Used to be, if you wanted to make significant genetic improvement in your herd, you needed to focus on identifying and culling the bottom 20% of your cows based on the profitability (read weaning weight) of their calves. “The best way to improve averages is to keep getting rid of the bottom 10, 15, 20%,” opines James Henderson, the newest third of the highly successful Bradley 3 Ranch (B3R) at Memphis, TX.

But, adds Mary Lou Bradley-Henderson, James' wife, ranch partner and one-time employer, as well as daughter of industry icon Minnie Lou Bradley, the industry is on the cusp of changing that.

“With all our new technology, we're seeing more cattle in people's herds that are absolutely outstanding,” she says. “They're so advanced, they have all the meat qualities and they're so efficient I think we're just now beginning to understand how to identify them.”

We all want to identify the bottom end, she says, “but if you're talking about how ranchers are going to survive in the future, it seems like there are a lot of cattle that are very futuristic that we're not identifying.”

For the cow-calf producer willing and able to step into this new world of opportunity, the outlook is bright, they say. And they know of what they speak, for Minnie Lou and Mary Lou, along with then-B3R plant manager James Henderson, pioneered many of the “new” trends currently grabbing headlines in the business.

How it started

Mary Lou describes herself, back in 1986 when the Bradleys established the B3R packing plant in Childress, TX, as “another typical angry rancher.” Prices were low, profitability was scarce and cash flow tough to come by.

But shortly after joining the dark side and becoming a packer, she had a dilemma — she no longer knew who to be angry at.

“When you've walked in those shoes of having a seedstock operation, gone through the management of how to feed them and then you slaughter them, it's an eye-opening experience. Because until then, you can always blame somebody else. Once there's nobody else to blame, it's eye opening.”

B3R hung its hat on natural beef, which back in the late '80s and early '90s was looked upon with more than a little suspicion by most ranchers. B3R bought cattle on a value-based grid instead of the cash market, and sold a branded product with a consumer guarantee of quality. Participating ranchers had to individually ID each calf, and participating feedyards had to modify their practices to accommodate the changes in management. The learning curve was steep and the road had more than a few rough spots.

In 2002, they sold the plant to Coleman Natural Meats, taking their accumulated and hard-won knowledge back to their long-standing purebred Angus ranch. But make no mistake, their perspective is different and they're putting that to work to help the industry produce calves that will hit the mark at every stop along the marketing continuum.

What they learned

“At the end of the day, as a packer, I can turn that animal into protein,” Mary Lou says. “But I can't really change it. I can affect it a little bit, but I can't change it.”

So one of the first changes came early in their tenure as packers, and it happened on their own ranch.

“Our cattle were a certain way until the mid-80s,” Mary Lou says. But then they started processing them and attempting to sell the meat to a highly discerning consumer. “We were the seedstock and those cattle changed. They're (now) real long and thick because that's what we needed. That was ultimately what paid its way.”

A genetic reaction to marketplace realities. But the calves sired by Bradley 3 bulls still had to be fed. So what's more important in moving the needle toward consumer acceptability — genetics or management?

“We went round and round about how one affects the other,” she says. The outcome, after individually analyzing thousands and thousands of cattle and returning that analysis back to the feedyard and the rancher, is they're almost equally important. “You can have the best management and not have the genetic makeup, or you can have great genetics and mess it up by management and never get the benefit. But if you have the two together, you can get there.”