Celebrating 20 years
with the Wilson Family
It was January 2006, when Jim and Willard Wilson approached Sherry and I and presented us the opportunity to buy a large group of their seedstock cows. It doesn’t seem like it could have been 20 years ago already. We had a group of registered cows, but this presented us with the chance to expand our numbers in a way that would have taken many years to achieve. Jim had worked to provide his customers with cattle that were right for the commercial cattleman. He also worked to have them fit what the feedlots and packer needed as well. They were in it from one end to the other with the feeder cattle brokerage business Willard, and then Jim, had worked on for years. The operation was focusing on their commercial herd and due to the size of their operation and labor limitations, the seedstock herd was offered to us. The Wilson cow herd was built on the best genetic and phenotypic inputs they could find. While some operations were just considering the Optimizer cow, Jim knew there was an advantage to running a crossbred cow in his commercial operation. The Salers-Angus cow offered pretty much all of the things needed in the cow business. He set out to breed the best of his Salers cows to the best Angus bull he could find to create the best Optimizer cattle he could make for his customers. This breeding philosophy definitely gave us a head start when we were able to pur- chase those 75 pairs of registered cows. Armed with as much data as you could have, we poured over records for countless hours. I was sure we needed to concentrate on younger cows – which we did – but it was too hard to pass up on those proven producers that had been there, done that and were subject to all the culling objectives that made it such a great program, and they were still there. Optimizers to Purebreds, we bought the best of the best from their herd.
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