Practically Ranching
Join Matt Perrier as he visits weekly with interesting, thoughtful, entertaining individuals within the beef community. Conversations will inspire curiosity and creativity while maintaining the independent spirit and practical nature for which ranchers are known.
Practically Ranching
#71 - Bill Rishel, From New Trend to New Products
Bill Rishel and his wife, Barb, live near North Platte, Nebraska. Born and raised in Pennsylvania, he has always had a passion for Angus cattle and beef cattle improvement.
Bill will be honored in November with induction into the Saddle & Sirloin Portrait Gallery, and an in-depth synopsis of Bill's industry accomplishments may be found in this article:
Bill Rishel To Be Honored with 2025 Saddle & Sirloin Portrai
Thanks for joining us for episode 71 of Practically Ranching. I'm Matt Perrier, and we are here. Thanks to Dalebanks Angus, your home for practical profitable genetics since 1904. We're opening our spring private treaty bull offering this week, so stick around at the end of the show to hear details about the bulls. You know, some of these podcasts take just a bit of planning and preparation to get the guests scheduled or talked into even sitting down and recording with me. Some others require me to do a little bit of research and preparation to figure out what topics we wanna talk about. This week's podcast took neither. It was definitely a spur of the moment conversation that took place in the trade show at the Cattle Industry Convention last month. And honestly, those are sometimes the best kind of conversations that I have. I've known Bill Rishel and his wife, Barb, since I was a teenager. Bill served on the American Angus Association Board of Directors with my dad, and we visited their ranch near North Platte, Nebraska on our summer vacation in the early nineties, and I've always had a soft spot for smart, passionate storytellers in the beef business. So I've always enjoyed my conversations with Bill. This episode is probably really gonna play to some of you Angus history buffs and cattle breeders. As we talk about a couple bulls and a couple breeders at some of you may recognize. And since we were at the Cattle Industry Convention, we also had a really good discussion about Bill's lifelong focus on the consumer and his work with the Beef Checkoff Program and, and even some of today's challenges and opportunities for cattlemen. At 80 years. Young Bill is still as sharp as ever. I edited these spots out, but at least twice during our podcast conversation, folks came up and. Just started talking to Bill. We had headphones on and a microphone in front of us, but it didn't stop him. They wanted to catch up with their old buddy, Mr. Rishel, and after carrying on a conversation for a minute or two with these people, he turned back to the microphone and pick up exactly where he was in conversation 90 seconds before. I don't know very many folks who are half Bill's age and can still do that. After we finished up talking, Bill shared with me that he will be honored as the 2025 inductee into the Saddle and Sirloin Portrait Gallery at Louisville this fall, which is for most of you listening, know that it's one of the highest honors in the livestock industry. Bill's passion for and service to the beef industry is impressive, but honestly, it's his love of the people with whom he has worked. That's likely his most endearing quality. This coupled with his quest for knowledge Make Bill one of those guys from whom I can always learn something. So let's do just that as we visit with Bill Rishel.
Matt:If we get any place that you don't want to talk about, you just say, that's classified, and we'll, cause I know how proprietary, I've got so much classified information, I wouldn't know where to start, the only difference with your classified information and that of the rest of the world is, you've shared it for decades, begging people to actually use it, right?
Bill:How
Matt:well you know, I think that's been the cool thing is, and I need to introduce this is a little bit different than I've done before, but I'm recording with Bill Rishel in the middle of the U. S. Premium beef booth at the N. C. B. A. Trade show in 2025. And I just ran past here. And as we were shooting the breeze and catching up on old times between Angus stuff and family stuff. Somebody came by and said, you know, this would make a great podcast. And so guess what? We pulled out the recorder and here we are. So as I was growing up, you were on the American Angus board with my dad. That was the first place I met you and Barb. And actually I take that back. I think we visited your place in North Platts a year or two before, but somewhere in that mid eighties time period. Now, what I always appreciated about you was. As hard as you worked at learning new information, it wasn't ever classified. You wanted people to learn what you had learned, and then, in reciprocal form, learn from them again later on down the road, which is something that I don't know that we see all the time in industries. Why did you do that? BIF, American Angus Association, Nebraska Cattlemen, NCBA, NCA, all the different things that you did. Why?
Bill (2):Matt, that's a great question, and I appreciate the opportunity to visit with you and your effort here. And I think I can answer that very honestly by saying that there were so many people that helped me as a young person growing up in this business, whether it was 4 H, judging teams, or whatever the case may have been, that helped me in many great ways. Often not appreciating it until much later in life and realized that whatever I was able to accomplish and do and amount to anything, really, I owed a lot to those people and I felt compelled to be able to share with other young people coming along. And I got a lot of those experiences working with, uh, judging teams from other universities and colleges that would come through Rishel Angus over the many, many years stop in and want to know if we could put some classes of livestock together to help them with their judging team efforts. And we did that and we did it with an open mind and very willing to kind of help these kids try to become more proficient at judging beef cattle in particular. But I, I had a great appreciation for that and what it meant to me in my life. And as a result. Uh, I think that carried over and allowed me to do a lot of that for other young people, especially college students, 4 H people. It, it didn't matter. It's just the idea that these people could go on and possibly become a very, very important part of our industry. And at the end of the day, I've maintained that thought process all through my involvement with NCBA and other organizations. that are very responsible for helping to keep our industry viable. So that's about the best way I could answer that for you, Matt.
