greenwillowherefords":e9lfxspl said:
Jack Ward wrote a timely article last year in which he said that the cancer eye etc problems were a result of a lack of using the knife when demand for Herefords was at high levels. Now, of the top 20 most used sires in the breed, less than 1% are culled with eye problems if I recall correctly. There are more culled due to old age than any of the problems that critics love to drag up.
He was right, and I know a breeder of another breed right down the road from me who sells every bull born to his cows as a breeding bull. He doesn't cut even one of them. He feeds the sorry ones more to try to make them all look the same. Whatever problems his cows have, they have all been passed on to someone, somewhere, many times over. Some of these old farmers come in just wanting anything cheap and black, because black calves "bring more", but they don't want to pay much for a bull to "freshen their cows", and this guy delivers what they want.
That's precisely what some unscrupulous Hereford breeders did when they couldn't raise enough bulls to sell 3 or 4 decades ago, and look what it did to the breed. But what can you do about it? The breeder owns the bulls and has a right to sell them if he wants, and some people (buyers and sellers) just can't be taught. You can talk to them till you're blue in the face about how their sorry bulls are hurting the breed, and they don't care. They'll just switch to whatever breed overtakes the one they've got now.
It hasn't been easy for me to hang on to Herefords. I just about sold them all in '96 when I took a load of straightbred 450 lb bull calves to the sale and got 38 cents a lb for them. Yes, you read that right. Somebody made quite a profit after feeding those calves, because they were good. I would have sold out, but nobody around here would buy a Hereford cow. I watched everyone around me go so blindly toward the black fad that they bought some of the worst looking bulls I have ever seen just to get black calves. It was crazy. Now, ten years later, both neighbors who literally laughed at me for sticking with Herefords have Hereford bulls on their cows. They were, however, too unable to admit their mistakes to come to me to buy those bulls.
I sincerely hope what happened to Herefords doesn't happen to the Angus folks. As many Angus as there are now, there used to be even more Herefords, so don't say it can't happen. Use that knife, boys, when it needs usin'. :cboy: