Angus Females at Work featuring Rob and Leslie Hendry

Females are the factory that keep our operations moving forward. In the April edition of the Angus Beef Bulletin, you might have noticed the Female Foundations section. This new section is entirely focused on highlighting ranches that take managing their females to the next level. 

On this episode our very own Shauna Hermel sat down Rob and Leslie Hendry of Clear Creek Cattle Company to discuss the versatility of Angus-based females, marketability, herd management in a range setting, transition planning and much more.  

A huge thank you to Vermeer for their sponsorship 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

Lynsey McAnally (00:04):
Angus at Work, a podcast for the profit-minded cattleman. Brought to you by the Angus Beef Bulletin, we have news and information on health, nutrition, marketing, genetics and management. So let's get to work, shall we?

Lynsey McAnally (00:29):
Hello and welcome back to Angus at Work! Females are the factory that keep our operations moving forward. In the April edition of the Angus Beef Bulletin, you might have noticed a new section focused entirely on highlighting ranches that take managing their females to the next level.

Lynsey McAnally (00:48):
I'm Lynsey McAnally and on today's episode, our very own Shauna Hermel sat down with Rob and Leslie Hendry of Clear Creek Cattle Company to discuss the versatility of Angus-based females, marketability, herd management in a range setting, transition planning and much more.

Lynsey McAnally (01:08):
But before we get started, we want to take a moment to thank Vermeer for their sponsorship of this episode.

Lynsey McAnally  (01:25):

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Shauna Hermel (02:16):
Hello, welcome to this edition of Angus at Work. I'm Shauna Hermel, editor of the Angus Beef Bulletin. This morning we're here talking and having some coffee today with Rob Hendry out of Wyoming. Rob, could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your operation and maybe introduce your wife, Leslie?

Rob Hendry (02:36):
Yeah, well, this is my wife, Leslie.

Leslie Hendry (02:39):
Good morning!

Rob Hendry (02:40):
Yeah, I'm a third-generation rancher and my grandpa came from Scotland in 1906 and came to Wyoming and wanted to be a cowboy. He ended up being a sheep herder for until about 1945 and raised five kids on that place.

Shauna Hermel (03:02):
What attracted him to Wyoming?

Rob Hendry (03:04):
Well, he read a book in Scotland and he wasn't the oldest son so he wouldn't be able to have any of the leases. The Lord's owned everything and he wouldn't have anything. And so he read a book about cowboys in the West and landed on Ellis Island, came west and the end of the train stopped just south of where we are now. And then he rode a stage on into Lander.

Shauna Hermel (03:36):
Oh, interesting!

Rob Hendry (03:37):
And spent his last $.50 on a hair cut and a shave. But that's all history. So when Dad came out of the war ... He flew bombers in Guam and the Philippines. He flew B-25s. And so that was the era where there was some tough guys came out of that. CEOs of companies clear into the [1980s and 1990s]. They were tough guys. They went through that. So there was a little more glamor in cows than sheep when Dad took over. So he changed over to cows.

Shauna Hermel (04:23):
Well, we're glad.

Rob Hendry (04:24):
Yeah. And cows have changed. I mean, everybody had Herefords back then and went through that era. And then over time we kind of got toward the black cattle more and more. They work good in our country. We have snow storms in the spring. Black cattle are a little more ... they're a little better to work with that way. And it's always been a range operation.

Shauna Hermel (04:57):
Well, in full disclosure here to our audience, I just met you yesterday! One of the reasons why I introduced myself is I overheard you and your wife visiting with some people about the fact you had to have that Angus cow as the base. Could you kind of explain a little bit about that and why?

Rob Hendry (05:16):
Well, that breed really works well in our country, but the other thing that we like in a strictly commercial deal, we don't keep track of every cow or anything. In a commercial deal, we can put any kind of bull on that black Angus.

Shauna Hermel (05:33):
You bet.

Rob Hendry (05:33):
And we've done that over the years. We tried Simmental, we tried Red Angus, we tried all kinds of breeds. They're all good bulls, but there was a couple of things. Sometimes they didn't suit our country very well, but the end result is we've got to have something to sell to the next guy in line. And we ran into some guys that really kind of liked Charolais cross calves on those Angus cows. A Charolais calf with a black nose.

Shauna Hermel (06:13):
Okay, sure.

Rob Hendry (06:14):
And so the Charolais deal was purely a marketing deal. We had people that wanted that cross. They wanted the Angus, but they needed a little bigger animal in the end.

Shauna Hermel (06:34):
And in your country, that probably doesn't work in the cow.

