma cow? Do they have all of the other traits after that? And if they don't, then I got to throw them out. And it was kind of interesting because I would say 10 to 12 years ago when we were doing that, I would put 20 bulls in this bin and I'd be lucky to get one. They would pass all of the other, because the last thing we want is unfunctional cows. And today, if I put 20 of those top bulls in there, 19 of them will be usable. So it's pretty exciting because when we first started, and see, we're the number one high elevation path program in the world, so we also have to deal with that. And so when I first started it, a lot of times I couldn't use them because their family, the cow family, didn't look good on paper for high elevation. And today we are not missing any trait. And right now we actually have a tenderness test that we do that nobody else in the world has, and it basically is upon if you go back to your biology days when you find out that you cannot change your muscle bundles. They are built the way they are. No matter what you do, you're not changing them. You may make them look different, but you're not changing them. And so we are using ultrasound data to check muscle bundles, which the calf when he gets the ground will tell you what their tenderness is. And so now we're even putting the tenderness in there, and we're actually putting all of those in one pocket. And so out of those 20 bulls, we can get all of those traits. So perfect feed and legs, great mama cows, high elevation can go to high elevation and feed efficiency. And so we're every trait that we deem important, we're able to get 19 out of 20 of those to hit dead on. And so that's a big that's a big thing because now I can use the bulls I really want instead of the bulls that looked at on paper.
SPEAKER_01Well, you took me down this road, so now I gotta ask you the loaded question. You said the tenderness, couldn't you just use the IMF EPD?
SPEAKER_02That has nothing to do with tenderness. Number one. Number two, most of these EPDs since they started the DNA stuff, they worth the paper they're written on them. And if you can go to the Angst Association since 2015, and you can look at their absolute actual factual data and line it up with their EPDs and they don't match. We've gotten backwards in most trades since 2015. And guess what happened in 2015? That's when the DNA came out there. And I'll tell you, the reason that you and I got together is I put a post out there and the guy told me that we couldn't have any prime cattle. I've never raised a carcass animal in my life. I've never bred for it, I've never had one of these high IMF bulls, high anything else. When I talked to you last time, I put this deal out there and I had a whole bunch of these cattle that were six cent prime. I haven't had one that has been below 100% choice in over 10 years. And for whatever reason, I fed some cattle out just yesterday. I got the data and I got pins of 86% prime out of there. This guy said, I fed over a million cattle, and I've only had a couple of pins that can go 80 cent prime. I've never fed to one of them. So tell me how much all that IMF stuff and everything's doing. When I am beating every carcass breeder in the world for carcass and prime right now today, and I've never bred for one. So I'm just telling you, it looks like bullshit is probably bullshit.
SPEAKER_01I wholeheartedly agree with you. One of my buddies, one of my closest buddies, Corey Crothman, always says, no one should ever talk about carcass until they feed out a pen of cattle. Yeah. Until you feed out a pen of cattle, you have no idea where a carcass is. You have all the E D's you want.
SPEAKER_02That's exactly what happened. So we were feed efficient. We knew we were one of the number one feed efficient programs in the world. So the only way I can actually absolutely prove it, I have to go out there and go against the competition. So we bought a ton of cattle. And it's this is kind of a crazy story because you remember when little rocket man was out there throwing them missiles out there. So I literally went to my bank and I said, we want to buy 10,000 head of our cattle and I want to feed them out. And they said, Oh yeah, go to buying them, go to buying them. And so I'm buying them on superior auction and all these auctions, 100% of our genetics. And I'm up to a lot of these. And then Little Rocket Man goes out there and starts blowing or threatening to blow crap up and the market crash. And so then my banker calls me back and he says, You have to protect and hedge every cow you have. And I'm already a million dollars in the hole, and I haven't even taken delivery on these cattle. So I had to end up, I hedged them the last day of the month and I took them off the next day, and I got out of the deal. But I mean, we could have lost well over a million dollars on that test. But what we did find, and the first original test was almost 10,000 head of cattle, that not only was our statement true that we had the feed efficiency, but our carcass data was right there with like gardeners, because we fed a lot of the cattle right by gardeners, which is the premier carcass breeder in the United States. And our carcass data was absolutely just as good as his. Our feed efficiency data was a lot better, you know. And I go back to the fact of the carcass animals. I know a guy in Nebraska, he was, I'm not going to mention names, but he was one of the premier carcass breeders. I know for a fact that that guy ran out of grass one year, took the cattle up to South Dakota and put them on some of the best grass in South Dakota, and those cattle almost starved to death. Those original carcass cattle were horrible. It takes more energy to feed the fat into an animal than to feed the muscle into the animal. And so this created all of our feet and leg and all these problems because all those carcass cattle, they had to feed them twice as much to get them just as fat as the other one. And so then they started making this roll to where we got to feed cattle. And then they put all these carcass numbers and all these numbers and all of that, and all of a sudden these guys are selling these $15,000 bulls. But they're falling apart at an alarming rate. And you might check my math here, but we have the shortest number of cows that we've had since 1951. Yet if you go out there and look how many bulls are sold today, it's probably the most bulls that you've ever seen salt. Do the math and tell me how that works. That means there's a lot of shitty bulls falling apart. And it started at the carcass level, and then them guys started feeding these. You know, you got some of the greatest people in the breed selling $15,000,000, $18,000 bulls. And so then the guys that actually were raising good cattle, they start doing the same thing. And so that started this whole entire bad feet, bad legs, cattle that can't hold up, fertility problems. I mean, we've been into this great cattle cycle for three, four years right now. Go back and do your math. It's a seven-year cycle. At the end of three, four years, we should be building cows unlike we've ever seen in our life. That's happened every other cattle cycle. This year we can't do it. I believe it's because the genetics are not capable of being built back up. They're not getting bred up, they're not lasting, they're not doing the thing they were doing. And that happened all through that carcass era. It never happened ever in our history until we hit the carcass era. And now you got the people chasing the carcass and the numbers, and now we can't raise any more cows and we have a shortage of B due to that.
SPEAKER_01Especially with the carcass, because the Angus Association has made these indexes, basically the dollar C, where the dollar C is these guys are just breeding to it, trying to get the first $500 C they can possibly get, and they're not breeding as cattle.
SPEAKER_02That's easy. I mean, that's absolutely easy. All you have to do is go in there and look at a catalog and find the ones with the numbers, and then everybody can go on there and see what a pretty one looks like. Everybody can do that. Everybody can breed both of us. What the industry doesn't know is in 1998 we bred a bull by the name of Lucky Seven Mentor 138. That bull had the number one curve bending EPDs in the United States, in the whole entire Angus system. About four years later than that, we had the number one highest-selling bull sale in the United States. That was easy. But what I chose to do there, instead of saying that's the game I want to play, I said, no, that was never the game I wanted to play. I got lucky and hit that. But I can tell you right now, if you want me to go out there and compete with the big boys and say, oh, I'm gonna get this back pretty one with the numbers, I'm gonna kick their ass. I can do that without even opening my eyes. But I choose to keep the family farmers and ranchers afloat. Those are the ones, that's the life bread of the whole entire world. Without those guys, we will have food problems. And I will never ever sacrifice them guys for the fame and fortune that some of the other people have done.
SPEAKER_01You're getting bulls sold all over the country. What states are you selling into now?
SPEAKER_02You know, predominantly we sell them into the Rocky Mountains. That's what they're bred and raised for, you know, high elevation, tough animals up here. But we've got cattle all the way into South Texas, Mississippi, Missouri. You know, we've got cattle in Montana, Idaho. They've even sent some cattle to Oregon. You know, we're getting a pretty big deal, Minnesota, Wisconsin. They're starting to, people are starting to figure this out. And the funny part about it is I have people call me up and they say, I want to buy to your bull. And they said, I'm gonna sell every bull I have because you're the best, you're the king, you're the man. And I say, no, you're not. I said, buy two. Make sure they're gonna work on your place. And so far, we have not gone anywhere in the United States that these cattle aren't working. And I think that's because of the mainly the feed efficiency. Yeah, it takes a little bit of uh uh getting used to, you know, they got to tackle me a little bit, but so far we haven't found anywhere where that these guys aren't happy with them. So I still will tell you if you want to buy bulls for me, they're built for the mountains of Wyoming, and I think we have the best product in the world for that. But we've gone all over. I mean, you go into southern Mississippi, that's a little different world than we're in.
