Home grown bull.

[southernultrablack]

First calf that I've ever retained to be a bull in my herd. He's a Balancer and I'm Just gonna use him on a small group of fall cows, so he'll be about 22 months old when he breeds them. He's about 15 months old here.

 

[wbvs58]

Looks good. Tell us what made you decide to keep him for your use.

Ken

 

[Ky hills]

Looks like a good bull to me. We have been keeping some of our bulls too for a few years. I think for me it makes more sense economically to keep your own in some instances than it does to buy bulls.

 

[southernultrablack]

Looks good. Tell us what made you decide to keep him for your use.

Ken

His dam is very fertile, good bag, raises nice big calves and breeds back. He was a standout calf and I needed another bull, so I wanted to give him a shot. EPD wise he is about as balanced as you can get, the one outlier is he is almost top of the breed on his heifer pregnancy epd.

 

[wbvs58]

That is similar to my way of thinking when I pick out calves to use the following season. I like them to be out of good fertile dams and this usually happens because I keep the ones that conceived in the 1st round of AI so they will be big enough to use as yearlings so they will usually have low ear tag numbers being born early. I have a couple of cow families that always seem to be vying for that number 1 ear tag for their calves. likewise with growth, they are the ones that catch the eye and again the cow plays a big part in providing the milk for that growth. Some of those fast growing ones come back to the pack after weaning but some will stay ahead. One I used last year weaned 50 kg ahead of his contempories and kept going after weaning in a pretty tough year. He was by Bruns Blaster and when I did his genomics he was in the top 1% for feed efficiency. I do like that feed efficiency EBV.

Ken

 

[jscunn]

Nice bull southernultrablack. Your reasoning for keeping him makes sense to me as well.

 

[sim.-ang.king]

Nice bull, good butt, legs, and feet. Slight break in the topline, and he gets docked for his fly swatter not being long enough to reach the front half. ;-)

 

[Brute 23]

Is he an ultra black?

We had an ultra black bull at one point and he was great. I've kept heifers out of Brangus cows and Angus bulls. The do pretty good down here.

 

[southernultrablack]

Is he an ultra black?

We had an ultra black bull at one point and he was great. I've kept heifers out of Brangus cows and Angus bulls. The do pretty good down here.

He's about 5/8 Gelbvieh 3/8 Angus. When I first got into cattle I had an Ultrablack bull. I ended up going away from the eared cattle and went toward Gelbvieh. Lots of eared cattle here in my area.