2009 AI Calves

We set up 25 head of cows to AI on December 28, 2008. I feel at this point that all of the cows that were going to have AI calves have already done so. We are totally amazed that we have 23 AI calves.  I don't care where you live that is a dang good conception rate! Mike Childress gets to take the credit for this he does all of the AI work for Gizmo Angus, and we feel blessed to have him on our team. For the 2009 season we used:

• Image Maker

• Sitz Alliance

• Morgan’s Direction

• Sinclair Excellency 5X25

• Boyd New Day

• Traveler 878

• BC Matrix 4132

• Nichols Extra K205

We have used Boyd New Day heavily in the past with excellent results, I used him very lightly this year but only because we want to keep some semen back on this bull. We used Morgan’s Direction several years ago all we had were bull calves and didn't feel we were getting enough growth from birth to weaning, so we cut all of them. We have diversified our operation to include a freezer beef program (more about that in another blog)  and put these calves into our mini feed lot......what an eye opener they exploded and made some of the best feeder calves we have ever raised. We hated to learn (of course after we had already AI'd everything) that Morgan’s Direction tested positive for NH so now what do we do we have five calves on the ground our plan is to steer out the bulls and test the heifers. We saw several 5x25 calves when visiting Rainbow Angus in Ashford Alabama and were impressed with the depth and thickness of them so we sampled him this year. Another bull that I used heavily the last two years was Matrix he worked very well in our program his heifers look really good they are calving their first calves this year and they are looking even better their udder's are beautiful and they are just so far looking like our kind of mammas. My favorite bull of 2007 was a Matrix out of Gizmo Forever Lady 010-036 which is a B/R New Design 036 on the top going back to Rainmaker 340 on the bottom this bull for me is just the complete package. He is Gizmo Matrix 721 010 4132 and we used him on a group of 14 heifers last year his calves are on the ground and looking really nice. I only bred Matrix to one cow in 2008 and that was again the 010 cow and she has a full brother on the ground as of 9/25/2009 I hope he is as good as his brother. 878 was used on some deeply bred performance cows and the K205 bull was used on some low growth cows to get a little more balance in the progeny’s pedigrees.

Gizmo Matrix 721 010 4132

Well I think that covers our AI breeding for 2009 calving now we better get busy selecting the bulls we are going to use for 2010 calving.  The bulls we are looking to use at this point are:

• Sinclair Excellency 5X25
• Sinclair Rito Legacy 3R9
• Sinclair Extra 4X13

We haven't made all of our selections as yet but the above bulls are on the short list. 

God Bless
Debbie Gilmore
http://www.gizmoangus.com/