SPEAKER_01It is, and you have a crazy good guarantee on your bulls.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so years ago, we I was mad at all these. I've been I'm mad, you can tell me. You can tell I've been mad ever since I got that one bull at one of these cows. They've been mad at the seed stock industry. And so I did the math on how well our bulls were doing compared to the rest of the bulls. So I said, why don't I just offer a four-year guarantee? And the day I did that is I thought, well, that will force every single registered breeder in the world to have a four-year guarantee because this is gonna be the coolest thing that anybody's ever seen. And now everybody has to have this four-year guarantee. And what that does is now they can't feed them in a feedlot, now they can't overfeed them, and they can't run all these shitty wolves that they're running to everybody. And this is going to change the industry so the moment pop ranchers are better off. And I started doing that about 15 years ago, and I guessed wrong, nobody else followed me.
SPEAKER_01Played telling me I couldn't do it. When you get east of the Mississippi River, these guys guarantee is about one day, one day or 10 feet, whichever happens first.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, and I mean some of these corporate boys that are out there promoting and doing all that stuff. I've had a guy out of Mississippi call me and he said he bought 11 bulls, and not one of them made it at the end of the year. So, I mean, you're looking at about what, two, three thousand dollars per calf before it's a tip. That that's the in today's world, that's the largest cost you have when you buy a bull. Price per calf before it sucks a tip, because there's so many of these bulls that are only breeding 20, 25 calves. There's a lot of people that are, especially in these corporate programs that are off in the buyback programs and all that. There's a lot of those guys that are into those calves for seven, eight hundred dollars a calf before it sucks a tit. There's no way in heck they're paying that back. You can never make that back. You're out.
SPEAKER_01Do you guys focus on birth weight at all in your program?
SPEAKER_02Well, we have it got to a point where, yeah, you're always doing that because at the end of the day, birth weight was king. Everybody wanted this light birth weight. So we didn't really mean to follow that, but we got a lot more light birth weight calves than we wanted. My point today is in my mind, I think different than most people, but my mind goes into an 85 to 90 pound calf's always gonna make you more money. I'm not going to do any of that anymore. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to a point where I want like begins like, I want every single cow to always be the exact same. So why don't I find a bull and I'm gonna breed it to my cows and my heifers, and he's gonna have uh maybe a uh plus 1.5 birth weight EV, and he's going to be capable of raising a cow and a heifer. And you're not gonna have the X's and O's because a lot of your birth weight problems come because you have a small pelvis because you've been breeding the light birth weight, and then you can't have a bigger bull. What happens if I breed the same ones to the same ones all time and dime again? Can I not breed that bull to a cow and get an 85-pounder and then breed it to a heifer and get a 70-pound heifer? And every single time that heifer can have that calf because she's bred pelvis-wise and everything else to have that. That's where my mind's going right now. But this calving yeast has caused a lot of problems. There's a lot of wrecks because of it.
SPEAKER_01Do you do you pelvic measure your cows?
SPEAKER_02I mean, we never have. And we literally, you know, and I'll have a lot of people say, Well, I run a bunch of cows and I don't get a check on them. It's like, well, well, I'm gonna give you a little information. It's like 28,000 head of cows for the last time I when I pulled one that was not an abnormal presentation. It was 28,000 pounds calves ago, and that calf weighed 145 pounds.
SPEAKER_01Oh, geez.
SPEAKER_02So I am not pulling, you're pulling calves out of your cows, you're screwed up. You got everything wrong. I only pull, I only pull less than 2% of my calves out of heifers. And I'm not using what you would call calving these wool every time either. You don't have that kind of consistency in your herd. You got a bunch of monro cattle and you got to fix some stuff.
SPEAKER_01What frame size are your cattle?
SPEAKER_02So I always that's the fun question from everybody. What frame size are you? Everybody says, I want to have a thousand-pound cow that brings a 700-pound cow. There's only one frame size out there, and it's just right, and that's in the middle. These cattle that are too small, they don't work for anybody, and they're not feed efficient. I can guarantee you with my research, these small frame, these put cattle, they are not feed efficient. They're horrible. They look fat because they produce 300-pound calves. And then when we get into the big frame cattle, you can't keep them alive. They're not sustainable on a ranch. I can find them feed efficient. I've found feed efficient animals there, but they will not live and thrive in the ranch. And so that means the cattle right in the middle. And so I'm going to say, depending on how much you're feeding them, they're going to be 1,150 to 1,400 pound cows. I'm going to say five and a half to six frame cow. But that's where the world says we have to we have to have every cow hit the carcass at the exact same place. And that's where they can go to the feedlot and that guy can make money. They can go to the packing house and that guy can make money. And if you don't have those cattle, you are not going to get the maximum use of your place. But what frame size are there? There's only one size, and they hit right in that box. You raise those, you're always going to be best.
SPEAKER_01So you're not running toads? No, no.
SPEAKER_02I can't find any of them. I mean, you see a handful of these people that have these small frame cattle and they talk about it. And I can tell you one, I won't mention any names. He, I don't even know how he picks them. I don't even know what breed they are. He basically is smarter than God, and he doesn't have any scientific data. He can just look at one and tell you how good he is. I look at it and I'll score at this and I'll score at this and I'll score at this. There's no scientific data. And if those cattle go into the sale ring and I've seen it, and somebody mentions his name that there's their cattle, they look exactly like the pen that went through there before. They'll reach 600 bucks a head less.
SPEAKER_01Huh.
SPEAKER_02Nobody wants to feed them. They're they're jumped. They cannot gain.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02No good. And that was from the small frame cattle that some of these people are saying they want. They don't work. We have been shown the market, and the market is those middle frame cattle. That's all that's really going to ever work.
SPEAKER_01On your cows, what gets one turned into a donor?
SPEAKER_02Our program's a little bit different than the rest of them, but I don't like to ever put a cow in a donor program until she's had seven, eight, nine, ten calves. I feel like we should not. One of the worst things that we've ever done is to try and get these cows in a donor program before she's shown the longevity. And so when I go in there and I'm looking at one, of course, the number one thing I'm looking for is feed efficiency. But if she hasn't had several calves, I wouldn't put her in there. But what I can tell you is those cows that are having 10, 12, 13 calves for me, every one of them are feed efficient. And they got a list of feed efficient calves, every one of them. So those old cows that are feed efficient, or those old cows, they don't have a bad day. On a bad year, they don't have a bad day because they're more feed efficient than the one right beside them. So they work every time. And so their longevity's going up and their feed efficiency is there, and now all I got to do is make sure that their feet and legs and their others are good, and we're good to go. Do you teat another score? I don't. I don't have to. Yeah, I don't know why you have to. They're either good or bad. Just ask it. That is a good question because I went out there and bought a lot of cattle. How's their teeth and others? And the guy'll say they're good and you'll bring them back and they suck. I don't think the guy lied to me. I don't think he knew the difference between good ones and bad ones. Um you know, it's pretty simple. I can go out there and show you a perfect other cow. You can go out there and show me a perfect other cow. And if you can't, you should stay in your corporate job and you shouldn't jump in this business.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's a that's a that one's simple.
SPEAKER_01I have to say, Jim, there's a lot of people that are bar born blind.
