WELCOME
Cattlemen & Cattlewomen!
Welcome to our 51st Annual Total Performance Production sale! We appreciate your interest in our program and look forward to sharing this tremendous set of bulls and heifers with you. Our Total Performance philosophy means that we think it’s critical that cattle perform well in all areas. The ultimate goal is for our commercial cow-calf customers to be consistently profitable. For that to happen, the bulls need to sire growthy calves with eye appeal, and they need to leave behind functional, fertile, problem-free females. Everything we do has this objective in mind. Based on customer feedback, we’ve started utilizing larger sire groups. (You can see progress in this area in this sale, and it will be even more pronounced in next year’s.) The select few sires we use are critical to success, and I spend a lot of time researching and evaluating them; it’s one of my hobbies (my wife might say obsessions.) In sire selection, great phenotype is a must because we know cattle are still bought by people, and people like to look at and buy good cattle! Numerically, if a bull is toward the bottom of the breed in any single trait that is a driver of cow-calf profitability, I won’t use him. Even though that bull could sometimes be mated to just the right cow and hit a home run, when spread across the volume of cows we are breeding to, those problems are bound to pop up. Additionally, as a seedstock provider, I believe it’s our job to keep you out of the ditches. When you’re selecting bulls, you shouldn’t have to pull up a bull’s registration page and look up all 27 of his EPDs and 6 indexes to see what his flaws are. We want you to have the
confidence that we are providing bulls that exhibit Total Performance in all important areas and have no significant holes. Culling is the next method we use to ensure our customers are getting quality. We cull early and often on both the bull and the female side. We offer an unusually low percentage of our calf crop as bulls. We’re fortunate to have a very long-term time horizon so we can take some short-term financial hits-like castrating more of the male calves-because we believe it will pay off in the long run by only selling top quality. At Wagonhammer, it is an achievement for a bull to make the sale, not an expectation. “What gets measured gets improved” is a classic quote. We strongly believe in the power of data and spend countless hours collecting and submitting data to the breed associations. Here is a list of the data we have been submitting: calving ease, birth weight, weaning weight, yearling weight, yearling height, scrotal circumference, docility, carcass ultrasound, heifer pregnancy records, entire cow herd inventory reports, teat size, udder suspension, and mature cow weight. We have large, meaningful contemporary groups and report with 100% honesty. We also genomic test every bull and replacement heifer. The beauty of genomics is it allows us to see how the genes were actually inherited, not just an estimated parental average. When the thousands of data records we submit are combined with millions of records from other herds and with genomics, we get genomic- enhanced EPDs that have incredible accuracy. Not perfect, of course, but pretty darn good.
Back to the ultimate goal of cow-calf profitability, here is a snapshot of what our Angus bulls have to offer in the traits we deem most important to ranchers. These numbers represent the median in each trait. In other words, for each trait listed, half of the bulls in our sale have higher numbers than what is listed, and half of the bulls have lower numbers. We’re proud that our median bull is around the top 1/3 of the breed in every major category. There are two Angus indexes that predict cow-calf profitability: maternal weaned calf value ($M) and weaned calf value ($W.) See the selection tools glossary on page 2 for all the traits included in those indexes. FL-functional longevity-is a new EPD that predicts the number of calves a sire’s daughter is expected to produce by 6 years of age compared to other sires. Our median bull in the sale is in the top 25% of the breed for WW, the top 35% for FL, the top 29% for $M, and the top 20% of the breed for $W! Please reach out if you’d like to talk about the cattle, and thank you for your interest in our program. FL 8 0.9 78 134 1.06 27 1.10 35% 42.5% 25% 28% 39% 45% 35% 10 73 -22 19 75.5 80 30% 47.5% 62.5% 55% 29% 20% CW MW $EN DOC $M $W CED BW WW YW SC MILK
Sincerely,
Alex Wolf and the Wolf family
DIRECT LINK TO OUR SALE VIDEOS !
SCHEDULE
Bred by Commercial Cattlemen for Commercial Cattlemen
MARCH 17 ALL DAY – Cattle on display 5:00 PM –Presale Party MARCH 18 NOON – Complimentary Lunch Served 1:00 PM –51ST ANNUAL PRODUCTION SALE
BROADCAST LIVE ON:
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