Irritations

I'm always talking about making our cattle better, and about all the things we do to improve our livestock, and showing you pictures of animals I like.
Well, there are always a few each year that aren't exactly top quality.
These are the bane of my cattle-related existence each year. I may hate poor quality cattle more than I hate lazy people...maybe.




Here is one of the culprits this year. Sometimes these smaller calves are simply young. This is not this guys problem, he's just bad. The other steers are about the average size of the group, and you can easily see that the baldy is much smaller. He isn't growing much either, and he will be animal that costs us money instead of making us money. As I've stated before, we love our livestock, but we also have to make a living off of them. This guy is one of the worst in our herd at doing his job, which is to grow and gain.
He makes my blood pressure spike every time I see him.
Another thing is that while I don't like other people's poor quality cattle, I have no control over that. Having to deal with this guy, and his partner in crime (yes, there are two of them) is extremely irritating to me because we raised them.






See the other one? In the back, on the left, the baldy. Another thing is that your worst cattle are always worming their way to the front. My dad will say your worst calves are always the ones that stand on the road for you to see.
These poor quality animals make me even more determine to improve the overall quality of our cattle, and are my main point of argument as to why we should match each calf to it's mother, and keep this record every year. Then, if we have to cull a percentage of our herd due to something like a drought, we can drop the bottom 20 percent out. I can tell you these two calves' mothers would be the first on the truck if I had that information this year. We don't do this right now because I'm the data-person, and I'm not there to collect this information.
You're always going to have higher and poorer quality animals within a bunch. But, we are constantly striving to narrow the gap, and bring the poorer quality end closer to the top end in type and quality. It's a never-ending challenge that is incredibly enjoyable, until something like one of those two scraggly little baldies wander up to you, then it's more like a dare.