Rob Hendry (06:36):
Yeah, well, the cows are good and our country is rough. We go from 5,000 to 9,000 feet and then it's big country. We're scattered out 75 miles north and south - and not all in one piece - and then about 50 miles east and west. And my grandpa and dad put that place together. But you never buy the neighbors. You buy the one over the top of the neighbor. We do a lot of trailing cows and just the Angus cows just work good. Through the '80s when we expanded, we went to the yearlings, and that just about broke us because our country, it just doesn't have, the growth. You can't get the gain on them in the summertime, and then you're victim of the market. Both sides. Buying and selling them.

And so we went back to cows and calves. That's when basically we became all Angus cows.

Shauna Hermel (07:43):
Describe a little bit of your program and what kind of female you're looking for? Maybe a little bit of the scope of your operation?

Rob Hendry (07:52):
Well, during those '80s we bought what we needed because it was tough. It was really tough times, and so we couldn't keep our own heifers because you're two years before you get a calf crop out of them.

So we started buying bred heifers. There's a guy in eastern Idaho that puts a lot of cattle together. He gets them from a lot of different sources, and then he breeds them to good light birthweight bulls for that first year. But then he keeps them over the wintertime and he grows them.

Those heifers, when they come to our place, they weigh 1,000 pounds. We never could raise a heifer to weigh 1,000 pounds. The other little trick that we found out when we buy that bred heifer in our books, we say that this year say it's $2,500, we put $1,500 on an unborn embryo. And the horse racing guys did that. Those bull guys, that's where our accountant kind of came up with that. So we've bought an unborn embryo for $1,500 and we bought the cow for a thousand. So at the end of that first year, that calf is almost a wash. When we sell it ...

Leslie Hendry (09:22):
We can write it off.

Rob Hendry (09:23):
We can write off.

Leslie Hendry (09:24):
We can it off that embryo on our taxes. We get credit for that.

Rob Hendry (09:30):
Yeah, so that's a big tax advantage on buying heifers. And then you get the calf crop that first year and you get her to start making money. Then when you sell that cow at the end ... first in, first out. You sell that cow at the end of 10 years or however long. We already bought her for $1,000. And right now if she makes $1,000 or $1,100, then that's almost a wash. No capital gains on her.

Shauna Hermel (09:59):
Right.

Rob Hendry (10:00):
So just in our operation, it works good.

Shauna Hermel (10:04):
Okay. How many heifers would you be buying at a time?

Rob Hendry (10:09):
Well, this year, 360 head. And we calve them a little earlier than the cows. And our son is there on the place now, and Jared is pretty well in charge of the day-to-day. We're there to help do the books. And then I look for work for him to do. It's a family deal. He gets a little tired of that, but they're in charge of calving and it's day and night. We've got a facility. And then he's starting to calve both ends. At the beginning, he's calving them day and night. And then as the weather gets better in April, he'll turn a lot of those out to calve because they're 1,000 pound heifers. And we feed them in the wintertime and treat them good. We feed them two pounds of eared corn a day and all the hay they can eat from about the middle of December to however long it takes. The old cows, it's from Jan. 1 to March 1. Then we turn them out to calve. So they get a pretty good feed in the wintertime. But those heifers, we keep them around. And then we started mixing them with the cows. We used to keep them separate and kind of treat them good, but they don't learn anything.

Shauna Hermel (11:35):
They need a little bit of those older mamas out there showing them what to do.

Leslie Hendry (11:40):
What's amazing is they really do because when we had them separate, they didn't know where to go. They didn't know that they were supposed to look for water. They didn't know. They always just kind of stayed together. And the cows, they teach them not only how to be a mom, but how to look for the water, where to go for the grass in the different pastures. And also, like Rob had mentioned, we trail a lot. And so it teaches them to hopefully keep their calf with them. Sometimes they don't, but we'll trail 200-300 pairs at a time and go 4-5 miles, sometimes 12 miles on one bunch we trail. And so it's helpful if they can keep their calf with them. When we get to the pasture, then we have to sit and mother them up. But then the cows will be looking for their babies and they'll be like, 'Oh, I have a baby here somewhere. I better go find her.'

Shauna Hermel (12:39):
You don't want 'em to go 12 miles back home.

Leslie Hendry (12:42):
So it is amazing that how they can learn from the older cows. And so that's worked well.

Shauna Hermel (12:51):
Now coming out of Idaho, they would be similar type of conditions at home.

Rob Hendry (12:59):
Big pastures and extensive range. Similar when they were up in that country. A little better grass country than ours, but it's similar and they're pretty well at home.

Shauna Hermel (13:11):
Okay. Now, before you receive those heifers, have they been through a vaccination protocol?

Rob Hendry (13:18):
Yeah, they get all of the shots. The BVD s and all of that stuff going in when they put them in the feedlot in the wintertime to grow them. And they'll go through a series of those and give them several shots, whatever they need to. And then when we get them, we don't have to do much to them. We give them a BVD shot now on all the cows. But we give them Vitamin C and D, a couple of rounds of that and pour them. And then they're pretty well set. Branding and they're set. And right now they've just brought them up to the house and we're going to start calving. They've probably got a calf for two by now. It's time.

