Latest / The Source – The Jorgensen Land & Cattle Podcast / The Source — Field Notes: Why SmartBulls Work
Transcript
- speaker-0: Welcome back to Field Notes, joined by a very special guest today for the first time. You guys will get to see more and more of him over the coming months. If you've called Jorgensen Land and Cattle over the last 14 years to talk about cattle, bulls, anything program related, you've probably talked to this guy. Welcome to the show, Andy Tegedoff. speaker-1: Thank you very much, Jamie. Pleasure to be here. speaker-0: I appreciate you taking the time. Kind of late in the season for this conversation, but a conversation that we need to have nonetheless on a Field Notes episode. Jorgensenland and cattle are very diverse in how we market Angus genetics. And we have a lot of questions about the term smart bulls. So Andy, I'm just going to turn you loose. What in the heck is a smart bull? speaker-1: Well a Smart Bull is I like to say a refined product. ⁓ They come over our leasing program. Without the leasing program we couldn't have Smart Bulls. So the Bulls are leased out once as a yearling and then again as a two year old. They're semen tested, trick tested every time they go out and come back. ⁓ And ⁓ then they're checked for soundness, all that fun stuff, feet. And then when they come back after a yearling, you know all that. They go through the whole rigmarole. They go out again as a two-year-old. They go through the whole gamut once more. And then when they finally get back to us after their second lease, and then they pass all the tests, jump through all the hoops, pass their semen tests, trick tests, we do all that. They pass all those. They look like a good, sound breeding bull. Then we put them in our Smart Bull program. And they're a darn good bull. By that point, they're, like I said, a refined product. ⁓ We know what they are. ⁓ We have all the confidence in the world in these bowls, selling them all over the country. speaker-0: So age-wise, we're talking when you start marketing those bulls, they're gonna be that coming three type timeframe to now being getting close to true three. speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. They're coming three-year-old bulls when we start selling them in the fall, you know, after they come back off of lease in the ⁓ mid-summer. So they'll be 30 months old, give or take. And then at this point in time, when we're still selling some, they're going to be right at 36 months old, around there. speaker-0: What was kind of the impetus of the Smart Bull program? Where did the Jorgensen family come up with the concept of this aged bull and then talk to me about the market that they're now really, really popular in and where a lot of these cattle end up at that older age? speaker-1: Yeah, so ⁓ in the early days when Greg was leasing bulls, we kind of needed an outlet after the bulls were leased out once. He couldn't just, you know, cut ties with them, send them to the sale barn. They were still a good bull at that point. And at that point, when he first started, he was just leasing them once and then selling them as a two-year-old bull. And then we figured, or Greg figured that ⁓ as he spent his winters in the, in the South and Florida, that the bulls really held up really well down there. ⁓ And then they you know the older they were at a three-year-old bull the better and ⁓ They just hold up so well down there and so Greg just thought hey, let's just lease them out to one more time get two leases out of them and Then that at that point they're an older bull there. They got a fully expanded rumen. They're fully developed at that point they got a full set of teeth and They can just last and last in the south. You know they eat all that washy grass at that will make a yearling bull or even sometimes a two-year-old bull just tip over dead a bloat. These older bulls, can eat it all day long and get the sustenance they need ⁓ and last. speaker-0: Yeah, I mean, you're talking about a bull that has been through, as you said, the wringer. mean, he's made a herd bull at that point. He's one that's going to be around a while. Yeah. And he's rugged enough to go wherever you want to send him and be there. speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, through the leasing process, they get sent to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, every type of terrain that ⁓ is basically out there. And then they come back to us and ⁓ he's been, like you said, put through the wringer. ⁓ If he's not a good bull, you know, we're not selling them. And, ⁓ you know, we just end up taking them to the sale barn. But ⁓ if they make it that far, they've been put through any type of terrain. Especially leasing him out twice because the first lease on a bull he might not go, he might just go next door down the street somewhere and then come back and then as a two year old he might get shipped off to Texas. So he's seen it all and at the end of it if he's made it that far he's a darn good bull. speaker-0: And the bulls that end up as smart bulls, they're gonna be a mixture of Jorgensen Home Raid stuff along with cattle from the genetic partners. Just kind of touch on the overall genetics behind what ends up being a smart bull there. speaker-1: Yeah, so what ends up