Matt:What was the, what was the hardest lesson that you learned? Whether it be as a kid, as a young person in the beef business, later in life, what was the hardest lesson you learned, and maybe the best one?
Bill (2):I think, and my wife's sitting here with me right now, and she may, she may kind of get a funny look when I say, I think in many ways, the hardest lesson I've learned was to be a little more patient than what I was at a, at a young age. I, I don't know if I've accomplished that yet, but I think
Matt (2):it is. I was just about to ask you, how old were you? Because I haven't learned it yet. And Amy could attest, just like Barb.
Bill (2):Well, I have, I just, I just have to tell you that I think anyone who really has a passion for this industry, I think it's difficult to have patience because you want it to happen right now. I don't want to wait 283 days to get this calf. No, no, no, I don't. I, yeah, I, waiting for a new calf crop, waiting for the calves to buy a new herd bull. It doesn't matter. It's, it's, it's a difficult industry. It takes time. And I think I have finally realized that, uh, that time invested has been extremely worthwhile. So I believe that was difficult. And I think I'm getting to a point more. While I can tell you one place where it really shows up is I've never been opposed to using a herd sire before he was proven, but I had some prerequisites and that was, I had to know a lot about his mother. I had to know a lot about. relatives and other cattle in his pedigree and have some way to determine what I thought the breeding potential of that bull was. And, and I, so I have become more patient and maybe wait until a bull's more proven. One of my great mentors over the years was a guy by the name of Clarence Van Dyke, Van Dyke Angus Ranch at Manhattan, Montana. And I tried to get Clarence to partner with me on a bull one time a number of years ago, 1981. And he said, Oh, Bill, he said, you know, our program, he said, we only use proven sires. And I kind of chuckled. I said, I know Clarence. And I said, I'm not going to push you anymore to do this. But I said, I know how much you love great females. And I'm pretty convinced that this bull will be a great female sire. And just to share with your audience that may know this name, the bull happened to be AAR New Trend..
Matt (2):So you would if you would be old enough and have enough
Matt:hairs like I have to know.
Bill (2):So that's that's one of my my very, very good memories because I loved Clarence Van Dyke and his ability as a cow man. He had a he was in the Holstein cow business before he got in the registered Angus business. And he knew a lot about maternal value and milk and all of that. I don't think that a lot of us, including me, until we got more involved in this carcass effort and marbling, I don't, I don't think a lot of people realized, like, I believe, this is my belief, I can't back it up all that much, but I think the marbling trait in our Angus cattle today is very, very much a maternal trait. And I think that muscle in these cattle is a masculine trait. And actually, ribeye and marbling have been extremely antagonistic over the years when you're trying to improve these cattle and, and what's in them when it comes to carcass merit. So, that's just a sidebar after you live long enough and do enough things in this industry, you eventually just start to make certain comparisons in relative Get relative ideas about how these traits operate, what they do, and how they work.
Matt:We, uh, we love as cattle breeders and geneticists to turn causation into correlation and figure out is this real or just perceived? And quite often we're guilty of maybe making something a correlation that geneticists would argue. But, uh, yeah, I think we've seen the same thing.
Bill (2):I know, Matt, that I just feel certain. That you and I both believe that what we have to do first and foremost is continue to breed and produce cattle with very, very strong maternal value to them. Because a cow herd doesn't have maternal value, and by that I'm talking about fertility, reproduction. And I'm talking about that calving interval that most people don't talk much about at all. But that calving interval is all about economics and value and money, whether you're purebred or commercial. I've always really believed in the fact that if I can breed a set of cows that have this tremendous value of reproduction and production and fertility and those things that really matter in calf crop percentage. Live calves, that I could tear up the papers on my registered cows if I had to if times got really, really tough and run them as a commercial cow herd and still make money and compete in the cattle business.
Matt:I have argued with dad as we have looked at end of year financials and assets and how we value things and he values our cows at their commercial value. Yeah. And I argue with him that when the bank comes to look at that, those cows are worth more than that.
Bill (2):No question.
Matt:Yet, I think that that stands the test of time. If you look at them, not just from the banker's standpoint, but if you look at them with that conservative approach as nothing but a commercial cow, when it comes right down to their market value, the rest is blue sky and BS. Yeah. If you look at it that way, I think you treat them. Just like you said, you make sure that they pay their way, that they are Yeah, I think cow first There's no question and bull generator second
Bill (2):I think it impacts, it impacts the, uh, the way that you breed and, and produce a set of cows that will keep you in the cow business and and keep the operation productive not only productive but profitable at the same time. So I, I'm proud to be a part of an old school with your dad, Tom, in that respect. And, uh, I, I believe that with all my heart, uh, that it's real easy to get derailed, if you will, in a breeding program. And the other thing while we're on it is, you know, if you have a really productive, I'm going to say great set of cows. You can buy the wrong bull and you can breed some of the wrong cattle, but your cow herd will carry that and make them look valuable for a while until that depth in that pedigree runs out of power. And then you say, how am I going to fix this problem? And so that's what we want to stay away from.
Matt:And that's, I think, why, as you've alluded to, why you can reach out there and maybe roll the dice and use an unproven, slightly unproven bull, as long as you don't do it year after year, generation after generation, until you find yourself in a hole that you've got to breed yourself back out of.
