Opinions on charolais bull please!

[jilleroo]

Finally got some time to get back on here to give you some more info that I shouldve given you in the first place....Didnt really know if anyone would be interested! Was glad he passed inspection with you discerning folk.

We did not breed this bull (we wish) and paid $9000 for him which we considered to be good buying at the time, but more than we generally pay for bulls. That was actually three years ago when he was the two year old pictured. He is all Oz breeding in his close-up pedigree and, as we are commercial breeders, we didnt get his papers transferred. He is not AI bred, his grandsire is Temana Muscleman for those of you in Aust who know him. His EBVs must have been good enough for us to buy him and I know his BW rating was +.01. We only buy low BW bulls of course.

He still looks great, never causes any management issues, and always holds his condition whether there's grass or no grass. A low maintenance bull. He's in a 5000 ac paddock with high content char cows and also some nice first generation charbray cows. Also other bulls of course. We wean some cracker calves out of there with big back ends. No problems ever getting the calves born out of the cows.

Obviously we really like this bull and there's a few others I gloat over as well. However....it's all downhill from there!
We have about 50 herd bulls, about 10 we really like, most are passable, and there's the few that we wonder "What on earth were we thinking????" Charolais and charbray for the main herd, a few senepol and a lone black angus for the heifers.
Will post some of our own bulls when I can get to it.

 

[Chuckie]

VLS_GUY,
You are right. He would compliment any breed he was crossed with. I was thinking along the lines of what we were doing on our farm, so, I typed "If I had some Charolais cows..."

He is a really nice bull and I think he would have some dandy calves.

I do have Angus, that is what the buyer wants. My husband only wants Angus, so I am not to look at anything else. I like Piedmontese, I liked the tiger striped cows with the white faces real well. There are so many of them that I like. I would like to have a couple of all the breeds I do like, just to see how they well they do. But if I were to sneak one into the pasture, I would never hear the last of it. I was raised around Charolais, I went to sales with my best friend and her Dad when he was the only one around here that had white cows. We pushed sileage down long troughs to Brahmans and Charolais for years every day after school and on weekends. After I got older, I found out kids got paid for doing things like that. I did not mean for it to sound as if I was seperating Charolais to themselves.

So, like I said, I would bid on the bull till he got past my pocketbook! He is a dandy!!!!
Chuckie

 

[Chuckie]

My opinion....
I just do not see this bull having too straight of a hip. I think that he has a lot of beef covering his hip and loin. I really like the way his rump is really full, and it swells up over the top over his loins, into his back showing a lot of muscle.
Usually when I notice a bull having too much slope to his hip, it will be in his shoulders as well. Vice-vera... If you follow his leg down to his hooves, you can see that his hock is not too straight. It has a very nice angle also. Then the angle goes down into the pasterns, which show a nice angle.
Mechanical-angle thang! This would make the animal "Post Legged." I don't think this bull could stand with the angles he had in his hocks or pasterns if he was straight hipped. It looks like he is able to get his legs up underneath him well. Like a race horse that has to be able to get his legs up underneath him to push off, and could not do that with a straight hip.

I have seen bulls on TV auctions with straight hips that walk around with their legs following behind them. They never get them up underneath, and stop short at their flanks. It appears that they are wallowing, and their hocks look weak. They walk strange and sometimes it is hard to put your finger on why they walk funny. Cattle don't have the flex in their pasterns like a horse has.
Chuckie

 

[VLS_GUY]

Chuckie,

If you like high percentage french purebreds then look at the bull battery for High Bluff Stock Farm: http://www.charolaisbanner.com/familytr ... hbsire.htm. Cougar Hill Hank and Winn Mann Original are the sort of bulls you would like. Also note the red simmys.
What more calving ease with your muscle? Check out: http://www.charolaisbanner.com/dbarl/pr ... rshall.htm.

 

[Chuckie]

VLS_GUY
There are several bulls on the Gerrard, High Bluff, and Rolling D sites that are super nice.
I think if someone wanted to start a program of cross breeding to get the the weights up on
their calves to sell, there are definitely bulls here to choose from.

The bulls I like are: Marshall, Polunlt 710F, and Crossroads. Taking a
quick look at them, they had the muscle and neck, heartgirth, that I like. Crossroads could have used
more rump, but he looked to be in breeding condition. His rump needs to be rounded more and tie in to his leg lower toward his hock. He had tremendous muscleing and it looks great. I enjoy looking at
him, even if he is not perfect. No bull is perfect. I do like the red Simmies,the solid red one is
muscled really well. The top one is nice also. Hank does have a lot of muscle. He has a heck of a neck.
The only thing I can say about Hank is that I would want him to have a deeper barrel. If he had Crossroads
heartgirth, he would be cooking. He needs to be deeper in the flanks. And I would want his rump to round off more and tie down deeper into his gaskin muslce, or just above his hock.