SPEAKER_02Well, you know. And what's actually has happened is we've got a lot of very wealthy people that bought a ranch and now they want to be famous. So they go out there and they hire a guy out of university that was taught by a guy out of university, that was taught by a guy out of a university, and not one of them guys have ever made a penny on a ranch. They don't know what the hell they're doing, and they're the ones that are promoting, they're the ones that are pushing 70% of the seed stock industry. I call them the establishment. But they don't have one person on staff that knows a good one and a bad one. That's where they came up with these numbers. They couldn't sell their cattle because they couldn't raise a good one. And so they had to come up with a number to trick people into it. Or they had to have these buyback programs, these gimmick programs, and they had to do that. That's why they're making their money because they've turned themselves into professional salesmen. So if you look at the seed stock industry, we're going back to the three channels of business, the three stages of business. Every single seed stock producer in the world is an oligopoly. And an oligopoly, you become better than the other guy by being a better salesman. Now you become a better salesman. I am in an oligopoly only, although my business practice is pure competition. That's how I run my business. So they're doing sales, so it's just nothing but a used car salesman. They're going in there and telling you that car's good, there's no problems with it, everything's good. They know damn good and well that they're not all good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Or they don't know nothing about it because they got a promoter, they got a haircutter, and they got two or three people managing. They came out of a university system, were taught by a university system, and there wasn't one person in the chain, in any of those, that ever raised a cow. And there wasn't one person on that place that would ever be capable of running a commercial ramp. And yet they're the ones selling the damn bulls.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. 70%. One of the best things I've ever heard about judging your own cattle or judging someone else's cattle, Joe Fisher, a buddy of mine, one time said to me, If you pulled her registration, would you keep her? Yeah, exactly. I think if a lot of guys would look at old ladies, would look at it that way, it's like she's standing there in front of me. If she didn't have an EPD and didn't have paper, would I keep her? Probably surprise themselves, but that they would send that one down the road.
SPEAKER_02Well, there you're putting into another point. You've got all of these scores like the teeth and other scores and the feet scores and all of that. So now we're supposed to go out there and unscientifically come up with an evaluation and give them this one through five score or whatever it is. You can't tell me, even I would do this. If I had the best cow I had in there, she's been my favorite all my life. I'm gonna score her one or two points higher on everything. And even if I'm being honest, she's my favorite cow, she's like my wife. She's gonna get a couple extra points. There's no way you can be absolutely accurate. That's not science, that's emotions. And yet, that is part of the scoring system that we have today.
SPEAKER_01That's not science, that's emotion. Oh, I I agree with that. Rather than spending resources on with land grants on methane studies, they should get with some of these land grant universities with their college students and send them out, let them do some scoring. Just go to random ranches. Yeah. You know, send some to Lucky Seven, send some to Ellinson over to Croftmoves or down to Bruin Ranch, and just let them do actual scoring. It doesn't have to be invasive.
SPEAKER_02Just let them go to see nothing. This is just yeah, that's a that is a cow. What are you score?
SPEAKER_01Involve the land grants. They're always looking for something to do. In the dairy industry, you don't get to score your own cattle. There's a guy that'll come out and score your cow, and you pray to God they break over a 90.
SPEAKER_02Well, and that that is that's one other thing that we kind of do in our business is we look at the other or competition, if you will. The dairy industry, the chicken industry, and the hog industry. In the beef cattle industry, we were nothing but emotional. We do everything emotional. We don't even have feed efficiency testing. That's what they did. Everything that's happened in the competition is where we need to be. Those guys are not emotional. And you go even look at the crop, it's like, wow, that's a pretty seed. I think I'll grow it. No, you look at science, you look at stuff that makes sense. And we're not doing that in the cattle industry. We basically go in there and somebody flies us in on a jet and they whine us and dine us and they re pull and we open the damn checkbook. Who would ever do that in any other industry? We're emotional. We have to change that because the thing that scares me is that the family farmer rancher has exited the industry at an alarming rate. And those guys that are coming in there and buying these ranches, they're not going to the funeral, they're not supporting the person at the basketball game, they're not supporting the community, they're not doing that, and not only that, but they're not the ones capable of raising this food supply that we need. And we have to keep these family farmers and ranchers a business. Well, we're going to have a train wreck, and you can see it all over. Get started. We have to fix that. And we have to get these family farmers and ranchers to say, I know you work hard, I know you do that, but you have to make sense. You have to say, how many bulls did that red care that bull breed before he his feet blew out on him? Don't buy that wool for that guy anymore. With your pencil.
SPEAKER_01Are you seeing a change with the commercial buyers where they're moving away from EPDs?
SPEAKER_02I have some. I think that we are on track for a lot of these things. I've got more phone calls from people calling me, mainly because of the bullstability and the not lasting. But I've got a lot more people that are basically saying, hey, I just want a good bull. And so I think that is moving forward. I mean, and I've been working on this for 25 years. I've been trying to teach these guys for 25 years, but I think for the first time in 25 years, I do believe that we have traction. I bet you I got 1,500 phone calls from people last year wanting to buy different bulls because they were tired of those bulls falling apart. And so I think that they're probably education. And what the people need to know, and this is absolute fact, there was a study done from 1991 to 2014, and the weaning weights only went up around 10 pounds from 1991 to 2014. And if you look at the Angus Association database, it will suggest that the weaning weights have gone down since then. So since 1991, the only thing that we've done better is learn how to feed better. Our weeding weights have not gone up. Nothing has got better since 91. So when you're talking about going out there and getting all these weaning weights and all that, well, if we haven't changed this thing in what would that be, 35 years, that's the last number you really need to be looking at. Because we didn't move the needle in 35 years, but the EPDs and the salesmanship moved. But we have not increased weaning weights in 35 years.
SPEAKER_01Oh, those EPDs have moved a ton in those 35 years. Oh, absolutely. You can't tell me some of these current bulls that are scoring 90 for weaning are better than the bulls from 30 years ago.
SPEAKER_02Well, and if they were actually a 90, they're not going to be a 90 on your ranch. It's pretty typical for the regular seed stock guy to have half as many cows on his grass as the guy in the commercial deal, and they feed twice as much in the winter. So if he is a plus 90 and he has the capability to be a plus 90, he can't do that on your ranch. So we run a ranch in real-world conditions, one of the toughest places in the world. And we got to a point where we were feeding these cows so much or so little that we were afraid that they were going to eat the barbed wire. When they started eating the barbed wire, we figured we'd feed more. It's extremely difficult to manage a herd like that. It's way easier to feed them all they can. That's easy. But what we did is we split our herd in half, and I did it completely and totally off of weeding ratios. The weeding ratios that were good went in this bunch, and we're going to we're going to put them as our test herd that we have to feed them when they eat barbed work. The other herd, we're going to have to manage the other way and let them eat all they want to eat, whatever. It's easy. I don't have to worry about them tearing fences down. I don't have to worry about all that management stuff. At the end of three years, every single person that showed up and they said, How did you sort your cows? And I said, Well, I did it just off of the weaning weights. And they said, No, these are two sets of cows that are different. And believe it or not, in most places, if they're double feeding and everything else, the higher weaning ratio cows would have been in the gut herd. In my herd, it was the smaller frame cows because they didn't have the ability to have that extra feed. And they don't have that on a regular ranch. 80% of the ranches in the United States are not fed like a commercial or a seed stock guy. And so even if they had that genetic potential, they can never reach it on your ranch. Ever. You'll never see it. And in many times, it'll be less.
SPEAKER_01Hey, speaking of Bobar, I heard you move your cows from your couch nowadays.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01How's that system working for you?
