GARDINER PRIME ANGUS RANCH Pat & Ada Gardiner 6503 Farm to Market Road :: Bonners Ferry, ID 83805 Pat 208-290-4521 :: Glenn 208-597-0617 www.gardinerprimeangus.com
.Hello and welcome to Gardiner Prime Angus. We are happy to partner with our friends at SHB Angus for our third annual bull sale. Both of us are strongly committed to herd improvement genetics in the traits producing market profit at time of sale. Solid breeding takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. . Over these years, we have been using bulls with good EPDs for calving ease and growth and we also kept a lot of carcass quality in the mix because those, down the chain of things, are what pay the bills. Better calves are coming from these selections. As a customer told us over the Christmas holidays, the calves from their GPAR bulls in the past several sales have grown “like weeds” so that they “had to do first vaccines younger so they fit in the calf chute.” .We have come to recognize that a big factor in the profitability of the operation is cattle that don’t fall out of the system because of bad feet, bad udders, or bad dispositions that as a practical matter reduce or even eliminate the advantage of those good EPDs. We focus on “$Maternal” here, or “$M,” one of the Association’s newer multi-trait $Value indexes. Before $M, the only index specific to the cow-calf producer was $Weaning, which was of limited value because while it addressed birth weight, weaning weight, maternal milk and mature cow size, it did not address heifer pregnancy, foot conformation or docility which $M includes along with each of the $W traits.
.We are finding that the $M index helps sort through bulls that may have very similar numbers for Birth Weight, Growth and Milk, but may have dramatically different EPDs for Docility and Foot Quality, to name a couple of important ones. In our experience, the bulls that have a complete, no-holes EPD profile will possess very high rankings for $M, and particularly that those bulls with poor Foot Quality EPDs will drop noticeably for $M, even if they possess excellent Growth and Milk EPDs. This shows us that high number bulls and cows can prove disappointing if they don’t last for more than a few breeding seasons due to foot problems or teat and udder deficiencies. .What is exciting to us at GPAR is that even before the advent of $M, we were selecting for the traits it is composed of, without ignoring the fundamental Angus qualities of low birth weight, high growth and marbling. That is why we are so enthused about the $M index -- it rewards the correct traits. Our bulls selling in our sale this year are an excellent reflection of that.
Come visit us at GPAR any time, or on-line at www.gardinerprimeangus. com, or just call to talk cattle. We look forward to seeing you at the third annual SHB/GPAR bull sale on March 13! Pat and Ada Gardiner Glenn Ensz
22 n FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2026
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