Bill (2):And Matt, quite honestly, as a registered breeder, It's easier for me to use a bull that I raised in that respect than to go out and buy one and spend a lot of money on it. You
Matt:know something about the
Bill (2):cow. Because you know something about the mother and the grandmother. And believe me, it is very, very valuable in that grandmother just as much as the mother.
Matt:So I want to go back. You said something that I think is really interesting and may fly in the face of some of today's discussions. And that is that marbling is It's a maternal trait or has not a genetic correlation necessary, but at least a perceived correlation. Because I think a lot of the discussions today would say you're either one or the other. You're either breeding for high marbling or you're breeding for maternal genetics and you're saying they go hand in hand. How do you see that and how have you seen that as you've read cow?
Bill (2):Quite frankly, I don't have scientific proof of that at all. I want to make that clear to your listeners. But I will tell you that history and records and looking at records and studying them and in the cow herd that we put together, Uh, I can see that marbling trait appear to exhibit more strength and more passing from generation to generation through the female than I've sires that will go ahead and pass that trait fairly. Fairly, uh, strongly, but, uh, I, uh, I just really feel like it's a little stronger in those maternal lines and cows carry it and pass it on easier. I, I'm not sure why that would be, uh, and it's, it is speculation on my part and I understand that, so I don't want to mislead anybody. But that's what I think I've seen in the records that I've lived with and worked with.
Matt:So I want you to do something for me. I want you to define maternal. In your, from your experience, your opinion, because I think that has a fairly gray area amongst some discussions. What's maternal to Bill Rischel?
Bill (2):Maternal to me is, I mentioned it briefly here just a little bit ago, and that is calving interval. Um, It's one of the most important traits to a commercial producer because of the tightness of a calf crop, the uniformity of a calf crop when it comes marketing time to market your, your calf crop. That, that calving interval is what creates a uniform calf crop in a good cow herd. So when we talk
Matt:about that, that trait, maternal calving interval, fertility, reproduction, We've all been told in every study, every genetics class, that fertility and those maternal traits are a fairly lowly heritable set of traits. which means they're affected greatly by how we manage the environment.
Bill (2):Yeah, no question.
Matt:So how, as producers, let's say seed stock producers. As a commercial cow calf producer, I think you just make sure and you give them everything that they need to make sure they get bred. But as seed stock producers who are trying to let Mother Nature help us make those selection decisions. And find out which ones can get the job done on grass and on a little bit of supplement or whatever the case may be. When is enough management enough? And we don't overshoot the runway and hide some cattle that won't breed under the normal environment. Or is there? Do we just make sure on a 2 fat market? I think you
Bill (2):just, you just opened up a whole new subject. We have plenty of time. The point that I think needs to be clarified and made clear, particularly to a lot of commercial operators, and sometimes I think there's commercial operators that understand this better than a lot of purebred operators, but that has to do with your contemporary grouping of this calf crop and what you're working with, and to make sure that you keep everything as even steven as you can in your contemporary groups, And the Angus Association will recommend that you contemporary group the calves out of your first calf heifers separate from your main cow herd, right? And that is because the adjustment factors in there to get those calves off your first calf heifers to the same supposedly equal librium or equal place of, of the rest of the, the calf crop out of your cows. Uh, if you don't keep those contemporary groups in the right sort, they can mess up all the data, which means none of your data is really worthwhile anymore. And we, we can't forget that issue. That, uh, contemporary groups properly done are the reason why the BIF and, and the breed associations are successful. With. Their databases.
Matt:And for those who may not be in the seed stock business, a contemporary group, I guess you're the guest, I'll let you define it.
Bill (2):Contemporary group has to do, number one, I would say sex of calf. And number two, is birth date. Yep. And the age grouping.
Matt:And all handled and treated the same way. All handled and treated the
Bill (2):same way. And that takes you all the way through ultrasounding data. It takes you through any data on to, uh, performance testing, uh, for bulls, gain testing. And takes you beyond that to the point to where you're talking about, uh, these cattle that are just You know, being measured on a level playing field is the best way I can say it.
Matt:Basically, we're attempting to take every environmental advantage or disadvantage that, that that calf may have had and strip it down so we know just what the genetics were doing in that calf. Matt,
Bill (2):I want to go back to one other thing here when I talked about calving interval. A number of years ago, I sat down and started going through our records on this, on our cow herd. And I found it extremely fascinating that how many cows that were now 3, 4, 5 years old that had calving intervals at 358 to 365 days of a calving interval. And for anybody that's interested in that, all of these, all of these cows that I'm talking about were being managed the same way and all of these cows were doing this when the vast majority of our breeding was by artificial insemination. Right. And as a commercial herd, if you can do it AI ing on these programs in a commercial herd, you can get into a situation where, uh, They don't do any AI. They turn out bulls because bulls work 24 hours a day and they get the job done And if if you can do this AI'ing like we did we're pretty confident that our commercial bull Customers could do this turning bulls out. Mm hmm, and that's the real real Difference that makes a difference on why that's an important trait You you run into a bad batch of semen you run into some bad management you run into a Drought conditions run into just a fertility problem that never got corrected or built right. And all of a sudden, you know, the calving interval is going to suffer greatly. And commercial man just can't make a really good living selling cattle and uniformity groups with those kind of issues going wrong.
Matt:I just had this conversation at breakfast this morning with a couple of folks and Troy Marshall was mentioning one of the One of the drivers of value to a feed yard is, since we have provided so much growth potential and so much, uh, marbling and quality and everything else in that carcass, now what they're asking for is consistency. Consistency of outcome groups, and, and those are the things that you're, I think, talking about. And a lot of that is solved by age of that calf.