SPEAKER_02Oh, it's insanely good. So we chose the halter system, mainly because it's a solar system and I don't ever have to run them in and change the batteries. But they sent us 1,210 collars. We fought 12, we put 1,209 on. And every there's one that didn't sink and is still sitting on the fence. But 1,209 of those collars are working. We turned the cows out, didn't hardly do anything. Not any cows hardly ever get out. Every now and again you get one that kind of strays a little bit. Every one of them's work, every one of them stayed where they want to. Now we're able to put a fence on a ditch line so we don't have to rebuild a ditch. It looks like with our feed efficiency and that technology and some intense grazing, we're going to be able to double the stocking rate on this ranch with those two tech or with that stuff. Like right now, I'm moving cattle right now as we're talking. The other day, I was up in the mountains. I think you've seen some of those videos. I mean, we're up in the middle of the rocks, and I had we had about 700 head of cows, and I'm up in the middle of nowhere, and all of a sudden I get just a little spot where I have some cell phone service, and I moved 650 head of cows from my phone when I came home. The cows were all moved. Done.
SPEAKER_01You use it up in the mountains too?
SPEAKER_02No, I was in the mountain. I didn't have it on those cattles. And back to the cattle who were down on the flat.
SPEAKER_01Got it. Got it.
SPEAKER_02I moved 1,400 head of cows basically by myself. Well, I had a few people helping me on the mountain dealing. And so everybody says, Well, what are you going to do? Lay on your lay around, watch TV. It's like, no. Then I can do something that I've never got done. That's all the stuff that needed done. Or maybe you have to have one extra hand. Whatever. That's efficiencies. So how often do you move them? You know, we're trying to move them about every three or four days. We used to have we we've done some intense grazing seven to seven to seven days to two weeks. But we're trying to move them every three days because your grass plant, you don't want it to eat, be eight off twice. You want it to just get one clip and be on. Probably shouldn't be doing it twice a day, but I doubt if we'll ever go there. We're starting right at three days now. Right now, I can tell you, I have meadows right now that I've ate off right now that look as good today as they would have if I wouldn't have ate them off. But you come in there and you clean them up once and then go to the next one. It's game changer. I would suggest that everybody's everybody should go to this technology at some point. It's game changer, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01Are you using it in Oklahoma as well?
SPEAKER_02No, not yet. Well, I mean, this was our maiden voyage. We wanted to get our feet whacked, so we've just got it in these cattle in Wyoming. But I can tell you that there won't be a cow on the place, as far as I'm concerned, that doesn't have it. I know they're kind of expensive, but I believe that we can save that money and more just off of the extra grass. I could just run more cows. I can run way more cows. It's just that simple.
SPEAKER_01So when's your calfing season there?
SPEAKER_02Oh, we went to the tight day calving seasons and now we calve all year round. We cow we generally calve first calf heifers early end of January, first of February, so we can have brilliant bulls to go to heifers that are big enough. And then we calve our spring calving cows that they will turn into, and they'll start calving the end of March. In Oklahoma, we calve the spring calving calves right in the middle of that. And then we now have gone to a fall calving program. We took half of our cows to a fall calving program because I think that's gonna be a better bull for everybody. You can use it as a yearling on a heifer, and it'll be big enough to breed a cow, it'll be a little different deal. You don't have to push it. And so those cattle start calving the middle of August, and then we have our Oklahoma fall calving program that we've had for years, and they start in September.
SPEAKER_01So they're all tight windows, but we calve your the Wyoming are gonna be in August.
SPEAKER_02That was yeah, and we're we've got a calve early up here. They'll turn in a little sherballs if we don't cal a little bit earlier up here, but we can get by with calving quite a bit later down in the south.
SPEAKER_01Do you have a lot of predators in your area?
SPEAKER_02Um yes and no. I mean, some point in time I'm gonna send you a video. We've got grizzly bears and we've got wolves. I don't see them very often, but what happens is they just cows just come off the mountain for no good reason. Or when you go to try and chase them, they just ball up. So you know they've been around. You don't know for sure. You lose cattle when you're running in a million acres and there's trees and rocks and cliffs and everything, you're not gonna find these cattle. So you have no idea if you're getting predicted skills or not, but we definitely have plenty of wolves and grizzly bears, but you can tell the way the cattle act, how much activity has been around those animals. But I'm gonna show you a video at some point. I'm gonna post this about two grizzly bear cubs coming out after a guy that was chasing cows, and it'll scare the crap out of you. Them freaking grizzly bears was on that horse faster. There's no way that horse could have outran them, but they were 100 to 150 pound cubs. If a bear would have been there, there would have been a lot of blood there. You are not gonna outrun them. They are bad dudes, they are so freaking aggressive and so fast. It's crazy. Yeah, you can get grizzly bear poop before you can even bleach.
SPEAKER_01How many head do you think you lose to predators out there? You know, every year.
SPEAKER_02We don't do very we do pretty well. I mean, you gotta understand we're at 11,000 feet on a lot of those cattles, so we probably lose a few of them to high elevation, and then just whatever, you know, there's rocks, they might break a leg or whatever. But I think out of the 400 head of heifers who must end up there, we probably are within three or four. I think the guys are taking cows and calves up there, and some of those guys are up to 10% loss. And I have to think that a lot of those are predator kills, but yeah, we don't find that many.
SPEAKER_01It's a lot different in Oklahoma.
SPEAKER_02You know, we got coyotes down there, and they'll they're pretty, you know. We don't deal with coyotes killing calves up here, but down in Oklahoma, there's enough of them they'll get a calf before he gets up.
SPEAKER_01So when you send them out to passure in Oklahoma, you're not looking at a 1% death loss.
SPEAKER_02Right, right.
SPEAKER_01They're all coming home. Yeah, they're all coming home for the most part.
SPEAKER_02I mean, you know, when you're down in Oklahoma, you can find them for the most part. I mean, we got some where there's too many trees. For the most part, it's like, yeah, you can they're right there.
SPEAKER_01Do you AI 100% of your herd person?
SPEAKER_02No. And matter of fact, I'm gonna give you some more crazy Jim Jensen bullshit stuff that's going through my head. We probably AI, I would say we AI at the end of the year seven, eight hundred head of cattle. We don't AI to a single bull that we don't know ever. Once we did that starting 10 years ago, our consistency and our cattle quality went through the roof. It was just night and day went better because we never made mistakes. We weren't reading to anything that we didn't 100% know were going to be good. And we're getting to the point where since we've moved this scale so big, we're thinking about not AIing at all. So I'm a Christian, I Jews Christ as my savior, Lord and Savior, and I believe in God and I have faith in God. At what point in time can't I turn those bulls out and say, God, you make the decisions of what they're supposed to breed? And I live with that decision because he knows best, number one. But number two, how many times, how many of these bulls that are out there can't breed a cow? They've been AI'd for so long. They're not breeders. When I get done, I go DNA those cattle from parentage. I can go in there and look at my data and find out which ones are breeding 50 or 60 calves, and I will now take that as a new trade. And so when you buy a bull from us, you can expect he's gonna breed 50 cows a year instead of 20. And so, in my mind, I'm putting this into my mind, bull cost is one of your biggest costs right now for live cap. What happens if you can get a bull that breeds 50 or 60 calves instead of, you know, the typical one out there probably is less than 10. I hope that ours are breeding 25 to 30. But what happens if I can start raising bulls that can breed 50 or 60? Because we now know which ones are actual breeders. So mole that over, or anybody wants to talk to me about that. That's my next crazy thought.
SPEAKER_01You're thinking about leaving AI completely?
SPEAKER_02I am considering leaving AI. Because what you can find is we have got so many generations where we're so consistent that everything that we have is now really consistent. They almost all do the exact same thing. When I go out to AI have 25 bulls, and I don't know which one to read to because they're just as the one's just the same as the other. They're all the same. And so why don't I just turn them out, save that time and energy, and then do my next cooling deal by when I get the DNA back, if they don't read 40 calves in that cycle or whatever that deal, then I don't use them.
SPEAKER_01You have a couple pedigree outliers that you own. Gemstate inception.
SPEAKER_02What's that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I said you have a couple outliers and pedigree that you use in AI. You have Gemstate Inception.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01You own that bowl.
