I agree with all of the above. Usually when you see the extream high prices it is a country club of several breeders that just send the money from ranch to ranch. You pay $100,000. for mine and I'll pay $100,000. for yours. I did see one of the larger Angus breeders get ran out of business that way. He had spent about $85,000 at sales in the past 3 months and when his sale came up every one of those in his country club circle bought low $3,000.- $5,000. Put him out of business quick. A very dangerous game to get involved with. Also in answering your question on why two bulls, brothers sold for such a different price. Were they FULL brothers? eye appeal and difference in EPDs come into play. And like someone else said if they were being sold by different breeders that also can make a big difference. We do mostly AI but for a clean up bull, I am not willing to take much of a drop in quality, so I probably pay a little more for a bull then others. Our clean-up bull is in the top 5% of the breed in 12 EPDs and I paid $3,500 for him as a yearling. There are several schools of thought for starting a new herd. Some will buy older cows with excellent pedigrees at a reasonable price, get 3-4 calves out of them and then ship them. I have tried this and it did not work good for me. Got to many bull calves and that made it slow building a herd. I also purchased a 10 year old donor cow that I really wanted. It was one of the most sought after donors. She died 4 months after I bought her. I perfer buying young open heifers, excellent pedigrees at a reasonable price. It is only a few months and you can breed them. I am using heifer sexed semen on my heifers so now my female fondation is building fast and I am getting the pedigrees that I want. A very well respected breeder told me something reasently that has changed my thinking. I, like everyone else was using several AI sires each year and trying to guess which sire is going to be the hot sire next year. He pointed out that because I was trying to build the fondation of our herd, I would be better off picking one or two sires that I really like and use them instead of using all the hot AI sires. This way I would get much more continuity in my herd. Again, looking at it this way, the fact that I am using sexed semen on our heifers, this all makes sense. There are only a few AI sires that they are offering sexed semen from. I hope I did not overload you with information. Maybe some of this you will be able to put to use in the future. Good Luck !!!!! :cboy:
