The Benefits of a Relationship with Your Seedstock Supplier featuring Paul Bennett

The relationship between commercial cattlemen and their seedstock providers is a really important one, helping producers reach operational goals.

Today's host Miranda Reiman sat down with Paul Bennett, Knoll Crest Farm, to discuss the importance of that relationship and developing an understanding of genetic selection tools. 

They discuss:

• Operation goals
• Customer comfort with genetics
• How to keep the relationship strong
• and more! 

We thank Lallemand Animal Nutrition for their support of this episode!

Find more information to make Angus work for you in the Angus Beef Bulletin and ABB EXTRA. Make sure you're subscribed! Sign up here to the print Angus Beef Bulletin and the digital Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA. Have questions or comments? We'd love to hear from you! Contact our team at abbeditorial@angus.org. 

Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to Angus at Work. The relationship between commercial cattlemen and their seedstock provider is a really important one.
That relationship helps make sure that you reach your operations goals. Today's host, Miranda Reiman sat down with Paul Bennett with Knoll Crest Farms to discuss how this relationship and the understanding of genetics helps us set up commercial cattlemen for success. Today's episode is brought to you by Lallemand Animal Nutrition, and we thank them for their support. So let's dig in.

Miranda Reiman:
Welcome to Angus at Work. I'm your host Miranda Reiman, and today I'm sitting across from Paul Bennett with Knoll Crest Farms from Redhouse, Virginia. Hey, Paul.

Paul Bennett:
Good morning. How are you today, Miranda?

Miranda Reiman:
Excellent. We've been at the Beef Improvement Federation Conference up here in Canada, and we've learned a lot throughout the week. And one thing that I wanted to grab you specifically for our commercial cattlemen was a panel that you sat on yesterday. So give me just a little bit of a rundown on what that panel was about?

Paul Bennett:
Our discussions were focused around basically a business case for the use of EPDs, which was very easy for me to do just because I live and breathe EPDs with our customer base year round. And so we had three producers on that panel that discussed how we utilize EPDs, how we interact with our customers, facilitate them using EPDs in their bull selection primarily. So that was kind of the focus of everything there, Miranda.

Miranda Reiman:
I know that your dad has been a long time supporter of performance programs and kind of started out with BIF. So I'm going to go ahead and hedge a guess that you guys have been using EPDs and or helping your customers use EPDs for a long time. Maybe give me just a little bit of the background of kind of how you first started and transitioned to today what you're doing.

Paul Bennett:
Sure. Well, our family's been in the seedstock business since 1944 and we started collecting performance data, primarily weaning weights initially in 1963. And so it's been a progression from that time. And as new technology has come along, we've certainly always tried to be early adopters of whatever was available to us that allowed us to better quantify our cattle for our customers. So we've kind of been through the evolution of EBVs onto EPDs, genomically enhanced EPDs, and look forward to a lot of new technology that we're going to be able to use in the future.

Miranda Reiman:
So if you have a new customer that comes to you, maybe hasn't spent a lot of time looking at the data, maybe has been selecting bulls phenotypically for a while, where do you suggest they start? I mean, there's a lot of numbers on that paper.

Paul Bennett:
Sure. Well, they all are. If you look at an Angus pedigree today, there are 22 traits and eight indexes of some form for a person to look at. And it can be extremely overwhelming. And I think about this a lot because we deal with such a variety of customers that purchase the 400 bulls that we sell every year. And so I typically start with a new customer trying to understand what their cow herd is, what their goals are, what their feed resources are, and basically why they're in the cattle business.
And being in the East, we have a lot of smaller producers who quite frankly are not in the cattle business to make money. They're in the cattle business as a byproduct of owning real estate. So getting to understand who they are and what their goals are is first and foremost for me. And then it's just a matter of working through starting at a very simple level. Typically, what I find is that initially a new customer that doesn't understand EPDs is a little bit skeptical, and so we try to match cattle and EPDs with the customer and give them some experience with bulls.
So that would kind of be on the simple side, but we also have other customers that actually want everything that's on an Angus performance pedigree plus some other stuff. So we always try to be prepared. And I guess, my goal is to breed cattle for the most sophisticated customer that I have, knowing that 99% of my bulls are not going to be sold to that person. But it's a relatively easy educational process as long as we don't try to put too much information in front of a customer at one time.