SPEAKER_02We have to, you know, always we're always cons conscious about getting a a new branch of the tree. And so we bought the Gem State bull, and then we actually shared in with a couple other people. So there's a couple other people going out there, but we own that bull. But we have to every year try and get two or three bulls, and then hopefully you get a couple of them. You know, we put a lot of emphasis on trying to make sure that they're feed efficient, then we try and find longevity. That bull there was out of a real longevity cow. Seems to be working pretty good. He's still in the earlier stages, but I don't have any reason not to use it. But we'll try and get two to three outside sires every year just to kind of keep an extra branch on that tree.
SPEAKER_01What's he doing for you so far?
SPEAKER_02You know, he's done all right. I mean, he's a really good breeder. He's breeding a lot of cattle. I do like that on him. He's a little bigger frame bowl than some of the ones we have right now, but he was bought completely on feet efficiency. And well, and I like some of that N-bar emulation EXT. They always had good feet and legs, they could travel, they could do their things. He had a little bit of that, and he went back to a really good right-time daughter. He's a little bigger than everything that we have, but he's fitting in. I mean, it's every trait that he has is fitting in so far.
SPEAKER_01I'm a little surprised he's a little bigger because he's a logo son.
SPEAKER_02I would not, but yeah, he's not a small bowl. He's uh he's damn sure over six.
SPEAKER_01Now you're kind of you're kind of underselling your partners too. I said you're kind of underselling your partners on this thing. One of your partners is Liam McDonald and the other one is Byrne Copel.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. And I think he's working okay. I mean both of them, I think he's working for both of them there. Yeah, I don't think he's bad, but the one thing that you gotta understand is that when we look at bulls, we are so ignorant in the fact that we think that we can look at a bull and tell you what the females are gonna be. That doesn't happen. Oh, he's easy flesh and he's gonna make easy fleshy daughters. That's not necessarily the case. Okay, so this bull is bigger. At this point, I don't know if his cows are gonna be bigger, though.
SPEAKER_01True.
SPEAKER_02On paper, you're right, he should not be bigger. But as a bull, he's bigger than my other ones. Huh. But does that mean his cows are gonna be bigger? No. We'll find out. And if they're I don't care if they're bigger. It doesn't matter to me if they're a little bit bigger and they can do everything right and they stay in the earth. I'm not the one that should be picking all that. The mother nature in your environment tells you what to breathe. Not, oh, I'm smarter than everybody else. I can just look at one and tell them it's a good one.
SPEAKER_01I think his daughters will have nice tidy udders and teeth. Say that again this week. I think his daughters will have nice udders and teats.
SPEAKER_02Oh, he's that yeah, that's a bought him if we didn't think that he had that capacity. But to be real honest, the strongest point that I I thought he was one of the best bulls at Midland. He traveled, his feet and legs were as good as anything in there. He traveled really good, but I thought maybe his strongest trait is he came from several generations of longevity. And that's the trait that we haven't been doing enough with. Longevity is maybe your number one trait. Longevity takes care of uh what 17, 20 different traits. If they have bad tits, you should have sold them. If they can't raise your cap, you should have sold them. If they can't get bred up, you should have sold them. You know, there are 17 different traits in there. And so if those cows are lasting a long time, you just got rid of a bunch of traits. So I would say if you can get longevity and feed efficiency and put them together, we don't need any other traits. That's all we need.
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm gonna try to sell a little bit of semen here for you, even though you're fighting me on it. He's available at Breeders Link in Bull Barn if anybody wants to look into that bull. Kevin Thighbolt, right? I'm probably saying it wrong. Sorry, Kevin. Last name, Kevin Thibolt, I think, something like that, but he's the breeder of that bull. Uh-oh. Jem St. Angus Ranch. And then you have a second bull that you've been using as well, Sterling Confidence Plus.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02The Sterling Confidence Plus. So we were always looking for an outside reader. And I ended up getting a phone call from Dave Holden. He was involved in the Ballon bull test or whatever that was in Nevada. They did a lot of feed efficiency testing, and he said, There's a bull you need to look at. And that bull had won all three things. He'd won the feed efficiency, the RFI, he'd won the feed conversion, and he'd won the average daily gain. And I didn't know nothing about him use conference plus on, and I don't breed to a lot of outside sires, so I'm not paying that much attention. But I did a little research and there was definitely a lot of feed efficiency in that pedigree. So I decided, yeah, I'll take a shot at him. He says, Oh, he's going to breed 10,000. And I get on the phone and I'm bidding on him. And here we go. He's going way past 10,000. And I'm pretty hard at it when I want to buy one. And this guy looked in the that was on the other side of the phone. He said, Do you know who's betting against you? And I says, I don't care. Buy the damn bull. At the end of the day, we bought the bull. I think it was, yeah, it was a major player that was trying to buy that bowl, but it was a very good buy. He ended up coming here. He didn't do as well for us on high elevation as I wanted him to, but he definitely was a real duel. Actually, that bull, Leo McDonald, used that bull, and I think he won his feed efficiency test in his individual hurt, which is very high. I think he won that test five times in a row. Wow. The bull's doing a good enough job for us. He's a little more average, but still doing a good job making super good females out of the really good Insidel cow family, so making really good cows. And uh it was one of those hard-headed moments that I won instead of lost.
SPEAKER_01There's been a fair amount of use on him as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he actually went, he even we had some semen go to Australia with him. He's gone to several different herds, and you know, not only is the bolt doing a good job, but he's going up with this. Here's the deal with that EPD. He's got pretty common EPDs. He's probably close to a plus 60 on weaning weight. But every herd he's ever gone to, he's gone to maybe not in my herd, but in every other herd, he's pushing 104, 105 weaning weight EPD, and yet he's only a plus sixty going against bulls that are plus nineties. How can that even be? I mean, at Leo McDonald's and Leo raced to some of the high weaning weight bulls, and I think he's averaged 103 in his herd. I mean, that's insane. That bull should be a plus 120 if it's anything. How do you justify that?
SPEAKER_01He's got 1,600 progeny in the United States.
SPEAKER_02And he was in the growth, and I'm not pa I'm not real high on this growth safe deal, but he was in about 1% of the feed efficiency bowl in the growth safe deficiency test system. Yeah, he's he is a real deal making great females. We uh we've moved on from him because we think we have quite a few sons of his that are better, and we think we have a lot more bulls in there, but definitely made some outstanding females and definitely did a great job. One of our very, very pleasant outside surprises.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, here I'll sell some more Simon for you. Available at Bull Barn. And then you got this lineage of bulls called special focus.
SPEAKER_02Yes, the special focus 448. Well, he was he's yeah, he's still he was probably one of the best bulls that ever hit the breed. He was just uh he was just a superstar. He did have some his feet were a little bit bad, so I kind of quit using him and went to some of his sons. But still today the daughters of his are just every trait he did. So when you talk about like a confidence boss and those bulls, this bull was just like two steps above in every deal. He did have some feet that I didn't love, which probably would be just fine in somebody else's herd. So I went on to some of his progeny, but I've got semen that I'm thinking about going back to him. But the old 448 bull was outstanding. His son, 9071, is absolutely outstanding. He died, so we don't have any anymore. But you're gonna see special focus that like he's having us for a long time. I can guarantee you that they just they're just the real deal.
SPEAKER_01Now you're using some grandsons, aren't you?
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah, at least maybe great grandsons. I mean, it seemed like every year I keep two or three more of them. It's like, you know, and it's weird because I thought that they were going to, you know, yeah, everybody gets worried about this line breeding. Well, two years ago, my number one bull selling bull was a double bred 448, lucky seven special 448. And he wasn't my best bull in the sale. The best bull in the sale, well, he wasn't even the best bull in the sale, but he was damn good. I bought him cheap because someway somebody misweighed him at the shoot, I'm sure. And so his leaning weight was like 490. It should have probably been way more way higher than that. But you know, it is what it is, that's what I'm pretty. But I'm assuming till he wrote read it wrong, and I ended up buying that bull for a guy for like $7,000, just stolen from him. But both of those bulls double bred 440A, and it seemed like they just got better. So until I start seeing something bad, I like this like begets like. That's what we need to do in the industry. Every single time that you have a calf, he looks this way, he does this, and then he goes to the supermarket or the feedlot, and he does what he's supposed to do, then he goes to the carcass, and then the mom and the family that goes to Walmart or whatever buys this beef, and every single time she buys it, it does the exact same thing. That's what we have to produce if we're gonna go and do it right. And so I'd love light begets like just read them the same. We don't have to hit home runs, we have to hit singles every single time.
