ANGUS
HEREFORD
YY Ranch - David and Tina Thompson
Located in the foothills of the Chiricahua Mountains. We mostly run a commercial cow/calf
operation and started out with Polled Herefords. In 1998 we realized that the calves we were
producing needed improvement in carcass traits and we needed to find bulls that would throw
small calves on our heifers because we were having to pull a large percent of calves from our
Hereford heifers. We researched our options and saw that the American Angus Association’s
work and dedication in developing genetic expected progeny data that could help us find bulls
with good carcass traits and low birthweights was the way we needed to go.
We bought our first
registered Black Angus bull at Marana Stockyards in 1998. We continued to invest in quality
Black Angus bulls and right away started seeing great improvements in our calf production! The
first year of having low birthweight bulls on our heifers nearly eliminated having to pull calves.
Our son Cory was in 4H at this time and received Grand Champion Carcass award with a steer
that was a cross between one of our Herefords and one of the registered Black Angus bulls we
bought that had high quality carcass traits! These things really proved to us the advantage of
raising Black Angus.
As we bought bulls from other areas and then some more local, we saw that bulls raised locally
and in similar type of terrain faired better and stayed in better breeding condition. We decided it
would be advantageous to start raising our own bulls. This is how we got started as Registered
Black Angus breeders. We are very satisfied with the bulls we have produced for our
commercial herd. They hold up nice on our type of vegetation and climate and travel well in
rocky country. It was our goal to produce the type of bulls we wanted to buy and we have
achieved that. We have grown our registered herd to the point now that we have breeding stock
to sell. We strive to produce bulls with good carcass quality, weaning weight, and are able to
thrive in Arizona and the Southwestern rough terrain, climate and vegetation type.