Stories I’ll remember
I chuckled when cattle feeder David Trowbridge told me two years ago, “Everybody has the best cattle in the world…until they feed them for the first time.”
That’s stuck with me.
So I thought I’d share a few quotes that I picked up on my travels through Montana and Iowa last week that I’m sure to remember even after these stories are written.
• “I bought used cows from everybody—bad attitudes, bad bags, the whole nine yards.” Sound familiar? Stan Pelton, near Absarokee, Mont., laughed as he told me about his start in the cattle business. He came back after college and a few years as a feedyard manager to work for his parents and start his own herd. Stan can laugh about it now, because he’s spent decades building that herd up. Not so coincidently, he’s been feeding cattle for one more year than he’s used AI. “After you feed them one time, you’re darn sure aware of what you don’t need to do.”
•“That kind of cured me on feeding cattle for a while.” Rick Jarrett, Big Timber, Mont., talked about his first experience with retained ownership. Prior to that he’d always run his cattle as yearlings, but a drought forced him to send to the feedyard. The economics of his plan to sell cattle and buy some light calves to run on grass when the rains came looked a whole lot different when the dairy-herd buyout program was announced and limit-down beef trading ensued. It was years before he decided to try feeding cattle again but eventually, curiosity got the best of him. “I just had to know how my cattle would do.”
• “If I’m going to pay that kind of money for genetics, I wanted to make sure that it was in there.” I had just questioned Lyle Gossling, who runs 150 cows near Decorah, Iowa, on why he decided to GeneMax test heifers he was selling. When Lyle said “it” he was talking about carcass quality and performance. His “never-ending thirst for genetics” led him to try DNA tech and now he’s hooked. “I’d challenge anybody else to stand outside of the pen and be able to tell what’s in there.”
See why doing story trips is one of my favorite parts of my job? Got any good quotes or pieces of advice that have stuck with you through the years? Feel free to share them in the comments; I’d love to hear it.
May your bottom line be filled with black ink,
Miranda
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