OUR HERD
We love the Angus Breed ! The family has always been involved in Performance records for traits of economic importance to ranchers. In fact, Leo McDonnell Sr. was one of the founders of Performance Evaluation back in the 1950's.
McDonnell Angus is comprised of 4 units, and while each unit operates independently the genetics & breeding are all parallel. We Focus on Efficiency! Using only Tested – Proven Efficiency Sires and selecting our replacement only from with our herd our pedigrees are stacked generations deep in efficiency and performance.
At McDonnell Angus we put a lot of emphasis on maternal traits, as that is where we and the majority of our customers make their living - with cows and grass. We like to look at pounds produced per acre and dollars generated per acre per cows exposed. This way we are covering all the bases from fertility, to longevity and stayability, feet, legs, udders etc. The new Angus EPDs for foot score are evidence of our commitment to this, with bulls like CCA UNO 049 and AB Capitalist 4507 being in the top 10% of the Angus breed for foot scores. A strong Maternal background is also at the top of the list, again evidenced by the American Angus Association's new $ Maternal calculations with Herd bulls like McD Performer 407, Deppe Impression, Spur of Franchise, and CCA Uno 049 all being in the top 10-12% of the breed..
We enroll our herds in the American Angus Association's Maternal Plus program which requires Whole Herd reporting. We also like to have cattle that make the feeder and packer money and a product they is desirable on your dinner table, we try and keep growth, ribeye, marbling above average but don't believe in chase the extremes.
In the last 12 years we have got very involved in Efficiency testing and have made great strides here, improving both pasture and feedlot intake while still maintaining and even improving on weaning weights. Many of our Efficiency sires are progeny tested with 3rd party verification; this is usually done at Simplot Feeders in Grandview, Id. In 2019 we had 3 efficiency sires groups tested against 9 other sire groups. Our efficiency sires groups went 1, 2, and 4 and fed for 20% ($150.00) less than the poorest 4 sire groups tested. We believe we have already lowered our intake on cows and grass cattle by 20% and in the feedlots we have consistently had the top feed conversion cattle with the top dollar returns on our genetics.
