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GENETRUST at Suhn Cattle Company - Page 2
Another highlight of his days running so many
cattle was that many show steer enthusiasts would trek
to the large ranch to select steers from the operation to
ultimately sell as show steers. As his young bride with
a background in horses, my mom, Vicki, was always
amazed at how the “steer jocks” would come in and try
to sort through 700 steers. Often Dad would smile at
their confusion and let them wander around in them
for awhile but being short on time and even shorter on
patience, would eventually point out 3 or 4 that they
ultimately were tickled with. Looking back now, it’s easy
to understand how today, Dad can so quickly make his
way through large sets of cattle and easily sort them for
quality.
Following their time at the home ranch in South
Dakota they left to manage registered Angus ranches
in California and Nebraska; along with logging a great
numbers of miles behind the wheel, showing cattle.
In early 1980, Dad was approached to become
operations manager for a large Brangus operation based
near Sisterdale, Texas. At that point in his life, having
lived in predominately northern environments permeated
with non-Brahman influenced cattle – everything about
this job was new to Dad, especially the breed of cattle.
However, the visionary concepts Glenn and Lloyd
Brinkman had for Brinks Brangus instantly appealed
to Dad’s desire to push the envelope and try something
new. Dad wanted to challenge the conventional wisdom
inside the Brangus breed that it was possible for ranches
to only sell two year old bulls. With his background in
developing yearling bulls, he worked within the Brinks
breeding program to select earlier maturing Brangus
that could be sold sooner and get to work in the pasture
rather than adding to the feed bill. Brinks Brangus also
employed the use of a breeding up program, to mate
Angus to three quarter blood Brahmans to produce first
generation Brangus.
Dad joined Brinks in the hey-day of the Texas
oil boom during the early 1980s. Two short years after
joining the team, a Brinks sale became the first purebred
sale of any breed to gross over $1 million. The next year,
in 1983 they smashed that record and became the first
ranch to gross over $2 million and averaged over $25,000
per head. Selling in that sale were breed greats that many
of today’s Brangus cattle trace their ancestry back to –
bulls like Nugget, Extra and Bravo. Then in 1984 those
previous records went by the wayside as the $4 million
dollar mark was exceeded in Brinks’ January Bull sale—
many remember that exciting day as Pride, Exacto, Tiny,