***A PERFORMANCE LEGEND FOR OVER HALF A CENTURY***
TOP QUALITY PERFORMANCE BULLS TO SIRE TOP QUALITY FEEDER CALVES WITH UNIFORMITY, CONSISTENCY, AND EXCELLENCE. CROSSBREED WITH THE BEST!
OUR 49TH SPRING BULL SALE IS SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2018--148 bulls for sale. Auction starts 12:30 p.m. MDT at Great Falls Livestock Auction, Great Falls Montana. Online bidding available with pre-registration at Western.
2018 SPRING SALE CATALOG LINK NOW ON THE "SALE CATALOG" PAGE. BULL LOT VIDEOS ARE NOW AVAILABLE on the "Cattle Video" page. Click on the sale date, then in each video, the words in the lower right-hand corner "Download for best quality..." to view them. The videos begin with a still photo, then proceed into video. Our cold, wet, snowy winter means they are in their muddy "working clothes." Thank you for your patience.
Cobb Charolais is the 3rd - 4th largest registered Charolais herd in the USA, with over 700 registered enrolled females. Our herd has been closed, selectively linebred and culled for 60+ years for a consistent and uniform balance of fertility, milk, docility, outstanding feedlot conversion gains, carcass traits, early maturity and sound conformation, all raised within a harsh, challenging mountain foothills environment. Wintertime temperature swings of 70-100 degree differences within 24-hour periods are common, due to the roll--sometimes 100 mph+--of warming chinook winds off the mountainsides. The ranch ranges in elevations from 4500 feet up to 6000+ feet in the summer breeding pastures.
Our animals are not bred for the goals of the show ring, but rather to fit the demands of the beef business—from birth to slaughter in the quickest possible time with the greatest possible profit. We have dehorned, scurred and polled animals in two calving herds, spring and fall, with only the top half of the bull calf crops offered for auction in yearly April and November sales. Only the best on test, only the best for sale. All are "one brand" and home raised, performance tested at home in our own feedlot.
WHAT IS THE COBB SECRET? EFFICIENT LINEBRED ECONOMICS
Early in the 1960's, the Cobbs experimented. Buddy built his own small feedlot, successfully fed out and marketed young Charolais bulls for a local Montana supermarket chain under the trade name of "Charmont--Red Yearling Beef"--one of the nation's first "branded beef" programs. But after realizing the explosive potential of their purebred Charolais as top performance beef cattle, the Cobbs concentrated their efforts toward seedstock production. From this valuable experiment, they learned data which enabled them early on to raise a specific "type" of Charolais, one that would grow and finish out to a top quality carcass more quickly and efficiently.
In 2003, 36 head of newly banded Cobb purebred Charolais feeder steers averaged 3.77 lbs. of gain per day, with a 3.83 lb/day dry matter conversion, no growth implants or hormones. From this same group of steers averaged a dressing percentage of 63.7% off an average 693 lb. carcass, live weight of 1088 lbs., averaging 2.2 sq. inch ribeye per cwt. And these superior feeder steers were CULLS from the 2002 spring crop of bull calves BEFORE the best were placed on performance test. Their half-brothers and cousins were tested, then culled again, and 150 remaining bulls were offered in our April 2003 sale to our usual crowd of commercial and some purebred producers, with many repeat buyers. A COBB BULL SALE OFFERS YOU ONLY THE BEST ON TEST, ONLY THE BEST FOR SALE--GUARANTEED.
The cows are studies of excellence in themselves. The "stacking" of performance upon performance in the Cobb female pedigree has produced a cowherd unequalled in its genetic ability to produce and reproduce superior beef animals at a profit. For 50-plus years, in one of the most demanding of environments, we have concentrated on reproductive efficiency, always selecting for replacement females that possess the genetic prepotency for fertility, calving ease, milk production, easy-fleshing phenotype and quiet, docile temperament to offer their own personal contributions towards their progeny's performance ability. Sound, reality-based cattle.
Replacement heifers with MT Nat'l Guards on Benchmark Rd., Ahorn Basin Fire of July 2007.
Almost 60 years of selection for calm dispositions and docility.
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We have been DNA testing our herd sires since 2006 with Neogen's Igenity Geneseek (formerly Merial IGenity). Igenity Geneseek scores the presences of various specific DNA markers from 1 to 10. These tables show how the Cobb herd sires from 2006 onward compare to all 63,000+ other bulls of all breeds in Neogen Igenity's Cattle Genomic Geneseek USA database:
*Scores NetFeed Efficiency(RFI)-Scores for ADG markers- Scores Tenderness markers
*Lower RFI scores are better. Neogen Igenity Geneseek also includes leptin markers in their RFI scoring.
A 2015 updated link showing these comparisons of our herd sires to all other 16,000+ Charolais bulls in Neogen Igenity's Cattle Genomic USA database: UserFiles/files/2015%20IGENITY%20BENCHMARK%20SCORES%20BULLS--Final.xlsx
Their resulting nine years of data show that overall, Cobb Charolais herd sires score 12% higher for Average Daily Gain markers showing moderation--not gains feeding just a bigger frame size--and score 30% better for Net Feed Efficiency, or RFI=Residual Feed Efficiency markers than the 63,000 other bulls of all breeds in the Neogen Geneseek USA database--all with outstanding tenderness scores. A tight set of numbers showing predictability and consistency. In addition to their gain performance test data, the ultrasound data on every sale bull over the past 15 years demonstrates our herd's trends of producing low backfat carcasses with the bulls' weights demonstrated in more muscle, and good ribeyes as well, with that profit-enhancing feed efficiency. All highly heritable traits to be passed onto their calves.
ALL OUR BULLS ARE "ONE-BRAND" AND HOME-RAISED, DEVELOPED ON-SITE ON OUR RANCH BULL TEST STATION WITH 50+ YEARS OF PERFORMANCE RECORDS.
All good reasons to buy your next set of bulls from Cobb Charolais.
Some of the herd sires in the rains of May, 2008
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