The Path To Profits In The Cattle Business

Ridgefield Farm was established by E. J. Whitmire, in 1951. An original 200 acre tract of land grew over the years to 1020 acres, of which about 410 acres is pasture and the rest is forested. Ridgefield Farm was the NCBA, Environmental Stewardship Award winner for Region II in 1994. We were raised working on the farm and showing livestock at county and state fairs and being taught to honor the land. Our father, E.J., originally stocked the farm with a registered shorthorn herd which he developed for about ten years. For the next thirty years or so he maintained a commercial herd of approximately 200 cows composed of a variety of breeds, but the majority were black hided. He then bred them to high quality Charolais bulls, believing that “you could make money by purchasing grade cows that had plenty of milk, and put an outstanding bull on them, producing fast growing calves that would appeal to buyers”. The calf crop had always been sold at the farm as 6 weight and 7 weight feeder calves. Since about 1980 the calves were sold each summer via tele-auction based upon video tape presentation. The farm generally operated at a loss, however, requiring outside capital each year in order to make ends meet.

Upon Dad’s death in a farm related accident in 1998, decisions had to be made about the farm. Whether to keep it or not. If so, how to make it pay for itself. Decisions that many families sooner or later must face. 

Employing a lot of the information that we had obtained from attending many sessions of NCBA Cattlemen’s College, and constantly reading trade publications such as Drover’s Journal, Beef Today, Progressive Farmer, etc., we developed a plan that would hopefully provide us with a means of increasing cattle numbers. We set about refencing and subdividing pastures, etc. in an effort to make the farm as efficient as possible. 

We also decided that we needed to retain ownership of several groups of calves of Dad’s breeding to figure out just what we had. We chose to send them out to Decatur County Feedyard, in Oberlin, Kansas because of their reputation for sorting and providing individual animal feedyard and carcass performance data. 

We discovered that Dad’s commercial herd contained about two thirds average to below average cattle. Their calves suffered from low feed conversion rates, mediocre average daily gains, and light weight carcasses, with only 43% grading choice or better. Their cost of gain was about $0.12 per pound more than that of really good cattle, and premiums earned for yield grades 1 & 2 and choice carcasses were few and far between. We quickly culled down the commercial cow herd from 189 to the 53 that we now have, only keeping cows that produced truly outstanding calves. 

Dad had an accident insurance policy from which we paid his remaining debts and had enough money left over for us to buy 140 Angus females at various locations and sales during the next year, figuring that we couldn’t go wrong with that decision. 

In addition, however, it became obvious that no matter what else we did, an infusion of really good genetics was the route to take if one had a chance to make the cattle business profitable, and to do nothing would doom us. We immediately began upgrading the new Angus herd by utilizing genetics from several well known Angus breeders.  As a result of these efforts the Angus herd has been continuously improved and now numbers about 100 females.

While we liked our Angus cattle, and still do; we felt like there was quite a bit of room left to produce an animal that would perform better in the feedyard and hang a more profitable carcass on the rail.

Being numbers and performance oriented we set out to determine which breed would ultimately work best for us. We wanted a breed that was docile and easy to work with and had heavy muscle and known to be really good mama cows. On a couple of visits to the NCBA conventions, I kept being attracted to this booth that contained these brown, really thick, heavily muscled cattle, known as Braunvieh. I found out that they were a Swiss breed; and even though I had never seen them before, I found out that they are one of the oldest cattle breeds in the world. What I read about them matched with what I saw. Although Braunvieh numbers in the U.S. are still limited, the cattle have demonstrated outstanding performance at the USDA Meat Animal Research Center (MARC), located in Clay Center, Nebraska as well as in numerous other beef cattle comparative contests such as the Great Western Beef Expo and The Kansas Empire Days Carcass Contest. As a result, we chose Braunvieh Cattle with which to take our cattle business to the next level.  We purchased two Braunvieh bulls in 1999 to use on our remaining commercial cows. Since that time we have grown our Braunvieh herd to about 160 registered cows and 8 herd bulls, representing the top genetics in the breed. We use the Angus cow herd for two purposes. One is to have high quality cows into which to transfer Braunvieh embryos in order to provide more opportunities for concentrating the genetic lines of our Braunvieh cattle, and the other is to provide the platform upon which to produce a hybrid Braunvieh Angus Cross (BAC). In either both cases we have a win win situation. If the embryo transfer is successful, we end up with a specially formulated mating combination of Braunvieh sire and Braunvieh dam, producing a fullblood or purebred Braunvieh calf that will be raised by an Angus cow that has been selected for her outstanding milking ability. On the other hand, if the embryo transfer isn’t successful, then we will end up with a BAC calf since we turn our Braunvieh herd sires in with our Angus cows shortly after the embryos are transferred.

For those customers with commercial herds wishing to achieve the greatest effect of heterosis, or for those folks wishing to establish Braunvieh herds of their own, we recommend that they purchase fullblood or purebred Braunvieh animals. On the other hand, for commercial cattle operators who have predominantly black herds, and want to insure that the calves produced will be black, but still gain most of the benefits of the introduction of Braunvieh genetics, and most of the benefits of across breed heterosis; then purchasing one of our outstanding BAC crosses is a perfect fit.

Read more about how you can participate with us to earn more money from your commercial cows by “clicking” on the information about The Ridgefield Farm Braunvieh Bull Deal.