Miranda Reiman:
So you're asking the customer what their goals are. I mean, that really starts with the customer knowing and being able to articulate what their goals are too when they come to you for bulls.

Paul Bennett:
Sure, that's right. And a lot of times they don't know what their goals are because as I mentioned, their being in the cattle business is just a spinoff of something else. So those relationships are critical because obviously my customer's success is going to drive our success. We've been in the business for a long time. The next generation is back there at our operation now, and our goal is to make our seedstock business sustainable into the future.
And we've got customers, I had a customer the other day that picked up some bulls and he told me that he had bought bulls from us every year since 1973. So we're very proud of those longtime relationships. And I always tell people, tell my nephew Dalton when he's, because he does a lot of their marketing as well, is anytime you sell an animal, you give priority to your long-term goals over your short-term goals.
Meaning that if that customer has a problem six months from now with that bull, you basically do whatever it takes to make it right, because there's a very strong likelihood that you'll create a lifetime customer if you've solved that problem. And customer service is a big part of what we do. And quite frankly, I see a close tie between EPDs and customer service because I feel like from a customer service and a seedstock provider standpoint, my mission, my goal is to do a really good job describing and quantifying the product that I have to sell, which is commercial bulls.
And the better job I can do that then the stronger likelihood that my customers are going to get it right with their bull purchases. So EPDs really make my life a lot easier because that's kind of become the currency through which we describe commercial genetics on the seedstock side. And at this point, a very high percentage of our bull sales are literally sight unseen because we do a lot of bull deliveries. We like to do that. And so those EPDs kind of need to get it right because they're what our exchange is based on to a great extent.

Miranda Reiman:
And so really it's an insurance policy that those customers are getting what they think they're getting when they buy a bull from you.

Paul Bennett:
Absolutely, without question. I think describing it as an insurance policy is a perfect parallel to draw there because there's no question that it is. Particularly with the genomics having been incorporated into EPDs, we see the value and the accuracy and the validity of those EPDs. I mean, for Angus breeders, quite frankly, they get stronger every Friday morning and we see that happening and we're blessed to have a huge database, to have a large participation from American Angus members that really do want to get it right and be a part of the process in creating highly accurate EPDs.

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Miranda Reiman:
So where's a place that a producer can make a lot of progress maybe more quickly? Because some of those EPDs, it's going to take a while, the heritabilities may be low or they're going to need to put pressure on it for a while, but if somebody's wanting to make some improvement in a few generations, where are some of those EPDs they could look?

Paul Bennett:
Well, I would say that for folks in the commercial cattle business, most of the American Angus indexes are specifically designed for them. Probably the simplest one to adopt and utilize and see results from would be the Dollar Beef, the terminal component, because its ingredients are pretty simple and straightforward. And so that's an easy no-brainer for someone that's going to be retaining ownership or selling cattle that are very well described in the marketing process.
The Dollar Maternal index is one that I kind of move a lot of our customers in the direction of because it encompasses multiple traits, all of which contribute to the success of a maternal oriented cow-calf operation. I don't always try to help our customers totally understand all the ingredients in the recipe, but I see Dollar Maternal as a really important index for a lot of our customers to use because we are in the East, a lot of our customers do market their calves in traditional manners that are not very sophisticated.
They're not closely tied to the feeding and packing industry. And so the Dollar Maternal index is perfect for them. And then of course, the Dollar C index is one that encompasses both the maternal components and the end product components. So it's the most comprehensive index that we have. But with that said, we do have customers, most of our customers are highly focused on things like calving ease, birth weight and the growth traits because they're so easily to relate to.
Milk is a big one just because the level of milk that a commercial operation needs is highly dictated by the environment that they're operating in, their feed resources, their stocking rates, those kinds of things, and along with mature cow size. So that part of it takes a lot of educating, quite frankly, to help some customers understand that our highest milk EPD bulls are not actually what they need because their resources are limited and they're not going to have an opportunity for those genetics to fully express themselves in their environment.