Leslie Hendry (14:04):
But one other thing we do is when we brand them and give them their shots and their ScourGuard and that kind of stuff, we also bleed them and check for brucellosis because these cows are so close to the park. We do have that problem with bison and lepto.

Shauna Hermel (14:22):
Yellowstone?

Rob Hendry (14:22):
Yellowstone. And so we do check for that because that is not something you want in your herd.

Shauna Hermel (14:27):
No.

Leslie Hendry (14:27):
And so we can say yes, we have checked every one of our heifers coming in, so every one of our cows as they get older, have been checked. And then that's another marketing tool. We can say that they are brucellosis-free.

Rob Hendry (14:43):
Well, and we don't want to mix that 368 heifers in with the 2,000 that are at home and all the neighbors, just in case. Now we aren't in a surveillance area for brucellosis where we live. And really the heifers that we get are not in that surveillance area either, but we're close. We wouldn't have to check them, but we don't have control over where those elk travel.

Well, the elk and bison. There are some bison that run through our bulls usually once in a while to run through some of those pastures in Idaho. And it's a safeguard. It's just something we ought to do. And then we checked the BVD test too while we took the blood sample and just to make sure that our cow herd is BVD-free. And so when we sell those, that's a marketing deal too. When we sell those calves then we can tell them that we do everything we can.

Shauna Hermel (15:50):
And that would be very attractive to a feedlot purchasing those steers and your heifers. Because actually you're selling the whole lot, right? You're not retaining any heifers?

Rob Hendry (16:01):
Right. We're selling the whole thing. Now that first year, we sold them in two different bunches. We've got a few of the neighbor's bulls get in the old cows and so we'll have a few black ones. And then all of the heifers calves are black. So we sell those separate. And then when we touch every one of them - we run through a chute, a little calf chute all over, got about six different pastures that we calve in. We put the RFID tags in and then we can say that calf was born in this timeframe and in this pasture. And so then when that calf goes to that buyer, then he knows he's got that information and that country of origin or farm-to-plate-type information. I know it wasn't a big deal to one of our buyers here 10-12 years ago, but the calf market for the feeders for those guys went completely crazy back 10, 12, 14 years ago.

He could make more money selling them to Japan. $50 more a head than losing $100 here. And so it became a big deal for him, that RFID tag. And so then it's a better deal for him.

Shauna Hermel (17:29):
So who are you selling your calves to?

Rob Hendry (17:33):
We've got a buyer that's been buying them for several years and he's got an outlet for those Charolais cross calves. But if he's not there, we usually go to Superior. And even though we sell them to him, it's through Superior Livestock. But we we've been on the actual sale for I think about 29 years now.

Shauna Hermel (17:56):
Oh wow.

Rob Hendry (17:58):
Maybe over 30. Yeah, maybe 30 through Superior.

Shauna Hermel (18:01):
So are you getting some data back on those?

Rob Hendry (18:04):
Not as much as we'd like. The guy that's buying them now, he backgrounds them and then he may feed them. He may not, but we're going to get some of that information that comes back. And we saw when we met you the other day in the CattleFax seminar. CattleFax does a great job.

Shauna Hermel (18:25):
They do.

Rob Hendry (18:27):
But they're talking about the Choice and Select spread. There's getting to be more of a spread between just an ordinary cow and one that'll produce a lot of Choice calves.

Shauna Hermel (18:41):
Yes.

Rob Hendry (18:42):
And so that's going to be more and more important as time goes on. So even in a big commercial deal, we need to find out if our calves at the end are 60% Choice or 80% Choice. Boy, that's quite a difference.

Shauna Hermel (18:57):
Big difference to your paycheck at the end of the year.

Rob Hendry (19:00):
Well, hey, it's a marketing tool. It's just like NHTC. We do that. We don't do GAP because we've got predators and it just doesn't work too good. But the NHTC, we do that with the calves and we're certified BQA. And so at the bottom of that, you sell the calves in a little box. Each page has six boxes on it. And the more things you have in the bottom, the more attention it gets. Our calves have been on there like 30 years, and those auctioneers, everybody knows those calves. And when Clear Creek calves come on that video, they pay attention that. Reputation. They know it's going to be right. The corrals are good. We'll bring 700 cows in and we'll be loading trucks by 9:00-9:30 and get them out of there. Get them on the truck and get to where they're going and not be eating dust and working them in the corral all day long. And it just better.

Shauna Hermel (20:07):
Let's go back and talk a little bit about that cow that you're bringing in. What kind of specifications do you give the people who are raising those heifers for you and supplying those heifers? What do you want in that female before she gets to your place?

