Galen Frenzen on Avoiding Fat Cattle

Now here’s Galen Frenzen from Frenzen Angus and Polled Herefords.

“Most of the guys that sell yearling bulls, they start calving right after Christmas. We don’t start calving till the middle of February and when we tested our bulls at our sale, I always get nervous with the yearling bulls, a lot of them weren’t even a year old yet. But the vet commented that he said the nuts are right there and they’re firm. And he said, I’m not grabbing hold of a scrotum full of, well he didn’t say scrotum, he said, a bag full of fat. We don’t get them fat.”

“The genetics are the same. When that calf is born, his genetics are set. And what you do from there is not going to change them. I don’t care how you fat you get them or how hard you promote them or what. Those genetics aren’t going to change. And so we don’t have the weights that a lot of them do. And I’ve been watching a lot of videos and there’s a lot of fat cattle out there.

“It was a Sunday afternoon, a guy called and he said, I don’t need any more bulls. But he said, I want to come to your sale. And he said, just look at your bulls and he said, I’m the most guilty one there is. He said, ‘I say, I’m not going to buy a fat bull. But that’s what we buy because they look better. And then we get upset because they go to hell come summer.’ We got repeat customers that say the bowl, he looks about the same in July as they bought them. In areas where there’s a hell of a lot of highly promoted, high powered bulls, he says, well, I’m tired of buying fat bulls. It’s a totally different program. That’s it in nutshell. I’m a redneck. I’m stubborn. I’m German.

That was 82 year old, Galen Frenzen, and that’s going to do it for today’s Cattleman’s Corner.