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Western Nebraska | I think people have bought into a lot of slick marketing. It seems to me that the marketing campaign has done more for the popularity of the black Angus breed more than any particularly great attributes of the cattle. We were just at the Range Beef Cow symposium and while I know that a few visits don't accurately depict a switch in sentiment, there were enough people talking about cross breeding that it is starting to make me think the black craze might be running its course. I talked to several people that are really eyeing the baldy, black or red, cross and thinking that it makes a lot of sense to start bringing some heterosis back into their herds. The Hereford seedstock operators are probably going to be doing quite well in the next few years. I think that there is a lot of pent up demand about to be released for Hereford bulls.
Our own operation is predominately red angus and we have really been struggling with this very question. We have tried several crosses to keep our cattle red and still haven't been able to find anything that we like as well as the Red Angus cow. If we could do the baldy cross and not have the white on the animal we would have done it a long time ago. One of the neighbors bulls got in and we had about a dozen early baldy calves. They were only about two weeks earlier than our own bulls but those calves came off the cow a lot bigger than our own. We have a good market for our calves right now and I hate to ruin it, but I also don't want to be caught in the position of trying to play catch up when the market does decide that we need to be giving them more crossbred calves.
I read an article recently in one of the Angus journals about how Angus calves were so good that they were even better than crossbred calves. According to this guy you didn't even need to crossbreed any more because Angus was so great and had made such great improvements that they were performing better and were healthier than crossbred calves. I have to believe that those kinds of ridiculous statements are grasping at straws trying to defend their position as the preeminent beef breed. It makes me wonder if the Angus guys are starting to sense a shift in opinion and are starting to get uneasy.
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limousin calves??