Rob Hendry (20:23):
Well, we want the growth on them and we want them to be good big heifers. But the guys up there, like I said, we've been doing this for 40 years and it's kind of an interesting relationship. It's just almost family without being family, we just call up on a cell phone and say how many we need because we know that they've been through. When they bought those calves, they were through the feedlot and then they worked out the best ones all the time as they go through. And then when they put them out to grass, they're pretty well all shaped up and they look like a picture. They really do. And they're all pretty uniform and mostly blacks, a few black baldies, but not many anymore. And then the other thing is they buy big boned calves and there's a lot of difference. And it isn't just black hide anymore. There's a lot of difference. And our cows have good big bones on them. And the legs are good.

Shauna Hermel (21:42):
Feet and legs would have to be good in your territory.

Rob Hendry (21:45):
Yeah, it is a lot of rocks. And so they're good beefy-type heifers. And so as far as us going out there and picking each one, we don't do that. I call him on the cell phone, tell him how many we need. And then Jared has been going out. I used to go out, I used to go out with our vet because he did it just natural pregnancy testing and he could pretty well date him. He was really good.

Shauna Hermel (22:22):
That takes some experience.

Rob Hendry (22:23):
Oh yeah. Lots of experience. Well, he'll be 100 this year.

Shauna Hermel (22:30):
Oh, wow.

Rob Hendry (22:30):
But he tested until he was like 92. And he went through two series of vets in Worland. They all thought when Dave retired that they'd take over. Well, they're retiring now and Dave was still working. But anyway, now we're doing an ultrasound. And so times change.

Leslie Hendry (22:53):
But we are able to go out and like Rob said, he's done it and now our son goes out and we're there when they pregnancy test them. And so he can kind of guide and say, 'Okay, yeah, I don't really care for that one or that one's calving too late or too early or whatever.' So we do have some say that way. So that works well. It's a good relationship we have with them.

Shauna Hermel (23:19):
And you're calving within about a 90-day window where you're wanting to get those in.

Rob Hendry (23:23):
They're AI and they'd like to say it's 60, but it never works out that way. And that's the nature of the beast. But those later ones, they'll be alright and they'll catch up over time. It's tough for them. If they're 90 days and they're really late, then next year they don't breed back as close. But it's a range deal. We work with them.

Leslie Hendry (23:50):
And then with our black calves too, we wean them and we keep them until around Thanksgiving. And so it's amazing how the ones born in March or even the ones born in April, once you wean them, catch up, and they're all pretty even about that time. So that was another marketing tool we did is decided to wean those. The white calves we sell, we do not. They're right off the cow and they go right on the trucks. But the black ones we do. We do wean them. And so the ones, like I said, born early and the ones born late, they just seem to catch up. They all just seem to be about the same.

Shauna Hermel (24:31):
Okay. Now as far as the cow herd ... Once they get into the cow herd, what kind of selection pressure are you putting on those cows?

Rob Hendry (24:40):
Well, if they're bred back every year. I mean, we don't have them all computerized or anything like that. So when we come in the corral, if they're lame or if they just didn't do good, yeah, maybe they'll go in that out bunch. But if they're bred and have a calf, they stay. And if they aren't, then we make a decision. And so sometimes if it's a real dry year, they didn't breed back and it was kind of no fault of their own. And so we'll keep the young cows (like 2- and 3-year-olds).

Maybe dip into the 4-year-olds depending on the year, but the rest of them go right to the packer. And we don't go to the sale barns. They're pretty important to have around. But we go direct to the packer and people that we have a relationship out in Idaho, they have that relationship with the packer. So we just call them up. And so the same guys that we buy the heifers from, they make the deal and we sell those right now, sell those calves through them to the packer. And then the old bred cows, sometimes we keep them and sometimes we sell them and they buy the old bred cows.

Shauna Hermel (25:57):
Oh, really?

Rob Hendry (25:58):
And so they go back to the same ranch, don't have to brand them. They already got their brand on them. And so they'll run them a year or two longer.

Shauna Hermel (26:07):
That could be handy for them as well. Then they know what they have coming back.

Rob Hendry (26:11):
It's a big deal.

Leslie Hendry (26:12):
They know exactly what kind of cows because they put them together so they know what they're getting.

Shauna Hermel (26:19):
You bet. So what kind of traits wind up working in your operation?

Rob Hendry (26:25):
What kind of traits? Buying the bulls, we try to stay with low birthweight bulls and then the cows, just Angus cows. And over time, some of them may not be milk producers like the rest of them are, but where we don't keep track of them in that commercial deal, we just want beefy-type, good big bone cows in our cow herd. Those old mature cows that weigh 1,150 pounds.

Something like that, that's about what they weigh in our short grass country.

