From the Headquarters

It’s a wonder so much effort goes into a single day of business for seedstock producers, but when that single day is the primary source of revenue for your business in a calendar year, all of those details become extra important. In this business, we place so much emphasis on the success of sale day that I sometimes wonder if it is necessary. As a family member to the business of selling seedstock, I understand the stress and requirement to try to set our business apart from other seedstock alternatives to stay financially viable, but how much of our marketing efforts are bravado? The seedstock business is changing; I think that is easy to see for everyone in the business paying attention. Commercial cow-calf operators are inundated with marketing material, most of which ends up in the trash, I imagine. And the entities with serious marketing budgets continue to chip away at the market share of family-owned seedstock enterprises. So how then do you, the independent seedstock provider, continue to scale your business, stay financially stable, and stay in business long enough so the next generation can take over? How do you stay competitive with corporate interest in the beef genetics space?

Collaboration. The word is tossed around flippantly in our society, but I truly believe that through collaboration, independent seedstock providers can maintain their place in the beef business. Collaboration requires open-mindedness, the ability to accept criticism, working together with your neighbor, and understanding your customer. It is sometimes frighteningly common to hear of seedstock producers celebrating when a neighboring seedstock provider goes out of business because that means they have access to a larger pool of local potential customers. But in the act of celebrating a potential new pool of customers, we are selling our future for a larger entity to step into that market and slowly siphon away our own loyal customers. In my mind, collaboration is the first of two steps to staying viable in the long-term, and the second is:

Integrity. The responsibility of every seedstock provider is to develop genetics that are better than the generation that preceded them. Yet the reality of animal breeding is that not every animal is going to be better than the average of the generations before. So what do we do with these animals? Do we find the one trait that makes them marketable in order to turn a profit? Too often when I ask members if they view expected progeny differences (EPD) or selection indexes as marketing tools first, and animal improvement tools second (or vice versa), the collective answer I receive is lopsided to marketing tools. This is an inherent integrity issue in our business because too often I see seedstock providers marketing an animal in the top 20% of the breed for growth, but also in the bottom 90% of the breed in $API. The reason is to sell the animal no matter the cost, but is this truly helping your commercial client? As mentioned before, commercial breeders are flooded with marketing material and sale catalogs with so much information that it is a challenge for them to separate the honest purveyors of quality seedstock that will improve their herd. Remove the data points that lost all utility for the comparison of genetic merit 30 years ago (actual weights, ratios, non-economically relevant trait predictions, etc.) between animals in your catalogs, and be honest with yourself and with your customers about what your animals are designed to do.

As a young person in this business, perhaps the most discouraging thing I’ve witnessed over the last ten years is that despite great innovation in management techniques, vastly superior genetic evaluation tools, and unprecedented collaboration among breed associations, with few exceptions, breeding programs and business plans haven’t changed and we are still doing the same things and using the same tactics to market our animals. .