Bill (2):Yep.
Matt:But also the genetics that are behind him or her and how they perform at all steps along the way, whether it be calves, yearlings, heifers, cows, whatever the case may be. Yeah. So, we talked about New Trend. Yep. He spurred on a, a new, a new design of cattle. Tell me about what that bull did and maybe the selection and the, the, the. Many A. I. Sires that he either sired or was grand sire of or cows that he left and where your path went after you bought that New Trend bull in the eighties.
Bill (2):Well, the background before that might be really interesting to some of your listeners. I managed and helped to manage... You know, we were scratching for a living and doing other things besides building a cow herd at one time. Managed a few Angus sales around the country and one of those was the Montana Angus Association every year in the fall had a Had a sale at Billings called the Northern International Livestock Exposition sale and I got hired by the Montana Angus Association to go select those cattle and For years they had this sale and I don't think anybody was selecting them all that much But, uh, I decided I was going to try and do it upright. It had been averaging, these open heifers and bread heifers, were averaging about$400, 450 when I took that thing over. And so, my goal was to go out and get on 30 ranches, at least, minimum, and, and, uh, with that, capture, a total of 50 to 60 heifer calves and bred heifers for that sale. And over quite a few years in the late seventies and early eighties, uh, we built that thing up to where we actually were averaging somewhere between three and 4, 000 on those females. And I decided that it was about time. Maybe we find a good bull calf out of Montana. Montana cattle were very popular and find a real good bull calf. And I spotted one at Arntzen Angus Ranch at Christina, Montana. And when I went in, you know, in those days, we didn't have all these EPDs and all this data and everything. Not coming from Angus. But most everybody, Montana was one of the first states in the nation after Virginia and Nebraska and some other ones. I don't know when Kansas started there. It was later. Yeah. Yeah. But these states
Matt:Beef Cattle Improvement.
Bill (2):Beef Cattle Improvement Associations was the source and the record keeping entity of their herds. But when I would walk into a person's home after I wrote these numbers down on these cattle that I eyeballed, you know, heifers or bred heifers, The amount of data I had was on a three by five card. It looked like a housewife would keep her recipes in a box, you know? And and so,, that's what we were dealing with. And when I talked to the Arntzen boys and told him I found a bull calf out there that That I'd like to put in the Nile and see if we could sell a good bull calf down there. And he was different. And I realized when I was doing this that there might be some blowback, because this was 1981. And we were on that shift toward bigger, much bigger, very large cattle. But these were the early days of it. And this bull was anything but a giant. But he had, he had a lot of volume. He was very sound, he was a great footed beast, and there were things in his pedigree, and had they gone wrong, and not to my liking, Um, he probably wouldn't have amounted to much. But if they went right, as they did, then the rest of it was going to be history. And I was convinced, because of my knowledge of the sire of New Trend, who was a Van Dyke bred bull, VDAR Shoshone 548. The sire of his dam was a bull called Candler Forever 376, who by the way was a sire daughter mating.
Bill:Oh, that's right. Which some
Bill (2):people will tell you not to do. If it works, it's line breeding. If it works, it's line breeding. If it doesn't work, it's inbreeding. Exactly. So, we had a lot of fun with that over the years. But, I also told him that day, I said, uh, You know, if we're going to do this, you guys need to come up with a new name for this bull. And, and they said, we don't know anything about that, you name him. I said, I've been thinking about this guys. I said, I didn't have a lot of time since we were out there in the pasture coming into the kitchen table. But I said, I would name him because of this background. Very, very maternal. The 376th is some of the sweetest great udder females in the breed at that time. The Shoshone side, on the other hand, was really high milk level. And sometimes a little too much white. And the other issue would be that, uh, Sometimes you get too much milk and you haven't paid enough attention to udders. You can really get into udder problems. And that's a labor problem that nobody in this business should want. Or, or, or. Create. Right,
Bill:right.
Bill (2):So those were all no-nos for me. And the positive side was that when he was a calf nursing his mother, when I first saw him out there in their pasture, the pasture that he was running in and his mother were nearly all VDAR Shoshone 548 daughters. Oh, okay. There wasn't a bad uttered cow in that whole pasture. They were beautiful uttered. They were full of milk and every time those big bull calves that were in that group of cows out there come out from under the cow, they were white from about midway between their eyeballs, clear down around their mouth, you know, their nose, the whole deal. They were just covered with milk. And, and I, I told him, I said, you know, I think this bull can be a, a really valuable bull to build cow herds and to keep maternal values straight in these cattle, meaning looking at it primarily from fertility. Utters, soundness, longevity. Longevity is a really big thing we haven't talked about yet here today, Matt. But it's all part of this. And longevity leads to the kind of females that can get you past the time when they're amortized in your breeding program and start to really be profitable cows. Make some money. Comes time to make money. So I said, why don't you just I said, well, use your Initials A. A. R. Arntzen Angus Ranch and why don't we just call him A. A. R. New Trend and they looked at me like I'd lost my mind. I think
Matt:that's the only people that's ever looked at you that way, right?