Shauna Hermel (27:07):
And can you kind of describe that country? I don't think we've shared quite with the audience how extensive some of the pastures are that those cows are going on.

Rob Hendry (27:16):
Well, when we turn out to calve, we're scattered east and west about 50 miles. Some of them stay around the house and close. Some of them go over, we're right in the middle of Wyoming. So we go from the Bighorn Basin. We loop over into the Bighorn Basin to some of the Sweetwater country. And so that's about 75 miles east, north and south.

Shauna Hermel (27:45):
That's quite a range.

Rob Hendry (27:46):
It is. And so there's lots of trailing, lots of trailing cows. One bunch, we'll have about 200 in a bunch down by the highway. And then we trail those along with another bunch of 200. We'll trail those one bunch at a time down 12 miles and then put them in another big pasture to start out the summer from the first part of April and May until July, they'll be in 20,000 acre pasture.

Shauna Hermel (28:22):
That's huge for this Missouri girl. That's almost hard to comprehend.

Rob Hendry (28:28):
And then they go up and we brand, there's a few selects, late calves, we'll brand them, and then they go into 13,000 acres.

Shauna Hermel (28:35):
Oh my. Okay.

Rob Hendry (28:35):
And spend the summer up on top of the Rattlesnake Mountain and then bring them in and ship the calves off. And then they go into 13,000 acres again in another pasture until we bring them home to feed them the other side. At the house, there's pastures. There's 5,000 in one, there's about 9,000 in another pasture. And it's big country. It kind of looks like Monument Valley. Red valleys and big rough hills. The water is pretty good. And they go anywhere they want to calve. Then the other part of that is we get hit with a storm once in a while, and so they're scattered out and they have good protection.

Shauna Hermel (29:23):
But most of those storms come in the wintertime or the summertime?

Rob Hendry (29:27):
When we turn them out. There's some killer storms can happen in March and April, and you want them to have them spread out because we can't get to them. And we have in the past had to take the graters and get them and feed them some hay for a few days. But by that time it melts off hopefully in a day or two. But it's tough on them. It's a range deal, and you kind of have to have the stomach for it. You'll lose some calves. You'll lose some cows, too, calving out like that. Our vet used to give us a hard time. I fly and he said, 'Well, you're calving them with an airplane.' And that's just about right. And I'll see some problems once in a while. And so the guys will go over there and pick them up with a trailer and bring them home and there's just cow problems that happen.

Leslie Hendry (30:25):
But then calving the heifers through the chute or through the shed, I always say sometimes we kill them with kindness watching them. You've got your nervous heifer and then she has a baby and she doesn't know what to do and you're right there. And even watching them day and night, you can still lose them. It just happens so quick.

Shauna Hermel (30:46):
We collect those bugs when we keep THem together a whole lot of times.

Leslie Hendry (30:50):
So sometimes it's a catch .22. Yeah, you can catch some problems in your heifers, but sometimes it's good. You hope that the heifer will learn something.

Shauna Hermel (31:07):
Going through those 13,000 and 20,000 acre pastures. That would be helpful to have older cower too that could teach those heifers where to go for water.

Rob Hendry (31:18):
Well, when you get to gathering them and stuff, those old cows, they pick up their calves and they know where the chute is. They know where the corral is and they know where they're going to go the next time. So a lot of times you have to have some guys in the front of them to stop them to brand those calves before you go into the next pasture.

Shauna Hermel (31:40):
So now how long do you keep a cow in the herd?

Rob Hendry (31:43):
It averages, it's pretty close to 10 years. Cows that keep getting bred are 10. At 10 years old, our neighbors love us. We have every kind of color of ear tag, but we have the brands on the ear tag and stuff. But we've got also a brand age mark. And then we've got that tag and different colors for different years. And so we'll tell them that way and we start that tag on the heifers and where we're going through the barn, we put it the same number in the calf as the cow when we're going as heifers.

Shauna Hermel (32:21):
Okay.

Rob Hendry (32:23):
But then the other calves, they calve out in the country. They don't have ear tags, except when we brand, we put the RFID tags in.

Shauna Hermel (32:31):
Now will you also castrate those calves when you're branding?

Rob Hendry (32:35):
Well, and that's the thing. You sell them in that box and buyer knows if it sells knife cut that somebody actually got that calf and did castrate him. And so it sounds better for him and they're assured that it happened. And our son, he's got one other guy that does that sometimes. But when I was doing it, I told him I did every one and I did. I did all the head work, gave all the shots, and BQA certified, the whole works. And then I'm the one that knife cut every calf. Jared has some help and he's doing a great job. He can tell everybody, 'Yeah, I was right there. I oversaw the whole works.'

Shauna Hermel (33:24):
That's a lot of calves to cut. When you talk about the number of head that you're dealing with.

