Spring Time
A lot has happened since I visited with you last. A Regional Angus Show, the Ohio Beef Expo, a trip to Kansas, and the onset of spring breeding season have combined to make the past month go by very quickly.
Earlier in March, Lindsey and I made the trip to Harrisonburg, Virginia for the Mid-Atlantic Regional Angus Classic Show. Lindsey’s April 2009 daughter of PVF ALL Payday from Stertzbach Cattle Co. was named Reserve Grand Champion Owned Heifer. Thanks to Bruce and Amy Stertzbach and the entire crew at Stertzbach Cattle Co. for all of their help in making the trip a success. Lindsey felt the trip was a nice diversion from studying for Winter Quarter Finals at OSU.
Next up was the Ohio Beef Expo in Columbus. This year we took on a new venture at the Expo by having a booth at the trade show. The booth allowed us to interact with many producers from Ohio and surrounding states and expose them to our operation. Through a promotion with Vita-Ferm, we awarded a certificate for $250 in Vita-Ferm product to Michael Duff of Whipple, OH. Plans are to do the booth again in 2011.
We sold an excellent Sim-Angus yearling bull as lot #71 in the Simmental sale. He is a Feb. 1, 2009 son of WSJ Encore out of the 2007 National Champion Percentage Simmental Female CRCC Dixie Erica 6040S. He sold to Cluxton Farms of Ripley, Ohio. Lauren’s Charolais x Simmental x Angus heifer was selected as Grand Champion AOB Heifer in the Jr. Show.
Spring breeding season began for us the last full weekend of March in 2010. We synchronized basically all of our Jan.-Feb. yearling heifers and Jan.-Feb. A.I. calving cows. We follow the basic synchronizing protocol of using CIDR’s and GnRH on Day 1 and a shot of prostaglandin on heifers at Day 5 and cows on either Day 5 or 7. This system has worked fairly well for us. Counting the eggs that were implanted last week, we have made over 100 matings thus far. Now we are hoping for respectable conception rates.
On April 1 we made our annual trek to Kansas for the annual Gardiner production sale. This year we flew in to Wichita instead of Oklahoma City because of Easter weekend travel connections. We took advantage of our alternate travel plans to stop by McCurry Angus Ranch at Burrton, KS to visit with John McCurry. John is an energetic young breeder that is doing an excellent job with his family’s herd.
We finally made it to Gardiner’s on Thursday evening and started looking at the sale cattle which continued up until sale time Saturday morning. As expected, Gardiner’s had another excellent sale as they grossed just under $3.7 million on 967 lots of registered and commercial cattle to average $3,805. The most impressive segment of the sale was the 297 lots of bulls that averaged $5,871 which included the sale of the $180,000 G A R Progress at $180,000. Maplecrest sold a total of 17 bulls in the sale in a price range of $4,000 to $10,000 with our bulls averaging $5,662. We are honored to have this joint marketing arrangement with the Gardiner’s.
We are also excited to have added three tremendous females to our lineup. We purchased two females in partnership with Steve Hillhouse of LaGrange, TX. First, we purchased Lot #460, G A R 1I1 Rito 1566, a daughter of 1I1 out of the great 2413 cow. She is a maternal sister to $300,000 Deer Valley donor G A R Objective 2345, the dam of Progress. 1566 was the dam of the high-selling bred heifer and several high-selling bulls at the 2010 GAR sale. The second female we purchased was Lot # 691X, G A R Predestined 208, a daughter of Predestined out of the highly productive G A R 1407 New Design 1182. This female is carrying an Objective heifer calf and definitely fits our requirement for outstanding EPDs with a great look. We also added a very good Bextor daughter from the bred heifer division. We are excited to get all of these females in production and look forward to a bright future for them all.
