Crossing mountains, crossing cattle

Jim Lynch-Staunton runs 900 cows on 16,000 acres (8,000 owned, 8,000 rented) in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Southern Alberta, around 60 miles from the US border.

The herd calves in two months from the end of April, with calving heavily front-loaded, as 80% of cows will have conceived in the first breeding cycle. This impressive statistic is down to Jim’s culling regime.

Like many top North American ranchers, he is ruthless. However, Jim is in a slightly different position, in the fact that some of his bull calves will be bought and marketed as commercial sires by the Beefbooster company.

All of their bulls are hybrids – and the practice of crossbreeding is gathering fierce momentum in Canada, as the benefits of hybrid vigour in areas like beef cow fertility are realised. Jim needs perfect cows that’ll produce perfect calves to make the grade for Beefbooster.

She’s outta here

“If she’s open, if I have to look twice at her feet or udders, note that she’s excitable, assist her at calving or help her calf to suckle, she’s outta here,” Jim told me. “In big herds like this, the cow does the work. She’s only going to be in the handling pen twice a year – for a pregnancy test and pre-calving.”

When I visited Jim on 28 April, 88 cows had calved. This was despite the fact that the official start date of calving for the 900-strong herd was 1 May – a testament to the herd’s efficiency. There was 6in of snow on the ground and the herd was in a 640-acre field, four miles from the yard across mountainous terrain.

During calving, the herd is checked three times daily. New calves are weighed, de-horned, genotyped and tagged almost immediately. In these snowy conditions, hypothermia is the big danger. If the calf remains wet for too long after birth and fails to get a drink, it can be quickly fatal.

Trek

Any uncalved cows were to be moved two miles closer to the yard on the day I visited. Jim told me that the six of us would be able to separate any uncalved cows on horseback, without dismounting, in less than 30 minutes – I was expectedly sceptical.

When we arrived at the calving area, the bulk of the herd was located near the entrance, with around 60 animals spread across other parts of the gigantic field.

We set out to check these and any uncalved cows were steered back in a leisurely fashion towards the main herd. Then four of us formed a moving perimeter and squeezed the cows into a tight group, through which two of the most experienced cowboys rode calmly, pushing any cow-calf pairs toward the group’s edge and beyond into the field.

Less than an hour and 15 minutes were spent in the cow field in total. This was a credit to both the strict selection for docile cows and the team’s handling skills. Everything was relaxed and I had been earlier warned not to shout or make noise near the cows.

“The second the cow is frightened, she will look for an out. That is not what we want here. The cows respect the horse and we respect their personal space,” Jim said.

Beefbooster and Dr Basarab

The Beefbooster company produces hybrid bulls for commercial ranchers in Alberta province. Here, progressive ranchers recognise the benefits of crossing (hybrid vigour) and have no qualms about using a crossbred bull, provided he’ll do the business.

Beefbooster delivers this product. It sources only the best bulls from a small number of trusted, dedicated seed stock ranchers, such as Jim Lynch-Staunton, and rigorously tests all aspects of their performance at Thorlaksen feed yard, south of Calgary city.

From birth weight to semen testing, feed efficiency to structural soundness, Beefbooster uses the genetic data (all cattle are genotyped at birth), coupled with their own measurements to produce a breeding index not unlike our own. Only the best go to the sale; around 30% of bought-in bulls don’t make it. Remember, too, that only the top bulls from their source ranches make it to testing in the first place.

Beefbooster sells four classes of bull. The M1 class is 80% Angus, 15% Devon (a British breed) – these were on sale the day we visited. Next are the M2, based on Hereford, Simmental and some Red Poll. For heifers, there is the M3 bull. He’s Longhorn and Jersey-based and comes with a no C-section guarantee. The final M4 class is Limousin-based.

Beefbooster sales are unique. Prospective buyers arrive and register before the sale – letting the clerk know how many bulls they want to purchase. Just before it kicks off, a random order of buyers’ names is generated.

The first name up has the pick of the bulls in the barn and everyone else must wait until their turn comes on the list. There is no bidding – all bulls are pre-priced based on their class. A buyer simply selects his bull from what remains in the barn, the animal is removed from the pen and the next buyer is notified to choose.

Having attended a sale and conversed with all of the buyers on the day, the message around the unorthodox selling method was clear. These bulls had had to jump through hoops to even make sale day. Be it the first or last pick, Beefbooster’s drive for quality and consistency meant that you were taking home a serious animal regardless.

Later in the week, I met with one of the most highly respected beef researchers on the planet, Dr John Basarab of the University of Alberta. I was keen to pick his brain on crossbreeding.

“People are waking up to the value of hybrid vigour in livestock here,” John told me. “Going forward, our principal use for genomics in beef herds will be to help guys match bulls to their cows. When you cross two animals, you assume that you get 50% of the genetics from each, but in reality you don’t.

“You also don’t know which parent’s genetics will affect which traits. Our farmers are very soon going to be using genomics as a tool to get around this and identify the most suitable sires to maximise hybrid vigour in potential offspring. In fact, we already have research herds with high and low hybrid vigour scores (HVS) on trial. The high-HVS beef cows are leaving $115 to $190 more behind per year than the low-HVS animals and lasting longer in herds.

“We’ve had help from a couple of your guys in this area, including Teagasc’s Donagh Berry. The concept of giving cows a HVS and selecting sires based on this has actually been commercialised by a company called Delta Genomics,” John said.

The product is called EnVigour HX, which “combines parentage verification, genomic breed composition, and a simple vigour score (assessment of hybrid vigour) to develop a crossbreeding strategy optimised for your goals in your herd”.