Rob Hendry (33:28):
Well, it helps we're not bending over and getting up and getting down. We're using a table and our hands are on every one of them.

Leslie Hendry (33:37):
So also, I was going to throw in there about branding. A lot of people will say they want to come to our branding because they see it on TV and it's glamorous. And I say, no, you don't. It isn't fun. We don't rope and drag. We run them through the chute and we'll brand probably 25 to 30 times.

Rob Hendry (33:59):
We might do 200, we might do five. But we are branding 25 to 30 times. And so it's not one big day. We are branding from probably the first part of April until June. And so it's just not every day. And we have to move a bunch of cows and then we'll brand them. And then we might have to move that bunch, do another pasture, and then we'll get some more. But it could be a week between, it could be a couple three days. But it's just a process. And for us, we are large enough that we don't have really time to go help the neighbors a lot. Jared does when he can, and then they'll reciprocate when we ship. But for branding, it's just us and our crew. And so there's just six of us and we just go and we just do it. And so we don't have to rely on extra help.

Shauna Hermel (35:01):
And so that's six people managing how many cows?

Rob Hendry (35:08):
200 to 250 maybe in a bunch. Probably no more than that. First started out, and even though when I was doing it, we'd go into those pastures with three guys and sometimes less would help. But we would gather 200 head and then just the three of us would bring those calves to the table. And so we didn't have a big deal.

Shauna Hermel (35:26):
You must've had your system down.

Rob Hendry (35:28):
We didn't serve lunch and do all of that stuff. Have all the neighbors come. It was just the three of us. And so the table was really the way to go.

Shauna Hermel (35:37):
You bet.

Rob Hendry (35:38):
And it was easy. One guy pushing him in and then one guy flipping that table over and branding. And then I'd work ahead on the other side and it was a labor deal. We didn't have a lot of people around.

Shauna Hermel (35:57):
Now are you giving those calves the pre-weaning vaccinations at that time too?

Rob Hendry (36:03):
Yeah, we give them all a shot, two shots at branding. Blackleg and BoviShield Gold is what we're using now. One shot and then the UltraBack-7. And no implants of course or anything like that. And then we ear tag them. That's what we do at branding.

And then we don't give them another shot pre-weaning. We don't, on those old calves, we just don't have the facilities. And they say that it does make money if you do that, but those cows, right before we ship one bunch of cows is 19,000 acres and no corrals around it. So you don't want to chase those cows down in the dust or something. And that time of year run them through the corral and precondition them and then turn them back out there in that 19,000 acres and have to go get them again. It just doesn't work too good.

Leslie Hendry (37:11):
Because at that point, that group of cows is 1,200 head. And so that's what we ship with one bunch. We'll ship probably 1,000 calves out of that bunch. So we brought all those smaller bunches together for the summer, and then they spend the summer together, so there could be 1.200 cows. So yeah, you don't want to talk causing pnuemonia.

Rob Hendry (37:34):
Yeah.

Leslie Hendry (37:34):
A nightmare. Pnuemonia and the dust.

Rob Hendry (37:35):
Well, that's really for that guy that's buying them. That would be worse than if he can't give that shot. That calf's got a good one to begin with. So he's got the foundation and then it's better for him to do it in the feedlot and have control of it.

Shauna Hermel (37:52):
And he knows what's coming. So that communication is there.

Rob Hendry (37:55):
He knows.

Leslie Hendry (37:56):
Okay. And we do sell him another marketing tool in All Natural. He really wanted to, wanted us to get into All Natural. So what we do is when we brand, if we doctor anything, that calf will get a red button for its RFID tag and then we keep the number. So we can let him know. A part of the deal is he would have to take everything. And so we would let him know that, 'Okay, this calf, it's got a red tag, this number has been doctored.' And so when it gets to him, he can pull it out, he can manage it separately, and then he would have the ones that we doctored as opposed to the All Natural ones that he wanted. And so that works well too because you don't want to let a sick calf go through because that's not good for anybody or any of the herd. And so you try not to doctor as many because they do better. I think the immunities build up if they don't have a lot of medicines, but there are few that really, really need it. And so we do doctor them, and that's what we do with those.

Shauna Hermel (39:16):
And as we heard at CattleFax, those calves are getting more valuable all the time.

Rob Hendry (39:20):
Oh, man.

Shauna Hermel (39:21):
Exactly.

Rob Hendry (39:21):
Yeah, they are.

Shauna Hermel (39:22):
That was pretty good news. What do you see as the future of the cattle business for you and your herd?

Rob Hendry (39:28):
Well, right now, I mean here it's really kind of up to Jared. What's going to happen. We're there for a while to help him, but it's going to be his decision how he goes forward or whether he wants to stay that big or that spread out. That's all. It's going to be kind of up to him. And I like it. I've loved it all of my life. But if you look at the big picture ...