Bill (2):I think there's been other cases for sure. But the whole point being is that in the long run, the other thing they asked me And this, this is really, I think this is a special part of the whole deal. They finally looked at me and they said, what do you think he can bring there in that sale at the Nile? And I never tried to mislead anybody on anything or blow smoke anywhere. But I said, guys, I said, I, I'm not going to go there because I said, I can't promise anything. I said, what would make you guys happy? And they said, well, it's 1981. Let's keep all this in perspective. And then
Matt:goals. For that perspective, what do you, what would Bulls and Angus Breed have been averaging nationwide in 81?
Bill (2):Probably nationwide across Oh Maybe more
Matt:2, 000. Boy, you may be right. We've got the data. I'll look it up. Oh, yeah. Okay, go ahead. That would be
Bill (2):interesting. Yeah, but The most fascinating part of the deal was they said well in our sale He's probably wouldn't do more than about twenty five hundred dollars And I said, guys, I'm very, very interested in this bull. I said, I really believe in what I just told you, and I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. And I said, I would give you, I'd write you a check today for 2, 500 and put him on a truck for North Platte, Nebraska. But I said, I'm not here to do that. I am here to sell these cattle for Montana breeders. to their highest value possible, and I said, if I didn't follow that belief in any way, I said, then I'm the wrong guy to be sitting here with you. And so the rest, he goes to the Nile. There was three guys bid on him that day. I was managing the sale and I was bidding on him. Pat Goggins was the auctioneer and he was bidding on him. And then Bob Sitz goes to bidding on him, and he took him up to about somewhere around 7, 500 8, 000. He wasn't really, you know, he wasn't willing to gamble on him too high, because I watched him buy bulls for 20, 000 in a day. Even then. And, uh, finally the bull got to buy 9, 500. And Pat slammed the gavel down and says, sold Vermillion Ranch.
Matt:Oh,
Bill (2):and I, I looked at Pat and I said, no, no, Pat. I said, that's my bid. And he looked at me like, what in the world is wrong with you, young man? And so this is such a great story. And, uh, so he said, okay. He fired her back up and he says, 10, 000. I went, yes. He goes, bam, sold. That's a true story. And, and of course, all things, I mean, I heard all kinds of stories about how Bill Ruschel got stuck with that bull. Oh, that's great. And, and of course, you know, had, had to buy him, but I couldn't, it couldn't have been more untruth to that ever. I wanted the bull and I thought I knew what was there. And history's proved that to be absolutely correct. There's a lot of people who wish they would have gone 10 5. And should have gone 10 5. Really, quite honestly, it would have improved 90 some percent of the cow herds in the country at that point in time.
Matt:Yeah, he did a lot. And he did so many things so well. And things that, you know, you're talking about foot soundness and athleticism and longevity. Things that I'm not sure at least at Dale Banks Angus in 1981 or two that we were even considering because we didn't feel like we had an issue with it, but he added growth and added marbling and things that we weren't even marbling. We weren't even measuring it and milk and milk. And you'd be surprised how many his
Bill (2):daughters were those average to short generation interval. Yep. Calving intervals and stayed forever. Stayed stability, longevity. He was truly one of the great sires of the era and in fact Van Dyke's went back and finally used him even though he didn't partner on him to start with and they produced guess who? Nutrient 315. Yep, who sold for? 73, 000 in their bull sale that spring and I'd say he went to Sydenstrickers, by the way in Mexico, Missouri So, it was, there's a lot of great memories from all of that. Uh, special things that you store away and, and it's such a treat to even bring them up and visit with somebody about it, you know, because it's pretty special.
Matt:Well, and again, the traits that you were looking at then, I don't know if there's still AAR New Trend Semen around, but I guarantee there'd be some folks saying, that's exactly what we need right here today. And I mean, he was doing it, what now, 40 some years ago. Yeah. And, uh, yeah.
Bill (2):So, uh, oh, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, you know, you said the traits we're after today, and quite honestly, to be, to develop and produce a great herd of cows. They're the traits that are fundamental to anybody's building a cow herd. They're timeless. Timeless. That's a great
Matt:word. Profitability, regardless of what it is that we're selling on the, on the revenue side of things. Yeah. Yeah. So we, we walked a little down memory lane. Um, what do the letters C, A, and B bring up in your memory? And what can you tell us about the early days of the Certified Angus Beef Program that you were so ingrained in and helped drive and keep going forth?