SPEAKER_01I attend a lot of sales, a lot of production sales every year, and I end up going to some of these cheese and cracker outfits. You don't have real buyers at those. There's just a lot of trading, and uh very actually very few bowls do get sold, and the ones that do probably get overbought because they're just trade money back and forth. But the real production sales I go to, I'm starting to see a change where the commercial buyer isn't as interested in the EPDs as they once were. And now it's going back to where they're really I and phenotype and pedigree. And I'm seeing that the really good ranch owners, the good producers are going to these guys saying, Hey, here's three bowls I think you should look at, because the last one you bought from me had this pedigree, and this is where your match is. And I think we're seeing a lot more where the commercial guys are focusing, going back to looking at pedigree versus versus EPDs, because they like you said, they want to be able to produce the same thing over and over again.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I hope that's the case. And I am seeing some positive leads in the industry in that direction as well. Speaking of which, are you a good ringman?
SPEAKER_01Am I a good ringman? Yeah, no.
SPEAKER_02Okay, nope. I need ringman. I was gonna let you come to my sale and be ringman. I'd pay you to come be a ringman if you wanted to. I need a ring.
SPEAKER_01I'll come to sell some mortality insurance.
SPEAKER_02Well, you're welcome to do that, but it's hard to tell when I'm a four-year guarantee.
SPEAKER_01I know. You're making it hard on me. Yeah, yeah, when you're doing a four-year guarantee. But no, I'm not a ringman. No, there's that's a job for everyone else to do for other guys. Yeah. No, I still feel like I'm one of those parasites, though, when I show up at a cell, we're mooching off to the guy that is trying to sell the cattle.
SPEAKER_02Well, but don't think that way because you're necessary today. Maybe in 20 years we'll fix this thing, and that won't be the case. But right now, you're necessary. Those guys need you because there's a lot of bad bulls out there.
SPEAKER_01That's the thing we see in the mortality side. We see some losses, but that's not as much the biggest concerning thing. It's the guys that are calling me after three months and saying, hey, David, I need to cancel the policy on that ball I bought. And they go, Well, what's going on? Well, I had to send them back.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah, I mean back. There's breeders, and I ain't gonna mention names here again, but it's one of the biggest breeders in the United States, and they're on record in their internet pages saying that they return 25% of their balls a year. That's crazy. They have a guarantee on that burst. 25%. I don't do that in 10 years. Are they using a lot of co-op Hertz? This yeah, there's a lot of co-op, yeah. This is a big yeah, I could say his name and everybody would know him, but yeah, they absolutely use co-op hertz. That's one thing that we won't do is to do the co-op. I gotta be in control. If I'm gonna do all this stuff, I want to be in trouble. I don't want to pre I don't want somebody else screwing it up before I get a look at it.
SPEAKER_01No, I got you. I throw a little free advice out there, which is about what it's worth. You know, if a commercial guy's listening to this and you're thinking about buying from one of these sales, you need to pull the registration up and see if that bull is actually owned by the ranch that you're going to. Because we see a lot of that. It's a co-op herd. Those guys don't care that it's sending trash to the ranch.
SPEAKER_02That and that's great advice. And I I can tell you because of the thousands of people that call me, and for the most part, you're exactly right. Almost every one of those people are calling me. I can tell you every shitty producer, and they're all the people are selling for the most amount of money. I guarantee you that. But I can tell you almost every one of them, and what you're saying is the biggest boys are the co-op guys, those are the damaging people. And you're exactly right. That is great advice. I'd never thought of that, but yeah, if they're a co-op her, yeah, you probably ought to really be careful.
SPEAKER_01Because too often what I'm seeing out of the co-op hers is these guys are sending their highest dollar C. These guys aren't even weighing their cattle, they don't even know what their weaning weights are. They don't have weaning weights, they don't have yearly weights, they don't have yearly heights. The only reason they get a scroll is because the main producer is actually pulling those before they go to sell them, but they're just pulling DNA off these things. Yeah and if the bull hit a certain DNA number, well, I'm gonna send them off and they'll finish them out and put them in their cell, and they don't care that this junk feet, junk hips, shitty attitude, and the whole works.
SPEAKER_02Well, and now that's exactly why if you look at the Angus Association, we went backwards on most of the traits since the DNA came out there. They're not doing scientific data anymore.
SPEAKER_01No, they're not.
SPEAKER_02And we've gone backwards on almost every single trait since 2015, and that's when DNA came up there. So that's a very good point. And that's I don't I won't put in my DNA. I said, why, you know, why would you do it? Garbage in, garbage out. We're not gonna do it. Yeah. If it ain't got science attached to it, I'm not in.
SPEAKER_01You have enough generations though, too, where your accuracies are pretty decent. You probably send in your weaning and yearling weights, right?
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, in yearling with spirth weights, carcass data, we sent that in.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So your accuracies are pretty darn good. You're not the guy that's your contemporary group isn't three.
SPEAKER_02Well, when you're weaning off 800, 930 cows, I mean, some people could probably cheat. I probably could if I really want to get at it, but there's no way. I mean, if I'm at the shoot, I'm just rattling off weights. I don't damn. It's like just write it down and send it in because I am not gonna look at it again.
SPEAKER_01But there's outfits that people need to pay attention to. They'll send in a contemporary group of four.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah. I there and you go to these places whenever they say I got more pathfinder cows than anybody else, it's like, I know what you did. Hold on yourself, your cheater, maybe not cheater, but manipulator for sure.
SPEAKER_01It seems like I quote my friends too much on this show. But once again, going back to Corey Crothmalt one time, he told me if you start getting too many pathfinders, you get a screwed-up herd. Eventually, you should have a point where you don't have pathfinders.
SPEAKER_02Well, exactly. You have just a few good cows. Yeah, think about it. I'm looking at it, if it's legit, you just have a few good cows, very good ones.
SPEAKER_01The whole herd should be good, right? Your ratio should be 99 to 101. That's it.
SPEAKER_02That's the thing that I pride myself at probably more than anything else, is when people come to my sale, they say I can go to the very last bull on the herd, and he's just as good as the first bull. He says, We can just close our eyes and pick. That's the only place we can ever go. That and we're selling 400 bulls, and they say that that's the biggest compliment I can ever get.
SPEAKER_01That is because that's awesome.
SPEAKER_02I could care less about a million-dollar bull or six hundred thousand dollar bull or any of that. I want every single bull to go out there, do his job, make that commercial man money. And that's that's where my that's where my wish is.
SPEAKER_01Do you call females that way by you want them all to have the same type of kind?
SPEAKER_02You know, we in our conditions and the way we run things, females just call their shelves. But yeah, I really I'm not much into lucky in an animal and calling them. I'm more into put it in the toughest damn condition in the world, let the ones that cull themselves out.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_02And the ones that don't cull themselves out, I don't worry about it. I'm not really worried about culling that cow. I'm making sure that I put a bull that is very functional on top of her time after time. I'm gonna let Mother Nature call that cow out. And she'll call herself out. I mean, she's either not gonna come in bred, she's gonna start having small calves. Something's gonna happen to that cow. So I'm if I'm not if I have to go in there and start culling them by looks, I haven't pushed those cattle hard.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02That's the way we run it. Make sure you, yeah, you gotta be functional. Make sure that bull breeding on top of is always functional. And if you see any holes at all in his side, his progeny, you dump him and get rid of them all.
