Maddux Cattle Company is a diversified 134-year-old cattle ranching and farming operation in southwest Nebraska. The ranch consists of roughly 45,000 acres, 30,000 acres of deeded land (27,000 rangeland 3,000 farmland) and leases roughly 15,000 acres consisting of cornstalks for winter grazing.

The ranch receives around 18 inches of precipitation annually. The ranch is a combination of a third hard land and two thirds Sandhills grass, with roughly 1,000 acres of sub-irrigated meadows. Grass species are a combination of warm and cool season. Green grass is available from early April through November. Very little dormant season grazing is done, with rented cornstalks providing the bulk of the winter grazing for both steers and cows. Around 2,500 acres of the farmland is pivot irrigated with the balance producing dry land wheat. One half of the irrigated land is leased out, the balance being farmed by ranch employees.

Our ranch has developed our suite of enterprises based on our location, competitive advantages and resources. We have identified 2 major areas that we feel we are competitive. We can produce large number of uniform feeder cattle that are attractive to large commercial feed yards. We have decided that we are best suited to produce these feeder cattle for the feeding complexes rather than retaining the cattle to slaughter weights. Additionally, we sell 500–600 of high quality low input type bred cows and heifers, primarily to an aging cow calf producer demographic. Seedstock breeding bulls are sold as well.

The ranch runs 2,500 mother cows plus 1,000 replacement heifers. The cows are maternal composites, British in type. All replacement heifers and bulls are generated internally. The major contributing breeds are Red Angus, Tarentaise (French breed), South Devon, Devon and Red Poll. The purpose of selecting these breeds is to build high heterosis and fertility in a modest input maternally oriented cow. A high percentage of heifers are saved for replacements and exposed for a short breeding period. All steers and any heifers not kept for replacements are carried over and sold as grass yearlings. If calves are weaned in the fall, no feed or supplementation is fed to mature cows. If cow/calf pairs are sent to cornstalks, they are supplemented with wet distillers’ grains. This supplemental nutrition is necessary to maintain the lactating cow and her nursing calf.

We are fans of crossbred cattle. In our opinion, there is no single management practice, which can have more impact on your bottom line than crossbreeding. The use of crossbreeding yields two important advantages over straight-bred cattle. First, is that the crossing of two breeds results in higher levels of performance for most economic traits. Secondly, the use of multiple breeds allows producers to harness the traits of one breed to “compliment” and improve desirable characteristics of another breed. No one breed has optimum levels of performance however, through breed combinations and hybrid vigor, one can develop highly desirable animals for a broad range of traits.

Hybrid vigor, more commonly referred to as heterosis, is the superiority that crossbred animals exhibit over its straight-bred parents. Generally, heterosis has the greatest effect on those traits, which have a lower level of heritability, moderate heterosis is observed in moderately heritable traits, while highly heritable traits show little or no affects from heterosis. Traits such as fertility, longevity, and health have relatively low heritability yet show large responses from cross breeding. This is important for two often overlooked reasons. One is that while most genetic change is focused on the highly heritable traits like frame size and growth, the truly important economic traits like overall cow productivity are not the focus of the seed stock community, because of the low heritability. Even if it were a focus in selection, making change in these areas would be quite limited. Secondly, crossbreeding allows one to make much larger strides in genetic improvement by utilizing breed differences. Through recent efforts to characterize the important economic traits and biological type for beef cattle breeds, one can easily identify which breeds excel in any one trait and use that breed to introduce those genes for that trait into your crossbred population. You can make much more progress in one cross than a lifetime of selection for a trait, even one with high heritability.

Producing crossbred calves has advantages in terms of heterosis and blending of breed differences but the major advantages of cross breeding accrues to the crossbred cow. Hybrid females generate a more desirable environment for her calf through improved maternal ability. This results in higher calf survivability and higher weaning weights. On average, a crossbred cow has a 4% higher calving rate, raises one more calf, and produces a cumulative 600 more pounds of calf over her lifetime. This higher productivity gives you more pounds to sell every year per cow and reduces your replacement rate due to higher fertility, longer lives and healthier more “maternal” cows. This higher productivity and lower replacement rates are powerful factors affecting overall ranch profitability.