Bill (2):I, being fairly active, and this wasn't the early days, CAB was actually started in 1978. for some reason, I've been a believer in that most of my life, and that is, I grew up, Matt, and you'll remember some of this, but most of our knowledge or drivers or people who influenced our industry we're professors at major land grant institutions, and really, many of them extremely valuable and good people. But As the industry would look to them for the pecking order or the pyramid of quality from the top of that pyramid to the base, and it started at the top with a purebred Angus breeder. And I came to a point in time in my life where I thought, this isn't right. Yeah, I believe in the purebred industry and what have you, but I don't care what the breed is. Nobody was talking about a consumer anywhere, and I couldn't make sense out of that. I just really struggled with that, and when people made fun of New Trend as a bull in our place and on, some of the folks, you know, because he wasn't the biggest bull in the breed, started calling him new toad instead of And for those who don't know, that's a definition. Of an animal's not real big. Yeah. Yeah. But he'd weigh 22 or 23 hundred coming out of a set of cows when he was two and a three year old. Yep. Long, long, long. I mean long hip, long bodied. Um, he had a little old bent down ear because he got in a fight with a Horned Hereford Bull one day that jumped in from across the fence. And it gave him a cauliflower ear but he whipped the bull hard enough he went back home. And then people. Well, and a few years later we had some five year old daughters of him in production and the state tour was coming to Nebraska and we were on it. And I put all new trend daughters in the lot right out in front of the auction barn there on the place. And they all had these big bull calves on them, you know, that were just massive. I mean, the kind that make your mouth water. And about two or three producers on that trip came up to me personally and said, Aren't you afraid you're going to get your cows too big? Ha ha ha! You mean the ones out of toad? Yeah, out of the old toad bull, you know. So, had a lot of fun with that over the years. It, it was, uh It didn't define him at all correctly, you know, I mean Really economic traits that were really valuable and still are and always will be We're still there and it didn't have a whole lot to do with how big a frame bully was He caused he cast a big shadow. I can tell you that you know for
Matt:sure Literally and figures. Yes. Yes So one other thing you mentioned was the fact that Clarence Van Dyke moved from the dairy business to the registered Angus business. and there were a lot of folks who did that in those days. No question. What would those guys if they fast forwarded and we're still with us today and in 2025 saw the whole beef on dairy phenomenon? How ironic to them. But How do you look at that and going forth? Do we see that grow? Is it going to stay just as stagnant as it, because we've got an X number of dairy cows? Or where do you see that going in the future?
Bill (2):You're talking about beef dairy cross? Correct. Yes. I, I've got some perspective and some ideas on it. Um, you know my activity and involvement with NCBA over the years. At one time, we had that group at NCBA called Research and Knowledge Group, and under that, there was one committee called Product Enhancement. And that's where we did all the muscle profiling work for the industry, as well as looking at, uh, these values of dressed cattle and, and what have you. It was, uh, it's been fascinating because, and, and I think, 2001 or 2004, maybe it was, we had one of the beef quality audits that I happened to be on. And, uh, when the data came in on that, it was, they gathered more information than any other time of a beef quality audit. And by more information, I mean, you know, all the way from through the feedlot performance, onto the, the packing industry, the packing house. And with that, they gathered information on heifer harvests, steer harvests. They gathered information on the Holstein steer population in the industry, which had never been done before, but it ended up being one of the most in depth studies of our cattle in the industry and where we were with what's going on. And so I got invited to go to dinner with, uh, Bo Reagan and Dr. Gary Smith, who was at Colorado State. And I really all meet scientist guys that were fabulous, very, very helpful to the industry. And they sat there worried that night about presenting this information because when they got the data back, the Holstein population in that harvest data proved to be Uh, let me get this right. I want to say it exactly right. The whole steam population in that entire database that they gathered from large numbers of them graded about 8. 5 percent prime, if I'm remembering the numbers correctly, when the huge population with them included on a national basis of our, our general beef harvest, steer harvest, and heifer harvest, the average for prime was two to two and a half percent. So with that background, I've always known that these Holstein cattle are another reason why I might be thinking about maternal and in relation to marbling because this influenced my thinking and back me up that they were, they were produced for milk. Milk is a maternal trait and they were selected for that almost totally. So why wouldn't there be a relationship with maybe this marbling thing, when you see that kind of data, you know, coming back and representing it. Now, we've talked about some of the good things in it. Uh, the good news for the dairy industry is, they're not getting these big, big, overgrown, rough framed, mixed amount of muscle in them. That's the reason they've crossed, uh, A lot of them with other breeds of beef bulls, heavier muscled cattle, trying to get more muscle on them. The thing they haven't fixed yet. And the thing that I think will be a real problem for the retail sector of our industry is the uniformity of the ribeye. These ribeyes in these dairy steers, if you take straight Holsteins, they're not big round, big ribeyes that smile at you. They're, they're pretty narrow. They, they look a little bit more like cattle that just. They'll slab sided. Don't have a lot of muscle in them per say. And so, until they get that fixed, and get more uniformity for that retail case, I think that's their biggest issue to overcome.
Matt:And of course, as they select those sires, those beef sires to use on those dairy cows, I know that marbling is one thing, and, and You know, rib eye area or red meat yield or muscle is another and, and, and they're figuring out some lines that help them get closer to a beef. No question. And the consistency of marbling is there because they're so closely related. Those, that cow herd has been selected for years and years and years. They've used AI. There's, you know, maybe almost inbred is to go back to our earlier discussion. And so there is a ton of consistency there and they're all raised. I mean, you talk about contemporary groups, dairy to dairy to dairy, they may have a little different feedstuffs, but their management is very, very similar compared to us cowboys that all are going to do it differently. So I think that's my, I shouldn't say fear, but that's a, that's something that I guess I'm concerned about the consistency of our beef cattle as they have to quote unquote compete against. It's a more consistent beef on dairy. And I never thought that I would even say that that was competition because it's all beef. It's all beef. But, uh, there, there are some reasons there that we have to make sure that we produce a level of consistency that, that rivals that.
