Rouse Red Angus Mission Statement:
“To produce Red Angus bulls for the commercial beef cattle industry that represent the Red Angus Breed - low birth weight, easy fleshing, high marbling, while maximizing birth to yearling spread.”
The Rouse Red Angus operation calves 95 - 100 spring calving cows from late January through early April. Calves are fence-line weaned around the first of September, with the best bull calves shipped to Bieber Red Angus Ranch in Leola, South Dakota. The bulls are put on test there and sold as yearling bulls in Bieber’s March Production Sale. Heifer calves and bred females are available by private treaty at the farm.
We AI as many of our cows as possible each year to the best bulls in the breed that excel in the traits that describe our program - low birth weight, easy fleshing, high marbling, structural soundness, and maximum birth to yearling spread. We also have a small Embryo Transfer program. Embryos are either purchased from top cows in outstanding herds around the country or produced from top “proven” cows in our herd.
Our cows are wintered on corn stalk fields as long as weather permits, then fed a corn silage, corn stover, and DDGs ration through calving. About May first the cow/calf pairs are moved to rotationally grazed grass and alfalfa pastures.
As we live in corn country, pasture land is hard to find, but we have incorporated crop residue grazing into our management practices as long as Gene has had cows. In recent years, we have been using more cover crops, usually rye, and trying different ways to utilize those for cattle feed as well. We have grazed the rye in the fall with the corn stalks, baled rye hay in the spring, chopped ryelage in the spring, and grazed the rye with pairs in the spring. These pairs grazed from mid-April until early May 2017, when they moved to our regular rotational grazing pastures, and then this field was no-till drilled with soybeans.
The following pictures were taken at our Cambridge farm in October 2014. We typically summer our first calf heifers and our mature cows who are raising bull calves at the Cambridge farm. At the time these pictures were taken, the cows had been weaned for about a month, and we had added our bred heifers to the group.