SPEAKER_01How many herdbulls do you retain?
SPEAKER_02You know, we will we will end up keeping probably three to four or five of our own every year. And then this last year I went on a spree and I ended up finding, I thought, I think I bought some of the best bulls I've ever bought. I bought three or four really fantastic herdbulls this year. The feet and the legs were just outstanding. I could count on their feet efficiency, great mama's, and I'm really excited about them. But we always keep somewhere between three to five bulls a year, just depending on you know what they look like and whatnot.
SPEAKER_01You know, out of your own genetics.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and it's exciting. I mean, I turned out herdbulls this year, and it's like I'm so excited. This is the best bull I've ever seen in my life, and I've turned them all. My cows, this is cool. I don't have one that I'm not excited about.
SPEAKER_01That's good. That's a good place to be. I breed a certain way with a certain philosophy. And then about three years ago, I bred into some popular genetics. And uh to go any farther.
SPEAKER_02I can everybody's done that.
SPEAKER_01For two years, for two years in a row, I have hated everything I produced. Every single bull went straight to town. I didn't even let them keep their nuts. Everything went to town. I was so jaded, and I went back to my core principles, and this year, I love everything. Yeah, everything is phenomenal.
SPEAKER_02And I think I can finish your story. Yeah, these guys are selling these establishment people are selling bulk dollar bulls. They were selling them bulls at the top of their sale that you you dump. Weren't they? Yeah, they were them high bowls that you bought them, but you were using them because they were selling them for so much money and you couldn't keep one because they were that junk.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02I'm not picking it up. The industry's broken.
SPEAKER_01I used two bulls that weren't available in stud.
SPEAKER_02You'll I'll tell you a funny story. So you you remember the old you might not be old enough for this, but you probably are. QAS, traveler, and emulation EXT, those genetics. Back in the day, they were good.
SPEAKER_01Jim, I think you and I are probably the same age.
SPEAKER_02Well, we might, but you look younger than me.
SPEAKER_01I'm 55. Oh, really? I'm 61, so we're close.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay. So more than a few years apart. A couple years ago, I was up in Midland. I always go to Midland because they got the feed efficiency and they got so many different genetics, I can get a good eye on what they are looking like. And that is my get into the world again card. And a couple of years ago, they had some QAS traveler and some N-bar emulation EXT cattle in there. Those are 30 to 40 year removed cattle. Do you know what they did and what they looked like in Midland today versus 30 years ago?
SPEAKER_01They probably look a little better, right? A little better feet.
SPEAKER_02They looked exactly the same. Exactly. Single ratio, including carcass, was the same today as it would have been there. They looked the same in the herd. Everything looked the same. These are 30, 40-year removed genetics. And I guarantee you they looked the same today as they did 30 to 40 years. So all these people saying we're going forward and we're making all these great genetics, the only difference was that both of those cattle had good feet and legs. That was the only thing that was really different.
SPEAKER_01Before we end this thing, you have a really big presence on social media. And if anybody wants to look at it, I would recommend it, Lucky Seven Angus, on Facebook. Do you do some Instagram stuff too?
SPEAKER_02We're starting to figure that out. I'm not very good at the social media. I just found out that we have the ability to tell the story. My social media presence is more so a big picture where I'm trying to help the farmer, family farmers, and ranchers. But the bigger I get, the quicker I can go to the city folks and explain the truth about why family farmers and ranchers are absolutely necessary for human survival. We have to have them, we have to support them. That's my goal in mind. But yeah, we're at we're on Facebook, we're gonna get on Instagram and some of these other deals, we're gonna get some help. And yeah, the when we get big enough, then we're gonna jump to the cities because we've got to change the way these guys think about the family farmers and ranchers. They have to understand that their life is in more jeopardy than ours if they don't make sure this food chain stays alive.
SPEAKER_01How long have you been doing it? I started noticing maybe a year ago that you were doing some of the stuff, but they've been doing it.
SPEAKER_02I I have no idea. So last year we hired a marketer and it didn't work out for us. The first thing they started doing is putting AI in, and I my hat just blowed off my head when they started putting AI stuff up. There's not gonna be any photo op shit on there, there's not gonna be any AI shit on there. We're not gonna do this. This is gonna be the real deal, and we're gonna start moving forward. But they actually showed me how, and I can tell you what, this is an insane story. There was a gentleman that was a big corporate boy that went out there and made the worst commercial, and it went national. It was on Fox Days and everywhere else, and he damned the whole entire family farmers and rancher. And I jumped on there and I'm in my drug rug and I throw this rant rave, throw it a fit, and we got 150,000 people overnight, watched it. And the next day I got to talk to a billionaire and his legal team, and I found out right there just how powerful we can be and how we can change things. Because generously enough, he changed that commercial to positive the industry instead of negative because of that event. So I now found out that we have some power to change our industry, family farmers and ranchers, to the better, which becomes everybody in society is better because they have a food supply that will not be controlled by corporate America. I mean, you just think about it. What would happen if Hitler could control the food supply? We had an evolved war. We have to protect that. Us dummies and family farmers and ranchers out there, we are the best thing. We're gonna work harder, we're gonna do everything, and not one of us will ever work with the neighbor to become the same. So there's no way we can control the food supply, and it's always gonna be the cheap, the cheapest and the safest it can ever be, as long as the family farmers and ranchers are producers. And they're exiting it at a high level. We have to fix that, we have to stop that. And that is my bigger goal than even producing bulls.
SPEAKER_01So you mentioned the hoodie. If anybody goes and watches any of Jim's content on Facebook on the reels, do you have a whole closet of these hoodies, or is this one singular hoodie that you always wear? Because right now you are wearing the hoodie.
SPEAKER_02So I've been wearing these hoodies. This one here is probably the only one that you've seen me on social media. It'll wear out sooner enough, and then I'll get another one. Everybody says, Why do you wear the winter hat and the hoodie? And I wear it at 100 below, 100 above, and 100 below. I never change it. And my answer to that is why would we have two sets of clothes? So this one will wear out soon enough and it'll be a different color.
SPEAKER_01I talked to Corey Crothmull after you and I talked the other night. He rec recommended that we do a GoFundMe to get you a new hoodie. I want to go on the record right now that I think at Crothmall's next production sale in March, the first Friday of the month, that he should do a donation bowl. He doesn't do any females, so he should do a donation bowl where all the proceeds go towards your hoodies.
SPEAKER_02Well, that's I like that deal. No, I'm gonna tell you. My daughter-in-law always buys me one of these new hats, and I like this hat because they don't blow off in the leaf and they don't get knocked off on the trees, and they're heavy enough that when a cow runs the wrong way, it can usually throw it in front of them and turn them. But she buys me one of these about every year, and my way of knowing when I need to throw it away is when I stick it to a kid and they smell it and they go to puking, then I'm taking that. I do have a selection of hats, but my hoodie selection might be getting low.
SPEAKER_01It's getting low? Where do you get those at?
SPEAKER_02Oh, I first got them when I was riding at the Narc Finals in Mexico and we went down there and bought them.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02It was funny because I we bought them, these cowboys from the University of Wyoming went down there in the Narc Finals. We bought these hoodies. We started wearing them just like I'm wearing them at the University of Wyoming. Before we left, everybody there was wearing these hoodies. My son, oh, he was probably 10 years ago, was at the University of Wyoming, and he said he started wearing my hoodies that nobody was wearing, but he took my hoodies down there. He said before he left, they all started wearing the hoodies. So the hoodies are popular, you just got to show them to people.