Miranda Reiman:
I think that's maybe one of the most confusing things as you're trying to study Angus EPDs is just understanding which ones. Sometimes more is better, sometimes you're looking for a medium, sometime... and it is very dependent on individual producer's goals.

Paul Bennett:
Oh, absolutely. And I've always felt like that as a seedstock producer, I need to work with Mother Nature. I need to understand the signals that we're getting from Mother Nature and respond to those to create cattle that are optimum for an environment. We operate exclusively on hot fescue, which I would contend is the worst forage that exists until frost hits it in the late fall.
And we deliberately run on hot fescue. We do not run any endophyte-free fescue just because we feel like we need cattle that are adapted to that environment. And our goal is to change the cattle and not the environment. And I kind of think about it from the perspective of saying, okay, what's the worst scenario that I'm going to unload a bull into? And really my breeding program from a environment standpoint probably needs to be focused a lot on that.

Miranda Reiman:
Yeah, that makes sense. And probably your customers could take the same approach, right? It depends. Some years you're going to get more rain and have more feed, but maybe they better be considering what maybe a lean year would look like or some of those things.

Paul Bennett:
Exactly. And we've seen a lot of drought in, quite frankly, almost every part of the United States. We've certainly experienced it in the East and the mid-Atlantic region. And so yeah, I think we all need to be prepared to have cattle that are going to be thrivers and, well, survivors and thrivers in the worst case scenario from a feed resource standpoint.

Miranda Reiman:
So I wasn't able to actually attend your panel discussion there because I was running around to a couple of different things. Is there anything else that either you said on stage that you want to make sure that our listeners hear or that you heard from either of the other panelists?

Paul Bennett:
Well, [inaudible 00:14:32] asked each of us to kind of think into the future with respect to EPDs and give some suggestions of EPDs of the future maybe. And I guess, the two that I suggested, one of which was something related to heart health and of course American Angus is very aggressively in the, AGI is very aggressively in the discovery phase of genetics related to heart health.
So I think that we will see EPDs that help us genetically select for improved heart health in the near future. And then probably further out into the future is going to be an EPD that's related to methane and greenhouse gas emissions. I think that's just the reality of where we are in this world today, that it would be, we'd be remiss not to explore that and see what opportunities might exist for us to make genetic improvement with respect to cattle and their relationship with greenhouse gas emissions.

Miranda Reiman:
Yeah. And that was super interesting yesterday to hear from some of the speakers in dairy industries or perhaps in other parts of the globe that are maybe a little bit further ahead than we are in the United States on those. So well, thank you for your time, Paul. This was super fun. One thing that we always end on the cattle business is a people business, so I want to hear something good. Just good news, either whether it's personally or with your cow herd, anything. What's something good?

Paul Bennett:
Well, something that's good this morning, we're in Calgary at the BIF meeting. I always see it as an opportunity to be around people that are excited about beef improvement, and it's just fun to engage those people and to leave this meeting with aspirations to do better. The good thing is with technology, like what you're sharing today, everyone can be a part of that process and understand kind of what we're preparing for in the future.

Miranda Reiman:
Very good. I'm over here nodding my head. The listeners can't see that, but that's definitely something good for the week. Thanks.

Paul Bennett:
Thank you, Miranda.

Speaker 1:
Listeners, for more information on making Angus work for you, check out the Angus Beef Bulletin and the Angus Beef Bulletin Extra. You can subscribe to both publications in the show notes. And we want to thank Lallemand Animal Nutrition for their support of this episode. If you have questions or comments, let us know at ABBeditorial@angus.org. And we'd appreciate it if you would leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share this episode with any other profit-minded cattleman. Thanks for listening. This has been Angus at Work.