Shauna Hermel (39:58):
Sure.

Rob Hendry (39:59):
We really need to have guys like us to produce calves. Because we're losing a lot of grasslands. We've heard it at this convention, we're losing grasslands,. We're losing it to housing developments to 40 -acre tracts. Somebody's going to have to produce food for this country. And so my heart says, 'God, we got to keep doing it and raise a lot of calves.' But then when you analyze and you talk to people from all over the country, there's a hell of a lot of calves that are 100 calves to the owner or fewer. And so there's, yeah, there's more calves down in some of that in your country .

And in the southeast that are smaller deals. But when you put them all together, they raise more calves than we do in Wyoming. But the nice thing about the Superior deal, you learn that Wyoming and Montana calves bring a premium. High altitude, good beefy-type calves. Then they go down primarily into Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Kansas wheat pasture. They go on from there and they really want those calves. So you kind of learn that over time. We can't lose that either.

Shauna Hermel (41:28):
You bet. So is Jared pretty positive about staying in the business?

Rob Hendry (41:34):
Yeah, he likes it. And like I said, he's in charge and we still do horseback. We've got about 50 head of horses, and he's got a motorbike, a four-wheeler and a side-by-side. He's got all those things. But our country, you got to be horseback. And that card I gave you is Jared, that's him riding some cows right there. And so we're not going to be able to get away from the horse.

Shauna Hermel (42:07):
Maybe find some more technology for the automated technology to help with checking waters and flyovers and things like that?

Rob Hendry (42:15):
Well, I did go crazy one year about 2014. We've also got a construction company that we got a little gas field on us, and I wanted to get that grass back to get those places back to grass quicker. So I started reclaiming locations. And then I started building locations. And then I got a lot of yellow iron. So that enabled me to buy a helicopter. And so now I help gather cows with a helicopter.

Shauna Hermel (42:49):
That's a new way of cowboying.

Rob Hendry (42:50):
Yeah, I got a good horse under me.

Shauna Hermel (42:53):
There you go.

Rob Hendry (42:56):
Oh yeah. Well, in that 20,000 acre pasture, I'll go over early and then guys get there about 7:30. By the time they get there, I'll have half of that 20,000 acre pasture gathered. And I won't have them pushed all the way, but I'll have them kind of strung out. And cows and calves, you need to have them strung out. You can't have them in a wad. And so when they get there, they'll send guys to the front end, guys to the sides and they'll just keep them moving. And so the cowboys like me to show up now. I save a lot of horse flesh.

Shauna Hermel (43:37):
You got half the job done.

Rob Hendry (43:40):
And I wouldn't say it's any faster, but it does get them together and it just saves on cowboys.

Shauna Hermel (43:52):
With Jared coming into being the next generation of the ranch, we've done some surveys and a lot of people haven't started that conversation about how they're going to transition a ranch and especially one of this magnitude. Have you started that conversation and what steps have you put in place to help that transition, both management and maybe ownership?

Rob Hendry (44:18):
I had a good education for my dad who had a good education from his dad. Grandpa came from Scotland, and he was not the oldest son, and he never could own anything. He had to go find something else. So when Dad came back, there was five kids and he decided that, 'Okay, [he'd] run the ranch.' One of the uncles was number two in household finance. I mean, they went all over. And four sisters. Three sisters got married and went to, well, there's a lot of them in California and Arizona. But Grandpa said, 'Alright, I'm going to give you the ranch, and then you owe your brothers and sisters.' At that time, it was $10,000-20,000.

But Dad had the ranch in order to pay them off. So he had a good education. When I started wanting to take over Dad, we did estate planning. And of course it's a company and he transferred stock. Grandpa transferred stock and did that. But now it's almost hard to keep up with that. And I was an only child, and so that made it a little easier. And Dad transferred the stock to me in the '80s when we were having real problems. He transferred most of the stock while it was worthless, basically.

Shauna Hermel (45:52):
Good time to do it.

Rob Hendry (45:53):
Well, really tough times. He was always thinking. He was always thinking. And so when it was basically worthless, he transferred a lot of the stock to me. So that was that generation. And then now

Shauna Hermel (46:09):
You're not in that position now.

Rob Hendry (46:10):
Yeah, we aren't. But here, before things got real crazy in land values in the West, I've already done a lot of the estate planning. And so Jared really, Jared's a majority stockholder right now. I don't know whether I want to tell him that too much, he'll vote us out. But he doesn't have to worry about that. And if he wants to do it, fine, if he doesn't, we've, we've still got a few shares of stock in the ranch, but he's the majority stockholder, and he's got a brother that decided to take off from the ranch. He's got some shares of stock too. When he decided to leave, I said, 'Alright, I want half of my stock back.' And so the corporation bought that back from him and not dollar for dollar, because it's a closely held family corporation.

