Females For Sale
Selling Hawk Valley Females
With a 20 head cow herd we do not offer many females for sale each year. All that we do offer for sale are of top quality after this many years in the Angus business. Susan and I will never sell you a female with a known problem. We are too small to hold a production sale so all female sales are private treaty.
The math of maintaining our current herd size is very simple. In a perfect world we will end up with 20 baby calves each spring. If ten of them are heifer calves this is how it works. We wean all of our calves on the same day. That day is usually the second or third Saturday in September. Around that same time we have the cow herd and five replacement heifers ultrasound pregnancy tested.
About a month after weaning and after we have gotten back our Angus Herd Improvement Records Weaning Report we decide which of the current year's heifer calves we will keep and get bred the following summer. The remaining heifer calves will be offered for sale as high quality heifer replacement calves. We do not sell them as feeder calves.
We attempt to replace 25% of our cow herd every year with our home bred and raised replacements. If we as breeders are doing our job right our youngest females should be our most powerful and correct ones. This replacement rate keeps our herd very young.
At this same time we decide which five of the twenty cows and five bred heifers we will let go so we can maintain our twenty head herd. Those five bred animals are offered for sale private treaty.
Which bred females to keep and who to sell is one of the most difficult decisions we have to make each year here at Hawk Valley. Our decisions are based on lots of factors. Some of the factors we look at are as follows, due date, sex of the calf, pedigree, EPD's, cow family, body size, conformation, age, etc.
Our farm's Veterinary service is very good at determining the due dates and sexes of the calves. We place all of the pregnant animals in due date order with the sex of their next calf next to them. Then we count down and draw a line between the 20th. and 21st. ones based on due date. Looking at the five below the line we decide if there is someone we just cannot let go at this time. This year for example our newest “Pathfinder Cow” was below the line with a heifer in her. She has never given us a heifer calf. She got to stay and one above the line was selected to be sold.
We need to maintain a certain number of cow family lines in order to offer options on both sides of the pedigrees to our loyal repeat bull customers. If we are not careful some of our cow families could take over our entire herd. We use that also as a reason to let a bred female go.
Once in a while we have a female that does not fall into the body size that we are looking for to maintain a very uniform herd of momma cows. Smaller animals and larger animals are looked at as possible for sale females. Lots of first time visitors will comment on how our cows all look alike, that is not by accident.
So the math alone dictates that if we have ten heifer calves born in the spring we should be offering five head of bred females for sale and five head of replacement heifer calves for sale each fall. Recently we had a calf crop of only five bulls and fifteen heifers, so our fall offering was larger that year.
If interested in purchasing Hawk Valley females the best thing to do is contact us as soon as possible. We place potential buyers on a list. The first one on the list gets first choice of the offering once we decide who to let go. If they do not take them all, which is a very common occurrence, we then call the second person on the list and so forth.
Like we like to tell people, "You can find cheaper Angus cattle and you can find more expensive Angus cattle, but you will be hard pressed to find better Angus cattle than what we offer at Hawk Valley Angus".