How did you get started in the bull breeding business?
It was in 2003 and I think one day I went to the sale barn and brought home a baby bull calf. It was just a little black, bony, beef-like bull calf. At this time, in 2003, rodeo cows were ridiculously priced. I mean, prices were through the roof. So I bought him and then three red polled heifers thinking I'm going to raise bucking stock out of these cows and I'd just buy stuff from the sale barn. I'd buy some of the wild ones that came through there.
Where did you go from there?
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| Winchester Girl and 2011 calf Photos courtesy of Bloyd Bucking Bulls |
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| Winchester's Image |
All these other animals we had were kind of half-blooded and a lot of them were no-blooded. The next few years I tinkered with buying different cows. But there was no consistency in our herd. It was stuff from all over the map. And that works with people who have 200 cows.
They can play around and there's more room for error.
When you have a hundred bull calves a year, you're going to have some buckers in there no matter what you're breeding. But when you have a small herd like we have, you have to concentrate and have a line-bred herd to consistently raise good buckers, and we weren't doing that. We'd have a couple that were good, but most of them weren't.
I know that at one point you decided to start over and redevelop your whole program around the Kish line. How did that happen?
I bought cows from people who were going out of business. There were a lot of people who got into it when the prices were really high and when the prices dropped out, so did their motivation for having to mess with wild cows because the risk was outweighing the benefit. I bought cows that people paid six to eight thousand dollars for back when things were at their peak. I bought them for a fraction of that.
Have you seen a difference since then?
I have no question. I've already gotten proof from some of the cows that I've bought in the last couple of years that they can produce and that they will produce outstanding bulls.
Before that I knew that I didn't have really good cows and really great stuff and there weren't people emailing me and knocking my door down wanting to buy stuff from me. Then two years ago when I started buying these Kish cows and bought Cash Prize and started breeding to him, people started contacting me left and right wanting to buy calves before they were even born.
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| Cash Prize |
Getting Cash Prize was a really smart way to buy a herd sire because if he hadn't been crippled up you never would be able to buy him.
He would be so expensive. He's one of those bulls that if he was four years old and bucking, he would be a hundred-thousand-dollar bull.
Do you still have that cow, the first one?
She's the one you featured on your website with the heifer calf on her side. She was a wild maniac when we got her and she's probably one of our gentlest cows now. She calmed down over the years.
How old is she?
She's an '03, so she's eight. She's had a calf every year. She finally had her first heifer calf this year.
What advice would you give someone starting out in the business?
Go buy five heifers from somebody that's established. From Don Kish or Alex Nacarrato or Rafter 7r. Buy a bull that's from proven bloodlines, a bull that actually performs and bucks. Breed those heifers to that bull and you're going to be in the bull business. The way I went about it - I didn't have the money to do any differently. I struggled through buying non-rodeo-bred cattle, and when you do that, you see the results of it. It doesn't work.
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| 2011 heifer calf |
You’re a purist.
I am. There aren't a lot of people in the central part of the country that have that west coast blood and have a pure set of west coast cows bred to a west coast bull. A lot of them have the Plummer stuff and the Kish-Plummer cross works really well. That was one of my business plans: to be able to offer a pure-bred set of west coast bred females for those Plummer guys to outcross to.
What are your goals from here on out? What do you want to accomplish?
Our main goal is to raise good quality cattle, which we're doing already. We just want to continue to raise high quality cattle that people want. When I think about breeding, I think about my heifers first, really, because I want to make my heifers marketable. I believe that if your heifers are marketable the bulls will sell themselves. If you have good quality females that you can sell for a decent price, the bulls will pay for themselves.
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| The Bloyd ranch |
How many cattle in the herd right now?
We have 20 cows total. Eighteen momma cows and two recip cows. The recip cows are rodeo bred, they're just not a bloodline I wanted to incorporate into my herd. They were the only two non-horned, fairly gentle cows that I had so I used them as recip cows for Mr. Juicy embryos. Then we've got 12 or 13 calves, weaned a couple of months ago. We've got three breed bulls - Winchester's Image, Cash to Win (Winchester's son), and Cash Prize.
Any young bulls?
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| 2011 bull calf |
[Note: Yearlings were chosen in a video competition by the ABBI, and winners were bought by the ABBI for the program for $3,500 each. First place winners in each video "round" were given an additional prize of $500. Bloyd's calves won first in both rounds.]
If you could pick one straw from any bull, what would you pick?
It would be Too Legit because of the way his daughters produce. He has 47 offspring in the registry and nine sons with probullstats. I'd venture to say all of this daughters minus a few have either produced something or is the grandparent of something that has. Too Legit is from that original deep line-bred Oscar-bred herd of Alex Naccarato's. There's a reason it's priced as high as it is. If some good Kish cows were used in those IVF procedures they'd sell like hot cakes. Too Legit has never been bred to the type of cows Vernon [Guidry]has been using. It will be interesting to see what comes of it. I know this is a fact, Too Legit was only live-bred. All of his known sons bucked. He was a solid bull his whole life.
Coming up next week: Lance Bloyd talks about flanks.
