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Need help making bull buying decisions
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Jordan3215
Posted 3/6/2019 20:00 (#7363762)
Subject: Need help making bull buying decisions


West Central Nebraska - Sandhills
Currently a purebred red angus commercial cow/calf herd around 300hd small to moderate framed 1150lb mature weight. We AI everything. We have been expanding for the last few years. We retain our replacements (all heifers who were AI sired), and we also purchase quality replacement females from a herd with nearly identical genetics every year. We market our calves in the fall, but we also market bred commercial females and/or heifer pairs.
When choosing bulls to AI to, it seems there are many bulls out there that have the quality in both producing a terminal male as well as producing a quality replacement female. But when you purchase bulls, it seems that you really need to choose whether you're purchasing a bull that is terminal or maternal. Coming up on some bull sales trying to determine whether to purchase bulls (THAT WILL BE USED AS CLEANUP)
A. Purchase somewhat terminal red angus bulls, but still be able to retain naturally sired heifers out of them if they are quality
B. Purchase more maternal red angus bulls, and then start keeping top 2/3 of heifers even if they are naturally sired (Burke Teichert method of retaining nearly all heifers, treating them like yearling/low input, and AI'ing and only putting bull in 1 cycle)
C. Purchase Sim/Angus terminal bulls, and hope that we get enough growth out of our cleanup calf crop that they may be more uniform with our AI sired group for marketing the steers.

I know there are a lot of factors, and this is an open ended question. We enjoy keeping and marketing bred heifers, but I wonder if the bulls we can afford for cleanup will really be producing enough quality to keep those heifers, or if we should focus our clean up bulls on terminal efforts.
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