The Gill Ranch began in the late 60’s when Larry & Janet moved home after Larry got out of the army. In 1979, we bought our first registered Red Angus cattle from the Enid School dispersion. Our foundation herd consisted of mainly Chief bred females, which has given us the great maternal herd we have today.

From the beginning, our main goal has been to raise a maternal and performance cowherd. We feel that our herd has as much or more performance than any other herd no matter what the breed. We strive to have big-butted bulls and easy keeping cows. The mature weight of the cows in our herd is around 1350 lbs. -- not too big and not too small. We feel that you need to run what your environment allows you to run, and our cowherd fits right in that puzzle.

Our main priority the last 25 years has been to produce the best performance bulls we can so our commercial customers are profitable. We do everything possible to make sure our customers get what their calves are worth when they sell them. This last fall we nearly wore out our vehicles going to our customers’ sales and bidding on every Gill sired offspring we could find.
We market our bulls through our annual spring bull sale and our females privately.

Give us a call or stop in sometime. There is only one thing that we enjoy more than raising Red Angus, and that is visiting with our friends and customers.

“You buy our bulls, we will bid on your calves!”

Howdy,

This is the very first Gill Red Angus newsletter. Our plan is to provide a newsletter to you twice a year, covering different aspects of the beef industry and just letting you know what is happening at the Gill Red Angus ranch.

First off, we would like to thank everyone for making our 26th year of raising Red Angus Seed stock such a great success. We sold more bulls than ever before and at an average of $700 more than last year. The overall average was $2980 on the bulls and we sold every one of them. Thank you to all the new and repeat buyers, and a special thanks to Sandy Willow Red Angus and Stradinger Ranch for taking home the two high selling bulls at $9000 each. Thanks also to Dean Shremp for being the volume buyer with 10 bulls.

The weather cooperated, we had a great crowd, our Samson-Inc feedlot/broker contact Scott Mueller was present to visit with customers, and Janet’s special cookies were on hand for the ride home.

Our Sale Average
Top 10 bulls-$5200
11 two-year olds-$3477
51 yearlings-$2871
Overall Average of 62 bulls - $2980

“Vegetables aint food, they’re what food eat.”

You, our customer!
We feel the success of this year’s sale is a result of several things. The first is you, the customer. Our customers have been very loyal over the years. In fact, this year only ten bulls went home with new customers; the rest were all repeat buyers. Your loyalty means a lot and tells us the bulls are doing a great job for you.
Another factor for the great sale is the super feeder calf market that exists today. We have never seen such prices before and it looks as though they are here to stay, at least for a few more years. It is nice to see everyone optimistic and smiling again.
The other contributor is the type of bulls we strive to raise. We try very hard to keep ours full of performance with extra long bodies, super thick butts, wide tops, and the right amount of bone. We don’t think you get your money’s worth by using the smaller type bulls, so you won’t find them here. You lose a lot of growth, muscle, and carcass weight by using smaller frames. Most everyone still sells by the pound and if is it isn’t there, you are throwing money out the window. The profit margin is just too small and as a result, we can’t afford to raise smaller bulls.

What sells the best?

History tells us that frame size is a solid barometer of mature weight and subsequent carcass weight. As the frame increases, so does the price that buyers are willing to pay for the growth potential. The larger framed feeder cattle tend to bring more money than the more moderately framed feeder cattle. Today's beef carcass needs to fit the "box" and meet portion size specifications requested by retailers, restaurants, and exporters. You also have to make sure the cow works at home and inputs don’t get too high.

Our cow size is around 1300 lbs. The kill weight of your cattle will be around the mature weight of their mother. So if the kill weight is 1300 lbs and they have a 63% yield, you will have a carcass weight of 819 lbs, which is right where you need to be by the industry standards. We feel this is a good mature weight for the Red Angus cow because the cow efficiency is still there while meeting all the other industry requirements.

You all know what your cattle do while on the cow, but it is very important to learn what your cattle are capable of doing after they leave the ranch. You need to know how the cattle gain, convert, grade, and what their genetic potential is. We all want our cattle to be in demand the day we sell. In order for that to happen, you need to provide this information to potential buyers ahead of time so that they will be more willing to buy. Our marketing program will help you to do just that.

The Gill Red Angus Customer Marketing Program
Something we do that most of our competition does not is our Customer Buy Back Program. Our slogan is “You buy our bulls and we will bid on your calves”. This has really helped our customers on selling day. We ran some calves up as much as $5.00 per hundredweight. You add that up on a pot load of 600lb steers and you made an extra $2500 just by being our customer. Compare that to our sale averages the last couple years -- that’s a free bull. How can you go wrong?

Here is how it works:
First, you must be a customer of ours. At marketing time, contact Gill Red Angus with which marketing option you wish to pursue:

Complete Retained Ownership.

