“These half-blood bulls will pull you quicker toward the center of what you're trying to achieve than any other system,” says John Welch, president and CEO of Spade Ranches headquartered at Lubbock, TX.

Welch is referring to an innovative crossbreeding system Spade Ranches began a couple of years ago aimed at stabilizing the genetics in their crossbred cowherd while optimizing heterosis and moderating frame size and milk.

No stranger to using multiple breeds to attain specific goals, Welch explains the ranch — originally purchased in 1889 and still owned by heirs of the same family — began using Hereford and Shorthorn to breed up Longhorn cattle. Over time, it became a straight-bred Hereford program until the late 1960s, when Dub Waldrip, the former long-time Spade Ranches president and CEO, came on board.

Waldrip journeyed to Europe in search of genetics. He brought home Simmental and Brown Swiss to begin systematic, complementary crossbreeding aimed at maximizing heterosis.

Keep in mind, by the time Waldrip entered the picture, the Spades were already a sprawling enterprise. Today, in addition to the original ranch, the organization operates five others. All told, this is an outfit that needs about 1,500 replacements each year.

Powerful simplicity

Eventually, Waldrip employed an aggressive four-breed rotational crossbreeding system using Angus, Hereford, Braunvieh and Simmental. Welch agrees with Waldrip's observation that it was easier to do than explain. Suffice it to say, the end result was a high retention of heterosis — about 93% of an F1 — and a system able to produce its own replacement females.

The downside, according to Welch, was ending up with two distinctly different sets of calves — or four, depending on how you look at it. At any one time, they had two herds 67% English and 33% Continental, and two herds just the opposite.

So, although the herds were stable genetically, the two distinct types of cattle required different management, Welch says.

Aside from having fewer calves of a like phenotype for marketing purposes, there was another hurdle. Waldrip's original intent was to use English breeds to moderate the growth and size of the Continental breeds, and add growth, muscle and yield to the English breeds with the Continental cattle. However, as the English breeds got growthier and heavier-milking, Welch says their moderating influence was lost.

“The net effect was half our cows were too heavy milking and too large framed for our environment,” Welch says. “As a result, we were running into some breed-up problems, particularly with the two-year-olds.”

Waldrip countered this by breeding first-calf heifers to Jersey bulls and weaning the calves at 60 days of age. The heifers returned to estrus like gangbusters, but Welch couldn't make it pencil.

“You had to sell the calves for $150 as roping calves, as opposed to $450 for a weaned calf,” he recalls. “Plus, the frame and milk in them meant there were still breed-back problems in the three-year-olds.”

So Welch wanted to moderate frame and milk and build calves phenotypically similar while maintaining a high level of heterosis. Oh yeah, and if it could be done more simply, that would be fine, too.

That's the basic question he posed to master animal breeders Larry Cundiff and Keith Gregory at the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center, when he approached them for help engineering a crossbreeding system.

Welch had some ideas of his own, too, based on his experience at his own Colorado ranch. About a dozen years ago, he began building Balancer (Gelbvieh X Angus) bulls with registered stock on both sides of the pedigree before this F1 even had a name. Though he knew he was sacrificing some heterosis, the uniformity of the calf crop and balance of English and Continental genetics won out. Today, his herd and its product is a stable blend of the two breeds.

In the case of Spade Ranches, they put Angus X Gelbvieh bulls on half the herd. The replacements maintained from these are mated to Angus X Simmental bulls. Those replacements are mated to Angus X Gelbvieh bulls, and so on.