Matchmaker, Matchmaker!

Valentine's Day is tomorrow-- the day of celebrating love, friendship and relationships. I have always been bad at holidays. I still have pumpkins in my house from Halloween. And with holidays that require giving gifts, I'm the worst. I'm just not a good giver of gifts and often forget to get people anything at all. Jeff's getting nothing this year for Valentine's Day. He just informed me I'm getting nothing either. To celebrate, we're taking each other to our local high school basketball game.  On the farm, nothing special will happen to note the passing of Valentine's Day either. The animals don't notice or care that it is a day we humans spend giving cards, flowers and sweets to each other.

We are not forgetting about a little romance for our cows, though! Ironically, this is the time of year we receive fliers and catalogs for bull sales. While the cows munch on hay and prepare themselves for calving, we are preparing to play matchmaker. This year, we likely need two bulls-- a herd bull and a heifer bull.

This is the catalog from the Bulls of the Big Sky sale, which Jeff and I have attended in the past.

As I flip through the bull catalogs, I can't get the song "Matchmaker, Matchmaker" from the musical Fiddler On The Roof out of my head:

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me a match.

Find me a find. Catch me a Catch.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, look through your book

And make me a perfect match!

What if there were an animated version of Fiddler featuring livestock? I have visions of cows and heifers dancing about the corrals in headscarves, singing the song in a yiddish accent. That would certainly be a sight.

But in all reality, we truly do look through our books and compare bulls' statistics. Before attending a live bull sale to make our final selection, we'll have gone through and picked out a few of our favorite prospects. We'll select for traits we want to enhance in our herd, that will suit the cows/heifers we have, and produce desirable traits in the calves. For the heifers, we might look for a slightly smaller bull, whose calves will be born small but gain weight quickly. With the herd bull, we'll select for traits that balance what our cows offer. For example, if we think many of our cows are long nose-to-tail, we may try to find a bull who will add some width to the calves.

Each bull featured in a bull sale gets his own chart in the book with all his statistics.

Another factor we always consider is temperament. We don't want a bull who is, well, a bully. Generally, with Simmental animals, hot-headedness is not prevalent. Simmental are known as a gentle breed. However, we often seek a Sim-Angus bull specifically for those beefier carcass traits, and Angus can have a little more attitude. Temperament is a characteristic that simply can't be quantified in a chart in a catalog. It must be witnessed. That is one reason we'll arrive early at a bull sale and walk through the pens. We can get a feel for the animal's personality and also a visual image of his build. The rest comes down to price in the auction itself.

I have yet to attend a sale that opens with a show-tune performance, but you never know! I think cows singing and dancing may be inspirational to all in attendance. We haven't finalized which sale(s) we'll attend this year, but it's always a good time playing matchmaker for the herd, and bull sales are a hoot.

With that, and in honor of Valentine's Day, here's a clip of one of my favorite commercials from the SuperBowl, featuring a bull sent out to meet the ladies! Also, the next post will be my 200th blog post! Stay tuned... It'll post this weekend!

What are you up to for Valentine's Day?