But I cannot say that any of these bulls are nicer than the bull posted here.

I am going to repeat what I think I read in an article. If I am not getting this right, correct me. It
has been a couple of years since I have read it. My memory is thin.

In all of my reading, so this is not from my experience, but I think the article Said that you will
get the highest weights by cross breeding three different breeds. From the way I understood it,You
must use full blood animals to gain the genetic make up to do this. It can be done by using a Charolais
bull and a first generation cow from a full blooded (e.g.)Senepol/Red Angus. I have no idea on that cross!!!
Then from those three, you are supposed to get a full bodied high weight calf for market.

If you start keeping the three way crosses, 2nd, and 3rd generation calves for replacements, you will
start losing weight as compared to those as a 1st generation three way cross. It starts watering down
the genetics. You must always use the fresh genetics of each breed. Such as, Charolais bull with a calf from a 1st
generation cross of Senepol/(Breed of your choice) this would give you the higest weights.

Doc Harris can explain this to me for sure if he is reading the forum.

Chuckie

 

[alacattleman]

VLS_GUY,
You are right. He would compliment any breed he was crossed with. I was thinking along the lines of what we were doing on our farm, so, I typed "If I had some Charolais cows..."

He is a really nice bull and I think he would have some dandy calves.

I do have Angus, that is what the buyer wants. My husband only wants Angus, so I am not to look at anything else. I like Piedmontese, I liked the tiger striped cows with the white faces real well. There are so many of them that I like. I would like to have a couple of all the breeds I do like, just to see how they well they do. But if I were to sneak one into the pasture, I would never hear the last of it. I was raised around Charolais, I went to sales with my best friend and her Dad when he was the only one around here that had white cows. We pushed sileage down long troughs to Brahmans and Charolais for years every day after school and on weekends. After I got older, I found out kids got paid for doing things like that. I did not mean for it to sound as if I was seperating Charolais to themselves.

So, like I said, I would bid on the bull till he got past my pocketbook! He is a dandy!!!!
Chuckie

your husband got some sort of business sense does he,, ive seen his type before always looking for ways to make more money
:cowboy:

 

[Chuckie]

Yep, I've seen your type, spreading the love........always looking to make a new friend :heart:

 

[VLS_GUY]

Chuckie,

Old Hank is not a young bull in these pictures and just off grass. The biggest gripe about all the Hank and Cyrano 32D cattle is that they are heavy fronted and somewhat coarse. Keep in mind he is a Mr. dependable and his bulls are in demand since his sons perform and put a butt end on their calves. The other bulls are very visually appealing and have great performance. Check out the bull sale catalog from the past year to see this.
If you like the bulls you mentioned SVY Pilgrim at GENEX should work very well. His daughters seem to be working well for Dory and the bulls are well received. In the flesh a very impressive herdsire.
Marshall is the easiest calving bull of the bunch mentioned and he would work great on smaller BWF cows and likely on heifers.
If it is maternal you are looking for it is hard to beat LT, Eaton's or Mr perfect breeding. For outcross calving ease and performance I like Rawes Ranches bulls-I think Joe Doll in North Dakota has Rawes cattle.

 

[Chuckie]

SVY_GUY,
Pilgram is a really good looking bull. I liked the calves that were in the slideshow too. That is a whole lot of beef there. I am not sure how the numbers run in Charolais, but his numbers were a lot lower than the others that were listed.
Chuckie

 

[VLS_GUY]

Chuckie,

I think you are talking about his weaning and yearling weights since plenty of bulls are around with much bigger weights at these respective ages. The thing to keep in mind is that Saskatchewan was in a dry cycle at the time and if you did not creep feed you calves weaning weights suffered greatly. In any event to get a grasp of a bulls growth potential you need to know the relative performance of a calf in the herd (ratios) and in the breed as a whole (EPDs) Using bit these measures Pligram measures up just fine and is likely the Charolais bull with the most power available from a AI stud sire in the U.S. at this time.
I can find you bulls with even more growth potential that are unsung. For example Rawes Ranchesa has a bull called HRR Arden that has +126 yearling weight EPD but he is not on AI. To buy a top end commercial bull from Rawes would cost over $ 4,000 CDN since their bull sale averaged around $ 3,700 for 2 year olds. This is a commercial sale with the vast majority of bulls going on grade cows.