Bill (2):You know, uh, we're, we're talking about this and I started earlier talking about that pyramid with the purebred breeder at the top, right? And it came to me in the late 80s after my struggles with New Trend and how a lot of that played out. It just came to my mind when I told her what happened on that tour that day about those guys worried about us getting our cows too big. I said, there's so much about this industry that just when I think about it, I said, it's just not common sense and it's kind of borderline, you know, just. Not a smart way to look at things. Insanity? Yeah, borderline, borderline. And so, uh, I said, we've got to figure out something different here, and a different way to go about this business, or I need to find something else to do. And she said, well, what would you do? And I said, I don't know anything else. I said, I guess we just have to, and then we had a guy working for us, and I said, if we get out of this business at this point, She said, what are we going to do for Kenny? And I said, well, I don't know, but he's not going to go anywhere and make what we're paying him. Yeah. I just wasn't going to happen. And so, um, I, I said, we've got to get a better handle on identifying those economic values and merits that have to do with consumer acceptance and beef demand. And of course to say that in the 1980s was still about 10 years ahead when beef demand finally turned and went up. Right. That was about 98, 99. That's correct. Yeah. The
Matt:bottom was 96. Yep, that's right. I like to say that's when I graduated from Kansas State University and entered the beef industry. You're responsible for Ever since then, Bill, if you look at that chart, I mean, we've been on a race to the top.
Matt (2):Because it couldn't have gone much worse
Matt:than we were in the beef industry selling 50 to 60 cent cattle. That's so true. Yeah.
Matt (2):That's
Matt:so true.
Matt (2):But
Matt:I think that as as As visionary as we see that today, you were, you were certifiably nuts back then, right? Talking about marbling. Why in the world would we focus on a trait that nobody pays us for? How many times did you hear that? A lot. Yeah. A lot. All by the pound. Every feed yard you went to until 1996, 7, 8. Well, I was all going to, was all going to be sold for the same price, Matt. I remember
Bill (2):going to San Diego, California for an NCBA convention. When one of your fellow breeders, Jan Lyons in Kansas was president of NCBA.
Matt:And Mick
Bill (2):Colvin was certified Angus beef and a very good friend of mine and ran the program when I chaired CAB one year at American Angus association. And he was there and I was there and we all got up and took turns. Trying to stop a move by a producer from the West Coast that said, we just got a lower these grades one more time and just worry about raising red meat.
Matt:Yep.
Bill (2):And we fought that tooth and nail the whole way and managed to get that thing stopped because it didn't make any sense for what we believe to be the future of the industry. So I think we earned our stars that day.
Matt:You did. And I was not there. Of course, I was probably, I think, maybe working for the Angus Association at the time, or maybe even still in college, but I remember, if it wasn't that one, it was in that same era, that Tom Perrier was a member of the Kansas Livestock Association delegation, and voted with you, and broke ranks with KLA, which Was not supposed to be done at the time, but Tom Perrier was a little bit independent minded as, as were you and felt like that was not the right thing to do for the consumer focus that we needed to be. And, um, you all weren't alone, but you were barely in the majority, right?
Bill (2):Yeah, I think that
Matt:would be an accurate statement for sure. Because we were still in the mindset of pounds pay and Uh, let's get the most out of the pounds that we can, and if we lower the grades and can make more choice that way, instead of focusing on improving the marbling and improving the feeding and management and programming and everything that we've learned since then, but it was a short term fix. It was a band aid that didn't actually address, it was a symptom, not the actual problem that we had.
Bill (2):Well, at the end of the day, no matter what business you're in, And it's not just egg and it's not just beef. But consumer demand for your product that you're producing is ultimately your hope for survival. Ultimately. And Ed, you can just kind of end the discussion on that as far as I'm concerned. It's really about consumer demand. It was then, it is now, and it will be 20 years into the future.
Matt:And that's the cool thing about being at a meeting like this. this because it's the one time that we as cattlemen get to have all of the different components together in the same room, arguing about how we meet that consumer demand. And we all have a different perspective, and we all want to protect our turf, etcetera, etcetera. But I think there is extreme value. Even though we have to give up a little of our independent nature as cowboys and everything else, but I think there's huge value in sitting in that room with the director of beef procurement for a big retailer, or a food service, or a packing plant that's buying fed cattle and saying, Hey. These are the challenges that we have with what we're bringing in our doors and getting out our back doors. You know, you stick everybody in that room to duke it out. And yet, the narrative after NCBA, we'll make some decision this week that won't make my neighbors happy because it looks like it favored this segment over that segment. But, if all of us are focused on that consumer, We bring more money in, and that's more money that we get to share amongst the different segments. And so I think that's something that, that I was reminded. I haven't been to NCBA in seven or eight years. And so I had almost forgotten just how cool it is to see as many minds sitting around tables, talking at the bar, talking in the halls, hammering out the, the resolutions in the committee meetings, but trying to do that
Bill (2):exact thing. You know, Matt, you can, you can even transfer. Over into the beef checkoff. Yeah, yeah. And there is no doubt, there's too much science and too much proof on when the checkoff took hold and when we started to see this turnaround from decline in beef consumption and in the market and the consumption to where it finally turned around and went the other way. And I mean, it's lockstep with checkoff work, with promotion of the product. With working with MEF, the Meat Export Federation, on exporting meat, beef, and all meats to these foreign countries economies that love our beef, we are the number one producer of high quality beef in the world, and there's nobody close. And so, everybody who's in the cattle business, needs to hear that, and needs to understand that. And the fact is that, That has worked to all of our benefit.
Matt:Well, I jokingly said that it was me graduating from K State in 96 that turned the tide, but there was something else that happened. And you, I'm sure, were sitting in the room. but in 1996, right here in San Antonio, this group voted to merge the National Cattlemen's Association, the policy arm. And the Beef Industry Council, the National Livestock and Meat Board, or the Check Were you here? Because I wasn't. I was there. That was a contentious discussion. No question. And there are still some folks that believe that that was not the right move. Some may say that it was the right move, but it wasn't handled from then forth correctly. And we can all argue that back and forth. I think it got at exactly what you said you were trying to do in the 1980s. And that is figure out how we focus on the consumer and pass those dollars through the chain to reward us for making the right decisions.
