I received a phone call late last week from a 75-year-old rancher in Montana. He called to request a catalog – but he started out by saying, “I have been reading your newsletters for over ten years – and you have been unbelievably consistent in what you say. You have never changed your story …and now I am finally beginning to understand what you have been saying.”
Truth be known, we have never changed our story or our focus for nearly 30 years. While everyone else was focused on increasing individual animal performance (weaning weight for the most part), we were focused on helping ranchers increase their profit and enjoyment. We have never jumped from one fad to another, to another, to another like many breeders have done.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that more and more ranchers are finally beginning to understand the philosophies behind our program. We have been mailing out newsletters since 1994. We knew that we were on the right track – and we knew that profitability and enjoyment involved more than just genetics. We also knew that no one else was going to share this information. We went from mailing 200 newsletters to over 20,000 newsletters. We sold 7 bulls in our very first bull sale. We are now selling over 800 bulls every year – in four bull sales. It took time and a lot of work, but more and more cow-calf producers are leaving the status quo herd for something much better.
When I asked this rancher why he thought it was taking producers so long to understand the philosophies behind the PCC program, he didn’t have an answer. When I asked him why he was still calving on snow in March, he said, “I guess it is what we have always done.” He said he had spent most of the last 10 years trying to downsize his cows and make them more efficient – but then he admitted to buying overfed bulls from pampered herds with HUGE cows. That ain’t gonna work!
I spent most of an hour visiting with this rancher. I very much enjoyed it – and I think he did too. We concluded that it is extremely difficult for most people, especially older people, to make a real paradigm shift, because doing so requires them to admit that what they were doing was wrong. That is something most people hate to do. I remember having a similar discussion at a Herd Quitter meeting in Idaho a few years ago when someone solemnly said, “We advance one funeral at a time.” That is so sad – but all too often so true.