In order to capture the benefits of hybrid vigor, we developed our composite population of “Maternalizers”. Our Maternalizer cows are designed to emphasize maternal traits. We feel these cows are well suited for our environment and production system. They are smaller framed, easier fleshing, early growth cows with desirable udders. We want cows that deliver low birth weight calves without assistance. Our composite is designed to graze year-round with minimal feed inputs. With this genetic emphasis, and through the use of cornstalks and late spring calving, only in the case of severe weather has any hay or supplementation been fed. And while some emphasis was given to carcass quality/marbling in our breed selection, our focus is on whether the breed can deliver fitness and convenience traits. Moreover, with our composite herd, genetic change is not necessarily our goal. Instead, we are trying to fix a set of traits at a given level of production. High growth and more milk are not necessarily desirable because of the higher maintenance and feed costs associated with higher production. Selection for fitness and convenience traits trumps high production. Our goal is to have every cow pregnant and raise a calf albeit at a lower weaning and yearling weights than most conventional systems.

Our ideal cow will have the following convenience and fitness characteristics:

1. 1150 lbs. mature weight
2. Frame score 5 or less
3. Fault free udders
4. Docility
5. Fertility
6. Polled
7. Longevity
8. Pigment on eye and udder
9. Fleshing ability
10. Calving ease
11. Modest early growth and milk

Here is a table Modified from the USDA MARC Germ Plasm Evaluation project that characterizes the production traits and biological type of the parent breeds, which we have selected to be contributors to our composite (see Table 1).

Table 1: Characterizes the production traits and biological type of the parent breeds

Breed	Growth Rate	Age Puberty	Milk Production	% Retail Product	+	-
AR Red Angus	XXX	XX	XXX	XX	-Good all-round maternal traits	-Limited genetic base
TA Tarentaise	XXX	XX	XXX	XXX	-Excellent convenience traits i.e., udders, size	-Greater than optimum milk & growth
DS South Devon	XXX	XX	XXX	XXX	-Excellent docility and carcass traits	-Greater than optimum milk & growth -Marginal udders
RP Red Poll	XX	XX	XXX	XX	-Excellent Fertility and marbling	-Marginal udders -Not much fleshing ability
HE Hereford	XXX	XXX	XX	XX	-Optimum Milk -Right biological type	-Poor Marbling -Questionable udders
DE Devon	XX	XXX	XX	XX	-Optimum milk -Correct Biological type	-Poor Marbling -Extremely small genetic base

We have confidence that the Red Angus breed provides an excellent base for our composites. The Red Angus breed offers carcass quality, maternal traits and calving ease. One drawback is that they have a far smaller breed population compared with Black Angus. The Tarentaise, South Devon, Devon Red Poll Breeds complement each other and make a positive contribution to our goal of producing high fertility, low input females in an extensive production system.

In addition, roughly 3–4,000 Angus calves, averaging around 475 pounds are purchased and wintered on the ranch. Growing calves are supplemented with wet distillers’ grains. We are able to buy high quality Angus calves and winter them on relatively cheap crop aftermath and ethanol biproducts. Our goal is to produce 725 pounds steer going to grass in the spring. We then expect these steers will gain around 2 pounds/day on grass during a 100–120-day grazing period. The use of Angus genetics allows us to grow the animals at a slow rate and produce feed yard ready animals at under 1000 pounds at 18 months of age. Higher growth yearling steers over 1000 pounds are heavily discounted in the marketplace. All yearlings are summered on leased land in Nebraska, Wyoming and Colorado. They are sold on video auctions as 9 weights for delivery in the late summer.

Our marketing/risk management plan relies heavily on using market seasonality. While not bullet proof, seasonality offers an approach to risk management that improves the probability of transacting on favorable terms. We purchase calves in the fall of the year, when most calves come to market. This wave of calves allows us to buy calves when historically prices are depressed. These calves are wintered and sent to grass in the spring. They are marketed in July when there is generally an uptrend in price of feeder cattle. These seasonal trends are driven by the climate of North America and consequently are not likely to change dramatically on year-to-year basis.

One competitive advantage we have is our location. We have a good base of native range, surrounded by large amount of irrigation development and cornstalks to rent. This allows us to economically winter a large number of cows and yearlings. In addition, we have access to wet distillers’ grains byproduct. This coupled with our own irrigated land allows us to have good access to feed resources to winter cattle and for drought protection. Another competitive advantage is our employees. With a stable workforce we can delegate responsibilities and have been able to invest in the training and development of our workforce. Another advantage is our relationships with various ranches in the west. We send yearlings to different areas of the west and then offer large numbers of uniform feeding cattle that are well suited for filling the needs of the cattle feeding infrastructure.