Not Your Ordinary Cattlemen

There is a lot going on at Kent and Kathy Abele’s farm in Nevada, Missouri.

Like many of their neighbors, the Abeles raise cattle. Their son, Cole, manages the family’s cow herd, half of which are registered Red Angus and belong to Cole and a partner. They run anywhere between 300 and 400 cows. However, the Abeles are not ordinary cattlemen.

They also run a bull test station, a restaurant and an event venue.

Each family member heads up a particular enterprise, but they work together on the 1,500-acre land base where Cole is fifth generation.

Tested for performance
Kent graduated from the University of Missouri (MU) in 1978, just in time for the farm economic crisis of the 1980s. He survived, somehow, he says, with mostly row crops and a small cow-calf operation. However, the experience made him realize he needed to find more creative ways to optimize his skills and resources. He needed to improve farm profitability.

Kent had enjoyed working at MU’s bull testing facility in Columbia during his college years. Since that facility had closed, he considered opening one himself. There might be a niche market there to serve, he recalled thinking. Timing would need to be right, though, for his family and the economy.

Green Springs Bull Test was born in 1999 and now brings in more than 1,000 head each year from as far east as Maryland and as far west as California. During the 112-day test, Kent and his team gather hundreds of data points that, together, separate the good bulls from the great.

They use ultrasound technology to evaluate carcass traits, which indicate potential meat quality and yield. They also perform breeding soundness exams on each bull and calculate average daily gain and weight per day of age.

Of special interest is how efficiently a bull converts feed into weight, measured as feed efficiency or residual feed intake (RFI). While performance and carcass traits are important, Kent says a bull that will grow with less feed is perhaps more valuable.

RFID tags document feed efficiency
Feed efficiency is not easy to measure, though. To get an accurate picture of how much an animal eats versus gains, both animal and feed need frequent weighing. Traditional monitoring setups involve keeping one bull to a pen or training cattle to take feed from specific bunks and measuring feed in and out. It takes a lot of time and labor.

In 2005, Kent received a call from Tommy Perkins, Ph.D., at the time a Missouri State University professor who also did Kent’s ultrasound work. The two had become friends and were both looking for ways to measure feed efficiency. Perkins thought he had found their answer in a Canada-based group called GrowSafe, which he had met at the Joplin Regional Stockyards. The GrowSafe team planned to fly back to Calgary the following day, and Perkins wanted Kent to meet them before they did.

That evening, GrowSafe came to the bull test station and explained their system: Each bull is fitted with an RFID (electronic) ear tag that recognizes him when he steps up on the scale-equipped feed bunk. The bunk weighs both the animal and feed each time the animal goes to eat, which, by the end of the test period, tells a complete story of how much feed an individual animal consumed within 10 grams per day. 

The system seemed promising, but the price tag shocked Kent. He called his clients to ask how important that data would be to them. They were all interested, so Kent pre-sold slots on the system to pay for it. Now, Green Springs is the oldest publicly accessible facility in the continental U.S. that uses GrowSafe, which today is part of a company called Vytelle.

“Many of their clients use the data as a selection tool and  have made some leaps and bounds,” Kent says. He has seen clients improve feed efficiency of their cattle by 10-15% in three to four generations.

Producing feed
The Abeles produce a silage-based ration that is fed to the bulls at the test station. About 200 acres of corn is grown each year and occasionally forage oats and sorghum sudan. They do it all with the help of their New Holland equipment. 

“If it’s a piece of equipment here, it’s blue,” Kent says.  “New Holland is the first name in hay equipment, and it’s that for a reason.” 

Kent especially likes his Roll-Belt™ 460 round baler. He and a neighbor, who also runs New Holland, put up clover and alfalfa hay together for their cow herds using a Discbine® H7450, Discbine® 313 disc mower-conditioner, a Rolabar® 216 rake and two of the round balers. 

Next – restaurant and event center
Fourteen years ago, Kathy came up with an idea that would further diversify the family’s income: the Gobblers Roost Restaurant. The couple created a foodservice model that worked for them, minimizing overhead costs and food waste.

First, they built the restaurant “out here in the sticks on the farm,” Kent says. Kathy was unsure of their location at first, but he told her: “If you make it good enough, they’ll come.” And come they do, down a two-mile stretch of gravel. 

Trip Advisor reviewers have rated the restaurant five stars, in part for the experience. The Gobbler’s Roost, which seats 50 people at a time, is only open Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, and reservations are required.

Another draw is the food, which Kathy cooks from scratch starting at 5:30 a.m. on restaurant days. They serve a five-course meal that includes a fixed menu of appetizers, soup, salad and dessert with a selection of entrée options.

Their most popular entrée is steak, and Kent has cooked almost every one of them – about 60,000. Though he raises a lot of cattle, he “can’t raise one that’s all steak,” so they source high choice and prime cuts from Sterling Silver Premium Meats. 

Bolstered by the restaurant’s success, Kathy added an events center to the farm. The 6,500-square-foot 3 Cedar Events hosts weddings and other events, including Kent’s bull sales.

At the end of the bull tests, the bulls are ranked by performance and potential. Owners of the top two-thirds are given the opportunity to sell their bulls to the highest bidders at one of two annual Green Springs sales. Pens outside the event venue allow buyers to view the bulls, which are sold inside by video.

“It all works together pretty well,” Kent says, adding that they have two full-time employees in addition to restaurant staff that help keep the various enterprises moving. “You just have to keep it simple, think outside the box and treat people right.”

Learn more at greenspringsbulltest.com and gobblersroostrest.com.