My cows are certainly not overfed unless someone considers having good hay or grass, mineralyx, white salt block and water always available to them as "overfeeding".

There is a poster here from Missouri who for years has replied to any picture of my cows with "YOUR COWS ARE TOO FAT!"

All I can say is I emphasize heart girth, fertility, calving ease and longevity in my cows. I went to a class run by Gearld Fry years ago that was very helpful in identifying cows that work on grass and in my environment.

Every few years I purchase a registered bull. I've had good luck focusing on CED (calving ease), marbling EPDs and docility in purchasing registered bulls from two very good Hereford breeders. I keep one of his best sons out of one of my best cows and breed him to his half sisters.  I've had very good luck with bulls out of EFBeef's Tested line. Schu-Lar is the other breeder whose Hereford bulls I've had very good luck with.

What this has produced is a cow that is deep sided, with heart girth that often seems like she needs a wide load sign, good-uddered, docile, can calve on her own every year and can live in below zero temps by going into the woods and can thrive on grass with almost no grain. I never see ribs on my cattle. Part of that is the way the marbling EPD seems to correlate to a good fat layer and FAT EPD.

I like the way most of my herd looks and don't feel they are "overfed". I tried bagging and feeding corn silage from a feed wagon years ago that did make my cows "greasy" fat so I know what overfed looks like.

Thank you for your comment.

ETA my next direction is to try to slightly reduce my average cow size without losing other positive traits. The cow on the right in one of the pictures above, #142, is 10 yrs old, has a great calf every year but is over 1500 lb. I have a few very good but smaller bred heifers that seem like they'll top out in the 1200 lb range. I'll probably keep a good bull calf out of one of them to use as a bull to lighten up the herd a ways.