SPEAKER_01I'm not gonna let you go yet. I gotta circle back to the feed efficiency thing so people will understand. You really are one of the leading experts in the world on feed efficiency. You have traveled the world discussing feed efficiency the other day. I caught a video of you on you on YouTube in England doing some stuff. Am I correct on that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you went to the Yeah, I was actually it was a crazy deal. So the this guy called me out of Northern Ireland and said, Would you like to come to speak at an event over here? And I'm like, I never I'm not a speaker, I don't speak, that's not what I do. But I thought, you know, it'd be a good time to go over there. And I said, the speaking event was after I'm there for three or four days. So if I do a really crappy job when they send me home, I still got half of a good vacation. So lo and behold, we're at the BSAS, so it's a major scholastics. So I'm not actually even speaking to ranchers, I'm speaking to scholastics. And when I send my picture in, I'm the only guy with the cowboy hat, and everybody else has weird names with PhDs on the end of it. And I'm the keynote speaker, but yeah, we were we went there just for the fact that those guys have. Their environmental problems. Everybody's trying to shut down farmers and ranchers. And basically, because of my feed efficiency, that is somewhat of a solution. So my first speaking event is going to that event and going up against people that don't necessarily even really like you a lot of them.
SPEAKER_01Did you go to more than one?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we did three different events. The one, the major one was a BS. That was hundreds and thousands of people in that one with tons and tons of speakers. But we went to some farm. The rest of them were more farm-friendly, you know. But we did a speaking event, which would have been basically the Secretary of AG for Northern Ireland. He was there, you know. So we did it with some pretty higher-up people, but they were all user-friendly. Those guys were. But yeah, the that one at the BSAS, they were, as the guy that was controlling your moderator, he said there's always an arsehole in the crowd. One of those guys was definitely on the opposite side.
SPEAKER_01Were the farmers interested in what you had to say?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, absolutely. What I found out is that the farmers and ranchers throughout the world are just like us. And most people are just like us. We always have the wackos, my opinion, on this environmentalist deal that don't know what they're doing. They're on the wrong agenda, and then we have your conservatives and the farmers and ranchers, they were great, absolutely great people, good to be along. You couldn't really tell them other than they talk funny from their the people here. Great people, but it's the same agenda worldwide. You have the people that are conservative that are trying to help and feed the world, and then you got the other people that are trying to basically take away, you know. And when that guy, that one guy came in there, he basically questioned my data. And so I was able to say, Well, you know, the 30% of the beef industry goes to the cat and food industry. I said, So why don't you start taking everybody's pet and killing them, get rid of if you're really scared about this shit. And that pretty intended it. It's true. It's okay for it's okay to feed your dog and cat all this beef and all this stuff. That's okay because that's my cool little pet. Well, if it's bad, get rid of them first.
SPEAKER_01Some of those farmers that you talked to over there, any make it back over here?
SPEAKER_02Actually, the people that took me there have been down there twice. I actually went on a tour with they were the all I might like right now, Foil Food Group. He was what the guy that hired me to go over there with, they had a packing house. And it's a little different deal over there. They only get cattle in in lots of threes and four small lots. And so to get a lot of cattle, he has to go out there and make a lot of friends in the agriculture, doing a wonderful job of going out there and helping family farmers and ranchers be successful so that he can be successful himself. But he came over here because he wanted to take a tour looking at 44 farms cattle, actually, because they were antibiotic and hormone-free cattle, and they have to be antibiotic and hormone-free over there. And so he's been over here twice and he's brought a few friends, but they haven't had anybody else come back.
SPEAKER_01In England, they call packing houses a different name. I forgot the name of it.
SPEAKER_02I'll remember it as soon as we're off. I guess it's called food group. But yeah, and and to be real honest, their technology was every bit as good, if not better, than America in that packing house. The the weird part about it was when they said, Oh, yeah, I got a truckload of coming in cattle coming in there, and they brought them this little bitty, look like a little U-Haart haul trailer, and they dropped three out instead of it's like, where's your cellways? Where's your cattle?
SPEAKER_01So let's wrap it up right here. I thank you so much for coming on the show. But before we wrap it up, when is your sale every year?
SPEAKER_02Um, it's the very first Saturday in March every year at the River Livestock Bar.
SPEAKER_01Do you normally keep it on the same, you know, like DV auction, live auctions? Where do you normally broadcast it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's Wivag, is what we were using the last couple of years. You could go right back to do it live.
SPEAKER_01Those listening to this thing, you can catch a lot of his video clips on the Lucky Seven Ranch on Facebook. It's pretty darn entertaining. It's fun to listen to. The other day he went on a five-minute diatribe on some douchebag in California, which was awesome. I loved it. I loved it. And the guy had it coming. He absolutely had it coming. You didn't even name him. I would have named him.
SPEAKER_02I'm trying to be, you know, this is the one thing that I want is I've tried to be cool careful because the bigger picture is we're all here for a greater source, and I don't want to run those people off. I want to educate them in the same way I want to educate everybody else because the truth will set you free and we want to get to that point. So I'm trying to be as nice as I could, but I I used to rodeo professionally. I've been in a few bar fights, and I have no problem shutting them out every now and again.
SPEAKER_01Did you rodeo? What what discipline?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I actually I rode Saddle Bronx. I traveled. I I actually lived with Ty Burray and Jim Sharp.
SPEAKER_01Really?
SPEAKER_02I traveled with Tommy Reeves. I was in the top 10 in the world there for a while, rode Calgary, every big rodeo in the world.
SPEAKER_01So really Saddle Bronck?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01All right. No bulls? Didn't want to do the bulls.
SPEAKER_02No, I jumped on a couple little ones when I was a kid, but no. Saddle Bronx.
SPEAKER_01Did you go to college for it?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. I went to Casper College and Rodeo University of Wyoming. Went to the college finals and all that stuff. Pretty much did everything.
SPEAKER_01Wow, that's pretty impressive. Did you ever make the NFR?
SPEAKER_02No, I didn't. Those guys are a little different. They're wired a little different. I was capable of becoming an NFR qualifier. I went to every single finals in the world. But when I can explain how come it was different. I was traveling with Tom Reeves, and he was a world champion. Went to the finals like 16 times. Credible saddle rock rider. Good guy. And he said, Where are you going? I said, I gotta go home with Cast and Cows. I said, Where are you going, Tom? And he goes, Well, I'm gonna go to somewhere in Florida, which was a thousand miles away. And I said, Tom, I said, that's like a $400 rodeo. You can only win four or five hundred dollars if you go there. He said, You can't even get your gas money back. I said, Why would you do that? And he looked at me and growled and he goes, Because that's what I do. And so I chose to come home and be a cattleman, and they chose to be a world champion.
SPEAKER_01But it's a lot easier for those guys now. Back then, they had to basically drive pickup.
SPEAKER_02Well, hey, I mean, they're a different breed. I traveled with Roddy Hay. There's a rodeo between Moala and St. Paul, and they they started at the same time, but they adjusted the events. So if you drove as fast as you could on this road, and it was like a mile one way, 90 degrees, mile one way, 90 degrees, all the way across there. And Roddy Hay kelled us like five different times. I swear he would go across around that 90 degree corner, 70 miles an hour, and I swear there was a couple cars, there's no way we missed. I don't know how we're still alive, but it's like, what the hell are you doing? He said, I got the best one on them. I said, I know, but it's not worth dying over.
SPEAKER_01It's like, well, I think it is. I grew up in Western, actually, I moved out here only four years ago. I'm from Western Washington, and I went to St. Paul and the Malala. Yeah, yeah. So you've been talking about it. Yep. Yeah, I even know where the the turns are that you're doing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. You can still, I still probably have poop stains on several of them. It's like, I swear, it's like there's a car coming. There's no way we missed that car. We're dead. I gotta bite myself. And that happened like three times. At that point in time, I'm going, there's a difference. I don't think I'd ever done that.
SPEAKER_01It's no huh. Geez, you can get somebody on the show and you find out all kinds of things about them. All right, Jim. Well, I'll let you go take on the day and go check on some cattle.
SPEAKER_02All right. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. And if you have a chance, come on out to our sale. It's a pretty fun event. Absolutely.