So the company owns some of that. It bought that stock back and it owns some of that stock in the the ranch. So we pretty well got the stock deal done. But then I started flying in '78 and my dad said, 'Well, we better buy an insurance policy on you.' And we've kept that up and we've increased that. We've got an insurance policy, life insurance policy on Jared, so we've got life insurance policies to take care of Les and to take care of the ranch if there's any problems that way. We've all got wills. Jared's 33 and he's got a will and he's got a trust. We've all got trusts. Just that.

Shauna Hermel (48:03):
Where did you go to get your advice for developing that?

Rob Hendry (48:07):
Well, you see your accountant, and each place has an attorney. With this trust deal, the government changes things - changes the law - all the time. When Dad did it, Dad and Mom, they did a joint trust. Les and I have individual trusts, and it just depends on when you set it up. And the law is so much different each time, but you got to go do it. You got to talk about it, and it's hard. It's hard to talk about it. How

Shauna Hermel (48:43):
Do you start that conversation?

Rob Hendry (48:45):
Well, Dad started that conversation and just said, 'This is the way it's going to be.' We have to talk about this, and you don't want to talk about dying, but you're not going to stick around forever. You've worked all of your life to put something together. And if you want to hold it together, you better start talking about it.

Leslie Hendry (49:10):
Well, and then Rob's dad was also on the FarmCedit board for a lot of years, and so he saw firsthand a lot of the family issues. And so that's why he knew we needed to do something. And he did. I grew up on a ranch. I'm actually a fourth generation, but my dad sold the ranch in the '90s. But when we were born, my grandpa was like, girls have nothing to do with the ranch. You will not get any shares of stock. You will not get anything,

Shauna Hermel (49:44):
Really?

Leslie Hendry (49:45):
And my dad was like, 'No, that's not the way it would work.' So there is that mind shift a little bit, but that's the way that generation was. Number 1) the women stayed home. That's what you did. But we've been very fortunate. And number 2) being an only child that does help. But yeah, you have to have that conversation. And I'm running into that with my parents right now who are elderly, and we have not had those conversations. They've sold the ranch, but they've got other stuff. And so they were ill this weekend. And so I might have to go down there and say, 'Okay, you know what? We need to sit down and do this.'

Leslie Hendry (50:27):
And so it is tough because they don't want to.

Shauna Hermel (50:30):
Who needs to take the initiative? I mean, is it harder to start the conversation as someone saying that I want to come into the farm and take it? Or is it the parent's role to say, okay, I'm going to die someday? I

Rob Hendry (50:46):
Think it's both of them.

Leslie Hendry (50:48):
And I think it's got to start with the parents.

Rob Hendry (50:51):
Because they have to want to.

Leslie Hendry (50:52):
The parents have to want to, because they can, I mean, the kids, yeah, we're going to take over, but the parents have got to be willing to talk to their kids and say, 'Okay, this is what we're doing and this is why.' And then the kids, they're young. Who knows when you're 20 years old and they don't know what you want to do, really. But I think it's got to start with the parents and they've got to be willing to do it because it is harder for the kids. I mean, they look at myself now talking to my parents. It's hard. They don't want to do it so well,

Rob Hendry (51:28):
But then the kids have to initiate maybe that conversation. If Mom and Dad isn't initiating it, the kids have to put the bugs in the ear, and hopefully the parents will come around and say, 'Well, yeah, maybe I do need to do something.

Shauna Hermel (51:46):
Well, I have totally enjoyed being able to visit with y'all and having a chance to get to know you better. And thank you for joining us for this episode of Angus at Work. I hope our audience enjoyed it. We'll put the website for your ranch in the show notes so that if people would like to learn more, they can go online.

Rob Hendry (52:07):
Yeah. Well, wonderful. We don't really have a website, but that'll be ...

Lynsey McAnally (52:11):
I looked it up. You have a profile on the Wyoming Stockergrowers page.

Rob Hendry (52:15):
Oh, okay. They put that on there?

Leslie Hendry (52:17):
Yeah, we did do that one time quite a few years ago.

Rob Hendry (52:20):
Yeah.

Shauna Hermel (52:21):
Okay. We'll do that. We'll figure out something.

Rob Hendry (52:24):
Good. Well, yeah, it's been good to be with you and talk about the industry that we love and the groups and the associations that we're here at National Cattlemans to support.

Leslie Hendry (52:36):
Well, thank you very much.

Lynsey McAnally (52:41):
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. If you have questions or comments, let us know at abbeditorial@angus.org, and we would appreciate it if you would leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share this episode with any other profit-minded cattlemen. Thanks for listening! This has been Angus at Work.