Bill (2):I agree with you on both points. That wasn't handled the way it needed to be handled at the time. Uh, and it created some ill feelings that festered for quite a while in our industry. I agree. And, uh Really, quite honestly, that checkoff to do the job that we ought to be doing should probably be increased today, but there's a lot of people for fear of losing it completely, don't want to open that up and try to do it all over again. And I'm probably part of that group. I'm more interested in maintaining and hanging on to the things that have proved to work for us and for prices. And for consumer buying of beef and just do the best we can with what we got. Uh, let's not forget the money from the checkoff that went into the muscle profiling work that added how much money to the chuck, which was a low price cut of meat. And most of those muscles in the chuck were four or five muscles going four or five different ways in that shoulder area of this carcass. And the fact is that it was low valued beef. It's ground. And, and then we find a muscle up in that shoulder area, you know, in the chuck, that happened to be the most tender muscle in the entire carcass of this animal. And that went on to create the flat iron steak, the petite tender, the, uh, What's a couple of the other ones, Matt?
Matt:The flat iron was the first one that I came to mind. I think there's a chuck eye or something. There is. There's several in there. But, uh, yeah. I mean, that muscle profiling was the first work that I had heard of separating out those muscles. And that was, that was simply because of beef checkoff dollars. Yep. And what has happened since then is because the Packer processors saw that research and figured out that they could get five, six, seven times more out of that. Then they started doing the same thing and it encouraged, and that's, that's the cool thing about when producers spend a little and hopefully it gets leveraged by the rest of the industry. And that's where that checkoff, I think, does things that we don't even know. It's not all about advertising and, uh, on the Super Bowl or whatever it is everybody wants to see that beef checkoff do want to share with your
Bill (2):audience one more thing. Yeah. I remember sitting in a meeting with Nebraska Cattlemen. Um, we had a meeting in, in, and I think it was Kearney, Nebraska, and we had representatives of a couple of major packers in the state at that meeting, and one, one old cattleman, who I knew as a good friend, just west of North Platte, stood up and asked the head honchos of one of those packing companies, why don't you guys just pay us more for these real good, straight Angus cattle? That, that, that, uh, Always grade well and everything and the guy who was fielding the question said because we don't have to and only I might be the only one that appreciated that, you know, just from running my own business all these years and and how you how you want to attack things and how you want to approach your business, but he was very honest and very forward about it. And I appreciated that that day very much.
Matt:And we as an industry figured out how to build. I mean, we're We're sitting in the U. S. premium beef booth right now. And it would have been, not the only, but one of the ones that lasted that said, You know what? We believe there is a value difference. And a better
Bill (2):way.
Matt:And a better way of buying and selling these cattle. And we're going to incentivize people to do the right thing. And it worked, and it's taken root, and everybody else has benefited from it. So
Bill (2):there was, there was another, there was an old cattle buyer in that crowd that day with that same packer. The guy who was the head up front. And he said, when are you going to start buying these cattle on a, on a grade merit basis? And I'll never forget this one word, never. And they believed it. He believed it. Yeah. He believed it. Guess what they're doing today? 80
Matt:some percent of them are getting bought on a great deal.
Bill (2):And that's instrument grading. And that's another thing. After muscle profiling, our product enhancement committee worked on that with. with Ag Research Service, USDA, and had instrument grading in these plants today. And my goal and hope is that we'll still see a time when we figure out a way to capture tenderness on these cattle and incorporate that into our entire grading system. Yeah. Now that, that some of our own people don't care for that that much at this point in time, and I know it, but I still believe that it would be worthwhile.
Matt:Well, Bill Rieschel at last. One hour of recording time, which is usually the absolute upper limit of one of these podcasts. I, you look to me like you're just getting warmed up. I, I mean, I mean,
Matt (2):Barb is over here giving us the cut. You all are finished signs. So, I guess, I guess, that's, uh, that's, that's our signal that we've got to end
Matt:it. But, I know that we'll keep these conversations going, but, uh, no, I appreciate it a bunch.
Bill (2):I appreciate this opportunity and thanks so much for sitting down here and considering this. Oh, you bet. I've enjoyed every minute of it. It, it makes me feel a little bit younger, if nothing else.
Matt:Well, guess what? Uh, you don't have to worry about that, because anybody listening here is as quick witted and as sharp as you've been, they can tell. So keep up the good work. Thanks, man. And happy late birthday. You bet you and we just established that you're a good 20 days older than tom perrier. So You all share the same birth year, birth month. Whatever
Bill (2):you do, don't tell Tom that I'm older and wiser.
Matt:Well, you just did. Thanks Bill.
Bill (2):Take care.
Matt:Thanks for tuning in to Practically Ranching, brought to you by Dalebanks angus. If you like this show, even if you didn't share it with someone you think would enjoy it, give us a five star review and a comment so we can keep cranking the content out. As we said at the start of the show, our spring private treaty bulls are now available. If you'd like information on the Bulls email, Matt perrier@dalebanks.com or text 6 2 0 5 8 3 43 0 5 with your email address and we'll get you the list. God bless you all. We look forward to visiting again soon.
