Denny said:
Were useing sinclair extra pretty heavy here so far so good. I wonder if wild living conditions don't help influx your cows behavior. If you leave them run out in the wild without much human relations why would you expect them to be people friendly.I've bought bred heifers that come off a big place that had only ever seen a feeder wagon and a tractor they were plenty wild thats for sure.They are 10 now and a couple are still that way but for the 3 or 4 days a year that I have to handle them it's of no concern to me.Of course good working facilities make all the differance.
My dad raised registered Hereford bulls for about 45 years. I have packed my fair share of feed in gunny sacks over my shoulder to put in bunks for these bulls. We ground a lot of oats and ear corn through first a hammermill and later through a Bearcat grinder-mixer. Dad would get many truckloads of ear corn hauled in each winter, and the pile would stretch for probably sixty or seventy yards. He looked at it as part of a winter's feed supply. Me, being the flunky but also the realist, looked at the large pile as a lot of work for me and the hired hand. Every ear of that corn had to be handled with a scoop shovel in grinding it, and then bucketed and sacked so it could be fed. Besides being hard work, it was also a dusty job. Grinding the oats was dusty and terribly itchy. I don't miss those days one bit.
The point of this oration is that when the bulls were bunk fed, they stayed very gentle. One year Dad bought three large-capacity creep feeders (I think each feeder held eight tons of feed). That year he bought commercial feed with a limiter, and put the bulls in three good-sized pastures on self-feed grain and all the good summer grass they could eat. Our human contact with these bulls was not much, and only to run them through the squeeze chute for various reasons including putting hornweights on and taking them off. :roll: That fall, when the eighteen-month old bulls were sold through the ranch salebarn, they were the wildest bulls we'd ever worked with. Sad to say, the next year we went back to hand feeding them just to keep them gentle.