It's not very often i would classify a year as strange, odd, one of a kind.  However, this last calving season proved to do just that for us.  It is not very often that you can have a lopsided calving season, but if you only keep bull calves from the first 1 1/2 cycles, a rare anomaly can occur.  We started our 2023 calving season with, what seemed like, a high number of heifer calves.  Little did we know that they would dominate:  1 -  the whole AI cycle, 2 - the entire first cycle, and yes 3 - the entire registered calf crop.  The registered heard end up 70:30 heifers, with most bulls coming too late to make the bull crop for this year.  In fact, only 16% made the age cutoff, but not all of those met our requirements.  Luckily, we started to see this unfold and began to keep some really great commercial bull calves just in case.

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We continue to work on several key attributes in our cattle.  These are (but not limited to) - calving ease, feed efficiency, structure and growth.  I feel these are the foundation of great cattle, and then you can move on to other things.  The exciting thing with this bunch of bulls is that they come from great foundation cows in our herd and the sires we chose for them are adding exceptional traits on top of that foundation to allow them to have a very bright future.