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Bryan and Marcia Mussard raise Angus
seedstock near Dillon, Montana and had their 25th bull sale in
2009. “I’ve had cows my whole life; I borrowed $400 when I was
10 years old, to buy my first cow,” says Bryan. His family had a
small ranch and a feedlot, at Dillon while he was growing up.
He was in the commercial cattle
business until 1984 when he bought his first registered heifers.
“I didn’t get serious about the Angus business until 1989 when I
started selling registered bulls. In 1991 I graduated from
college and started a bull test station here in Dillon, called
Mussard Bull Development Center. In college, I wrote a business
plan my senior year, stating that I’d go 10 years or until I had
100 registered cows of my own. On the 9th year I had 100
registered cows, so my wife and I decided to end the bull test
and pursue our own registered cow herd and expand it,” says
Bryan.
Since 1993 he’s been collecting
carcass data and performance data on all the calves that didn’t
make it as breeding stock—using that information to improve the
cow herd genetically for feedlot and carcass performance. “We
were testing them on the ranch every year by selling all the
open cows, all the late calvers and the bottom producers. So we
were keeping track of all the data at home and keeping track of
all the performance data when they left home, and really started
tweaking and honing what we call the extreme middle. We’ve made
that our term, and our goal—to breed cattle for the extreme
middle. You can call them average cattle, but we call it the
extreme middle, and we feel that getting around all the bases is
a home run for us,” he explains.
“We don’t ever strive to be
number one in any one trait. We just want to eliminate the
outliers that affect our bottom line, in every trait. By doing
that, we don’t have to make any major swings. We can spend most
of our time fine-tuning.”
He started one of the earliest
source and age verified programs in Montana in 2003, called the
Tracker Program. “This was when we got introduced to several
feeders and packers, and learned how to cross that bridge and
find out what’s on the other side—in the Midwest where they feed
our cattle and process them. We spent 3 years in myth-busting
sessions, learning the challenges of those 2 segments of the
industry. This helped us come home and learn how to manage
genetics, health and nutrition,” he says.
“We got connected with several
feeders, and were able to work with Mark Nelson through Angus
America, and looked at several grids. This is where we came up
with the concept of the extreme middle. There are some myths,
that you must have one extreme or another. There are yield
grids, continental grids, English grids or quality grade grids.
People feel they must try to target one grid, and by the time
they get all their cattle there, it changes. So the industry
stays confused. What I found, when I looked at 3 different
grids, is that they all paid the same premium for the very
center. Some paid a little bit more for prime, some paid a
little more for yield grade 1s and 2s, but when you got to the
very center of all 3 grids, it was exactly the same. So this is
what we shoot for—the extreme middle on the grids,” explains
Bryan.
When you do this, you can work
toward consistency rather than having to keep changing focus.
“You can sell your cattle on any grid, and if you shoot for the
bulls eye in the middle you’ll get paid a premium on any of
them. So we are not interested in primes, and not interested in
yield grade 1s, or selects, or yield grade 5s. Focusing on the
middle, we’ve helped our customers average $50 to $75 annually
on grid value in feedlots that are consistently bringing home
$12 to $18 on the grid. That helps a lot.”
He also learned that what they
did for the cattle health-wise, up until selling them, such as
preconditioning, weaning, etc. before they went to the feedlot,
all made a difference. “We now work with a couple of good
feeders that we get all the information from. We get individual
data on sickness, death loss, feed efficiency, average daily
gain, individual carcass data, etc. We can look at each animal
individually and then look at the entire group,” he says.
“A customer can come to us and we’ll look at their close-out
records. We might see that the health looks good, the cattle
gain really well, but need more marbling—they didn’t have very
many that graded choice. So when they come to our bull sale, out
of 170 bulls we can sort through and say ok, here are 30 to pick
from that won’t hurt you on what you are already doing well, but
will really help you in marbling,” he explains.
Some customers need help to
improve rib-eye, or something else. “We had some guys who’d been
buying $1200 bulls for 20 years and had lots of marbling and
their carcass data looked good, but their feedlot performance
was poor. So we showed them some sleepers in the sale that would
help them out. By specifically targeting these things, we can
help people move their herds to the extreme middle,” says Bryan.
Customers can find something
that’s strong where they are weak, without giving up what they
already had going for them. “This has been our goal and we
really enjoyed working at it, because it has helped to bring
closure to me—about everything we are doing, everything we put
into the cows, and the investment we make in genetics,
nutrition, the health program, and the whole thing in managing
these factors. When it’s all said and done, and the meat is on
someone’s table, we can ask, ‘How did we do?’ This is very
important to me. I am not someone who can sell my calves right
off the cow and never know what happened to them. In my 26 years
in this business I’ve seen so many people that don’t care,
people who stopped keeping track of things. They get discouraged
easier. The customers we’ve been able to help, some were like
that, and today (3 to 10 years later), they are excited,” he
says.
These customers now get
information back from their calves. They are excited about their
conception rates. They are excited about their carcass data, and
feedlot data. They are learning what cost of gain is, and
learning about marketing their calves at different times and
maybe retaining ownership of part of them. “There is so much
more in the industry that they didn’t know about, or maybe
they’d just read about, or maybe they’d bought into a myth that
really isn’t there. This is exciting for us, to help them get on
track. We don’t spend a lot of time advertising our bulls
because we’ve spent time with our customers all year long, doing
these things,” says Bryan.
“This is just one part of our
business--selling bulls and collecting all this data. We also
have a 7000 head feedlot. We built a new one 3 years ago and
wean calves for several of our customers, for 45 days, and help
market those calves. We buy a small interest in some of the
calves,” he explains.
They weaned close to 10,000
calves last year. “That’s part of our customer service. We also
AI the heifers for them. Our crew is mainly just my wife and
kids, age 14 to 28. Usually there are 2 of them here to help.
The ones that are in college come back on holidays. They all
have a few cows in the herd, so it’s fun to have them here to
help,” he says. They AI heifers in the spring, wean calves in
the fall, and sell the bulls, so it’s a complete package for
their customers.
The bull sale is the first Friday
in March, every year, and now they also have a bred heifer sale
in December. “A bull customer who was selling bred heifers
bought heifers from another one of our bull customers, and
really liked the heifers. They bred up better than other cattle
he’d bought. He sold those to another one of our bull customers.
So we AI’d 75 head for him that year, then the following year we
AI’d 1000 heifers for him, and had a sale for them. He goes
around and buys heifers from producers who don’t keep any heifer
calves. He’ll buy 1200 head and we’ll sort them down and AI the
best ones to our bulls, and also use our bulls as cleanup bulls.
Our investment in this deal is that we are standing behind the
bulls the heifers are bred to, and he’s standing behind the
heifers,” says Bryan.
“People were thrilled with the
calves, and that was exciting enough that he wanted to do it
again and last fall we had our second sale, selling 750 to 800
bred heifers—after sorting down from 1200.” This is the cream of
the crop, and a good way to help people improve the genetics in
their herds. “We don’t raise enough of our own to do this, but
that guy has several customers who just buy bred heifers and
don’t raise their own, so he gets first pick of their heifer
calves.”
It’s a challenging business, but
one this family believes in, and they are pleased to be able to
see the results of their efforts, improving the genetics and the
bottom line for their customers.
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