Finding Foundation Females with Tiner, Tolbert and Tuckwiller

First off, here is some sage advice from Reese Tugwiller, regional manager for the Northeast.

If you had someone that was brand new to the industry that called you and they were looking to start their herd, how would you recommend they find and then go about purchasing the females to be the foundation of their

herd?

Good question, right?

It's a big one.

Great question.

And I probably take a different approach than most.

I kind of make them give me a, what is their five-year outline and what's their five-year goal?

That's good.

You know, because there's so many, you know, not only genetics or management or what have you, you know, what camp, you know, terminal or maternal, you got to figure out what their goals are.

And so we established that.

We kind of get a game plan because...

You know, I hate the statistic that the average Angus breeders in the business for less than five years, how do we keep them in business longer? How do we make their business model sustainable? And ultimately, I think you build and foster a better relationship with those folks.

You make a plan, and then once they figure out what they want, you know, how many units they can handle on their farm, things of that nature, and then you start making some recommendations afterwards.

Is it more feasible for you all to buy commercial cows and put in embryos? Or are you more in line to want to go buy a set of bred cows or bred heifers? Those are the kind of conversations I would have at the beginning.

No, that's a great place to start.

And so I think another thing that a lot of people think about is, or maybe don't think about, is finding cattle that are, quote unquote, adapted to your area.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's a good point.

And, you know, fetal programming is a heck of a tool.

You know, we find if you bring cattle out of the West and put them on fescue, it takes them three to five years to adapt.

But if you bring in an embryo, It's fetally programmed to be already adapted.

So we can mitigate a lot of that on fescue.

It's not foolproof, doesn't work 100% of the time, but it's pretty dang accurate.

So people can make a lot of genetic progress without the limitation of environment.