Partial/Partnership Retained Ownership.

Livestock Auction or Off-the-Farm Marketing - Sell 100% of your calves off-the-farm or at the stockyards and a Gill staff member will be there to place a bid on them for you.

Replacement Heifer Marketing - Market your top quality open and bred heifers through our bull sale in December. (We have spent thousands of dollars on advertising over the years. Use our past advertising and known name to market your replacement females.) Call for more info on this.

- When possible, we will work with our customer base to help form co-mingled loads of calves.
- To determine the value of your calves, Samson-Inc will compute the "breakevens”.
- Once the above is completed, the calves will be shipped to Samson-Inc Feedlot.
Upon harvest, if possible, Gill Red Angus & Samson-Inc will prepare a report complete with feed yard and harvest data for your use. The Gill staff will then schedule a meeting with you to discuss ways we can help add profit to your bottom line.

We are also available for consultations regarding breeding, replacement heifer procurement, and all marketing options. We will help you any way we can to make your bottom dollar grow.

The Future as we see it
We have been studying and visiting with a lot of seed stock producers, feedlots, and commercial ranchers around the country. A majority of the people we talk to believe that us seed stock producers will have to become more of a full service company in the future. We won’t be able to just raise and sell bulls anymore. So we have decided to try and take the lead in doing just that - becoming a full service company. We are going to have to supply replacement females and provide more marketing options. The numbers we are selling are going to have to be higher, too.

As we watched several of the bull sales around the country the last couple years, we’ve noticed that the ranches with 150 bulls or more seem to have a better sale than the ranches selling 50 or less. It gets even better when they add commercial replacement females to the offering. This combination seems to make it easier for the commercial ranchers because they don’t have to drive all over the place trying to find enough top quality bulls and heifers. The commercial ranches are getting bigger and bigger every year, which means the cowboys will need more bulls and they will want to buy them in bulk. They simply are not going to have the time to visit several different ranches looking for bulls and heifers.

Our Future at Gill Red Angus

Considering the industry trends just mentioned, we at Gill Red Angus have made some serious changes in our program. We moved our calving dates to May and June, and will now be selling 18 month old bulls in a December 7th, 2005 fall sale. We did this for several reasons. For one, we wanted to make our ranch as efficient as possible. Boy have we done that. We’ve cut our cow costs in half and the spring work has never been easier. We now graze as much of the winter as we can and have only the cost of the pasture, which is much less than wrapping and unrolling a bale.

Another reason for the change is to accommodate your schedules so that you can make it to the sale easier. A large majority of our customers calve in the spring and have a lot of crop to get in the ground. A late fall sale is usually a better time for you to get away. In addition, some of you may need to spend some money in the fall for tax reasons. Why not buy a top of the line bull instead of iron? You can deduct them, too.

We are still making additional changes and our sale numbers are going to jump drastically in the next five years, starting in 2006. We plan to market several commercial females in our sale along with more bulls every year. The females will come directly from our customers or will be home raised and they will only be the top end.

Fall Sale - December 7, 2005
This year will kick off our very first fall bull sale. When we started calving in the summer, we split the herd in half so we wouldn’t have to skip a bull sale. This December’s sale is the second half of the cowherd. We will be offering around 50 or 60, 18 month old bulls and about 50 commercial bred heifers.

Make sure you contact us when you sell your next feeder calf crop. We want to be there to help you get the best price possible. If you don’t tell us when you sell, we won’t know.

Please contact us if you need anything at all, when you are selling your calves, or just want to BS. Our door is never closed and the coffee is always on. Hope you enjoy these chats, and we are looking forward to seeing you this fall on December 7.

Sales & Breeding Manager
Bryan & Kristen Gill
1614-28th Ave. S.
Fargo, ND 58103
701-239-6920 Home/office
701-730-0134 Cell
bigredgenetics@hotmail.com
www.bigredgenetics.com

“Think ahead, breed ‘em red'

There is an old proverb that states that:
“he that does not look forward must look behind.”

The last two years we have been working closely with the Gill Ranch looking to the future. Our beef industry is changing rapidly and we must be persistently focused on improving our businesses. Our goal at Samson is to continually improve our systems to provide exceptional value to our customers. This goal cannot be achieved alone. Alliances between producers and suppliers will be imperative to our future.

Samson is a diversified business that concentrates on the services of feeding cattle. These services include custom feeding cattle, providing risk management services through our commodity brokerage, developing data collection and analysis for producers and identifying potential markets to add extra value for producers. This is a very broad spectrum of services, but we feel it is imperative to develop a system that can reward producer efforts.

The one inescapable truth is that the future of all our businesses starts with the calf. But, it is how we all work together that will determine whether we are looking forward or behind.

Next time: Why weight is still king.

Scott Mueller