CEO COLUMN
A WORD FROM THE CEO by Dustin Hurlbut, CEO, American Chianina Association
H
appy New Year to everyone! It has been a little while since I have written anything for news from the road and there has been a lot happen since my last article. We have had Louisville, Cattlemen’s Congress and Denver as well as our annual meeting and everything else in between. It sure seems like the last 60 days have flown by and there have been many miles traveled and lots of nights spent in hotel rooms to start the new year! Let’s go back to November and start with Louisville. There was a great turnout for numbers in the junior and open shows held during the NAILE. We had a great crowd of members and other breeders in the barn on hand watching our show. It is so impressive when we fill the ring with our division winners to pick our champions! We always have people compliment us on how good the quality of the Chianina and Chiangus cattle are that make their way to the national show. And as always, we are highly competitive in the junior supreme champion selection. While in Louisville we held our annual membership meeting with a good turnout of members on hand to listen to staff reports and hear the numbers of registrations, transfers and memberships for the year. All are up across the board for the 2021 fiscal year! Dr. Rob Sheets also gave a presentation on moving from percentages to fractions. There was great discussion between the membership about their thoughts and concerns on this topic. After Louisville it was full steam ahead preparing for Cattlemen’s Congress, the -C- The Difference National Sale and a sire directory. The sale catalog came along great and the consignors put their best in the sale. Once the catalog was done it was time to focus on the sire directory and the
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| CHIANINA JOURNAL | FEBRUARY 2022
bulls included did not disappoint. The bulls in this sire directory will be promoted at any event where we have a booth. Louisville, OKC, Denver and Junior Nationals are our 4 major places we set a booth up and we will also take the sire directories to Ft. Worth, Black Hills Stock Show, Nebraska Cattlemen’s Classic & the Ohio Beef Expo. Future plans include attending some state cattlemen’s association conventions as well. After Christmas it was off to Oklahoma City for the Cattlemen’s Congress and the -C- The Difference National Sale. We ended up with our biggest shows of the year in Oklahoma City. There was quite the buzz around the barns for how good the Chianina cattle were from top to bottom. There were many classes that the 5th place heifers could have won the class under a different judge. To me, that is a huge compliment to our breed that our classes are that deep in quality. Our champions were very well represented in the Junior and Open Supreme selection as they were all pulled in the top 8 or 9 for consideration of being named supreme. The sale saw a new excitement for us as we had the largest crowd we have had in a while. The buyers ranged from breeders to commercial cattleman from 11 different states. They averaged well with the bulls averaging $7,407, open heifers averaging $7,295 and half of a bred heifer bringing $21,000. The embryo lots averaged $5,295 per lot. A full report will be included in the Herd Reference issue of the ACJ. I was then off to Denver to setup our booth in herd sire alley. The yards are brand new and state of the art so it was nice to finally see everything coming together in Denver. The crowd wasn’t the largest, the shows weren’t the biggest
