What Are Your Benchmarks for Success?

Angus Beef Bulletin seeks your input on how you gauge your success in the cattle business.

by Shauna Rose Hermel, editor

How do you gauge your success in the beef cattle industry? Conception rate? Calving rate? Pounds produced per acre? The number of your daughter’s ballgames you can attend? All are legitimate, depending on your aspirations for being in the cattle business. As we approach the January Angus Beef Bulletin, we’d like to get insight into what you consider the most important benchmarks for your herd. With your permission, we may share them with our readers in the January issue.

There’s no doubt, many of us are ready to put 2020 in the rearview mirror, and what better way than to start looking forward to 2021. Before we completely block it out of our minds, what were some of the benchmarks we reached this year? And where do we want to go from there?

Do you have a formal goal, maybe one you’ve set with your lender, your veterinarian or your supply chain partner? Or are your goals more in your head (or in your heart, for that matter)?

Are your goals focused on your herd? Or do you use your herd to reach goals for other enterprises, such as land utilization, forest management or residue utilization?

Yes, these are pretty wide-open questions, but grab ahold of one that piques your interest or passion and tell us what you think.

While the above are certainly open-ended questions I’d love to get your feedback on, here are some specific questions I’d love to get your response to:

• If you are a cow-calf producer, what was your calving rate (number of calves born ÷ number of cows exposed to a bull, bred by artificial insemination or implanted with an embryo) this year? What window did you allow cows to get bred (45-day, 90-day)? How do you want that to change this year?
• Many producers used 2020 cull cow prices as incentive to cull cows. What were the weights on the cows you marketed? How does that fit with your environmental resources, and where do you want to be with your mature cow weights in five years?
• If you feed out cattle, what was your cost of gain? What factors influenced that the most? How would you like to change that in 2021?
• What was your death loss? How does that compare to the last four years? Of course, we’d love to be 0%, but what is a realistic goal for next year? What problems do you need to address to get there?
• If you are a stocker operator, what was your cost of gain, morbidity rate, and average treatment cost? What was your return on investment (ROI) and what do you want it to be?

You get the idea. Visit our Facebook page and share your comments on our post there, or email me at shermel@angus.org with Benchmarks in the subject line.