being a smart bull along with our home-raised bulls are, you know, our bulls out of our parent stock cow herd. ⁓ You know, those would be the registered bulls. ⁓ But the vast majority of these smart bulls are coming out of our cooperators that, you know, they come to our sale every year. They buy our top bulls. They take them back to their cows. We buy back the weaned bull calves. And the majority of the bulls that we lease out are those cooperator bulls. And then, you know. As mathematics would have it, they end up being the majority of our smart bulls. speaker-0: Right. And all these bulls backed with, we've talked about the ideal beef evaluation on this show before, all these bulls backed by a full set of genomic enhanced EPDs. Yeah. All the data you could ever want on them. speaker-1: Yeah, that's the best part of them I think is that, you know, we're not just selling commercial bulls that we don't know the background on. We don't know, you know, the sire or the dam. We've got everything in our profile on that bull to help Cattleman make a very sound and educated decision on what bull to pick. speaker-0: Right. So you mentioned a little bit geographic location of where these smart bulls are going, Florida, Louisiana, the Gulf coast of Texas. And we talk about that because that's really kind of been the market for them historically. That was where Greg was spending his winners. The emphasis was those bulls will fit in a lot of other environments as well. speaker-1: Yeah, they do great, ⁓ like you said, in the South, ⁓ Florida, Texas, Louisiana, ⁓ selling some now into Colorado. We're trying to get further out West. ⁓ Nevada, we've sold some in the past. Looking to do that in the future here. And then also California. ⁓ That's kind of a burgeoning market for us getting out West further, especially on the West Coast. speaker-0: Yeah, and you know that that Southwest part of the world very much a different environment than Florida, but the same rate limiting factors just in different ways we talk about washy have to consume a pile of forage in Florida and To stay in rig going to Arizona. They've got to travel to get feed Again and older bull to be able to get out there. You know get on the move go cover the country needs to cover to eat, find cows, to breed cows. speaker-1: Yep, yep, they work in all conditions, whether they got grass up to their bellies or whether they got a forage and hunt for it. ⁓ They're going to be able to travel. Like we said earlier, all these bulls, they're checked over for soundness of good feet, ⁓ everything like that. They're able to travel if they have to travel and find what they got to do to survive. speaker-0: So let's talk specifics here. We have a sale coming up, ⁓ Fallon, Nevada. Tell me a little bit about where that sale's gonna be held at, when it is, and a little bit of what you're bringing. speaker-1: Yeah, so we're super excited about this sale on Nevada. It's at Fallon Livestock, March 17th, ⁓ around one o'clock, I'm guessing. But Tommy Lee is the sale barn ⁓ operator out there. We reached out to him through a ⁓ guy out in California that we also had a bull sale with out at the 101 Livestock, Jim Warren. He said, hey, call this Tommy Lee. ⁓ He's looking for some bulls to sell. And so we reached out to Tommy Lee. When we were out there in August at the Winamucca Superior Sale out there, we went and visited the place. Awesome facilities. Tommy Lee was great. ⁓ And yeah, we're going to have around 30 or so, maybe a few more depending on how Seaman Test goes. But it's going to be a nice mix. We're going to have some registered bulls and some, I don't like to call them commercial bulls because we know everything about these bulls. So they're not commercial bulls in the historical sense, but. Registered bulls and non-papered bulls I guess, but they're going to be good. I picked them out just the other day and they're going to be ready to rock. speaker-0: Yep, nice set of bulls. As we put this book together, good mix of heifer bulls, cow bulls, good mix of Kevinese. And then there's some straight power bulls in there for a guy that really wants to some pounds on. Yep. Gonna be a nice mix. speaker-1: Yeah absolutely, whatever you're needing, whether you're needing a couple of Heifer bowls or some good Power Bowls like you said, they're going to be in this sale and they're going to be good. speaker-0: Absolutely. Thank you, Andy, for taking the time to sit down and visit about Smart Bulls a little bit. We'll have a full episode on this at some point in time. Again, coming up, Fallon Livestock, Fallon, Nevada, March 17th, one o'clock. Any questions, call Andy Tegedoff or the JLC office. Catalog is available. Can contact any one of us at Jorgensen, Lanny Kettle. We'll get you on via email. Not a problem. And if you have any questions. There's the man. Andy, any closing thoughts on this sale going into Fallon? speaker-1: You better be there if you want some good bowls. ⁓ I mean we have sold out basically of all of our other Smart Bowls. We've been holding on to some bowls for some special sales and so if you want Smart Bowls this is it. speaker-0: All right, thank you guys for joining us. Thank you, Andy, producer Boston behind the camera. As always, thank you, sir. And we will see you guys next time.