The Animal is Telling You Something

THE STOCKMAN'S STANDARD** — Straight Talk on Cattle, Land, and the People Who Care for Them

What Bonsma, Lasater, Zietsman, and Campbell understood about cattle that the modern seedstock industry keeps forgetting.

By Isaiah Shnurman · Genetic Hedging Solutions

There is a conversation that happened in the cattle industry about seventy years ago that the industry has largely stopped having. It was a conversation about what the animal in front of you is already telling you — before you look at a catalog, before you pull up an EPD summary, before you ask what the genomic prediction says.

Jan Bonsma started it. Tom Lasater was having a version of it at the same time, from a different direction. Johann Zietsman synthesized them. Steve Campbell put numbers on it. And somewhere along the way, the industry stopped listening — not because the ideas were wrong, but because there was no money in marketing them.

I have been having this conversation my whole career. Everything I have learned from decades of practical cattle work — from artificial insemination to embryo transfer to owning and operating bull studs to evaluating some of the highest-selling bulls in this industry — has confirmed the same things these men figured out decades ago.

The animal is telling you something. The industry has been teaching producers to ignore it.

What Bonsma Understood

Jan Bonsma was a South African animal scientist who spent his career at the intersection of genetics, environment, and phenotype. His core conviction — and the one the modern industry has most aggressively walked away from — was that an animal's external appearance is a readable record of its internal function.

Not a cosmetic preference. A diagnostic.

The way a cow carries herself, the refinement of her head, the character of her eye, the expression of her secondary sex characteristics — Bonsma argued these were honest signals of endocrine balance, fertility, and adaptability. A feminine cow with a clean, refined front end and quiet eye is telling you something about her hormonal balance that no blood test was collecting in 1950 and no EPD captures today. A staggy cow — coarse, masculine in the wrong places, rough through the front — is telling you the same thing, in the other direction.

Bonsma's insight was not that pretty cattle are better cattle. It was that correct cattle look correct — and that the difference is visible if you know what you are looking for.

He stressed glandular function — the animal that sheds its winter coat on schedule, holds condition on grass alone, maintains reproductive function through heat and drought — as the visible indicator of the adaptation that keeps cattle in production in demanding environments. He was working primarily in subtropical South Africa, where adaptation to heat and parasites was a survival issue, not a preference. But the principle he identified translates to every environment where cattle are expected to produce with minimal inputs.

The phenotype is the realized animal. It integrates genetics, environment, management, and history into a single observable package. No prediction model does that. The animal does it for you, if you are willing to look.

What Lasater Understood

Tom Lasater was working from a completely different premise at nearly the same time. Where Bonsma was a scientist who taught cattlemen to read animals, Lasater was a rancher who stopped trying to predict and started measuring outcomes.

His philosophy was brutal in its simplicity. Select on six things only: disposition, fertility, weight, conformation, milk, and hardiness. Everything else — color, breed markings, cosmetic correctness, catalog appeal — is noise. Let the production environment decide who stays and who goes. Open cows leave. Every year. No exceptions. No sentiment. No rationalizing a retained heifer because her dam was outstanding.

The radical part of what Lasater did was refuse to trust the prediction and insist on the evidence. He was not interested in what a cow might do. He was interested in what she did — specifically, whether she brought a calf to weaning every year under conditions that gave her no assistance and no allowance for failure.

Lasater's argument was not that phenotype doesn't matter. It was that the real phenotype — the one worth selecting on — is a live weaned calf every year for a decade. Everything else is a proxy for that, and he didn't trust the proxies.

The commercial producers who have figured this out are the ones who ask the right question when they look at a cow herd. Not 'what is her EPD?' Not even 'what does she look like?' But: 'How old is she, and how many calves has she weaned?' That question, answered honestly across a cow herd, tells you more about the genetics program that produced her than any sale catalog summary.

What Zietsman Added

Johann Zietsman read both men, worked in a South African range environment, and arrived at a synthesis that reframed the whole question. His book Man, Cattle and Veld is the most useful single text I know for understanding what the commercial cow-calf business is actually supposed to optimize.

His contribution was to shift the unit of measurement. Not profit per cow. Profit per hectare.

That reframing changes everything about which cattle you select. A moderate-framed, early-maturing, easy-fleshing cow that converts grass efficiently and breeds back reliably is more profitable per unit of land than a larger, heavier cow who produces a heavier calf but needs more grass, more supplementation, and more management to do it. The larger cow's advantage at the scale she shows up is real. Her advantage at the scale of the whole operation — the total calves weaned, the total grass consumed, the total replacement cost when she fails to breed — is often not.

Zietsman also made the longevity argument in its most economic form. A heifer's development cost is a large sunk investment. She typically does not pay it back until somewhere around her fourth to sixth calf. A cow culled at four may never return her cost. A cow that lasts to twelve drops eight to ten calves and spreads that development cost across all of them. Her cost per weaned calf falls dramatically with every year she stays in production.

Fertility, soundness, longevity, and profit are not four separate traits. They are one loop. The cattle that stay in the herd and keep producing are, by definition, the cattle that prove all four — because only fertile, sound, adapted cattle make it to year ten.

This is why I look for cows that are seven, eight, nine years old and still performing. Not because I am sentimental about old cattle. Because a nine-year cow who has weaned eight calves and is still in acceptable body condition on grass has proven herself against every selection criterion that matters — in a way that no EPD prediction, no contemporary group ratio, and no genomic test can replicate.

What Campbell Quantified

Steve Campbell took Bonsma's eye and put calipers on it. His contribution was to make the phenotypic evaluation systematic — linear measurements that predict carcass merit, glandular function assessments that identify adapted cattle, rumen development in the nursing calf as an indicator of lifetime feed efficiency.

His Red Solo Cup analogy — which I have used in my own evaluations and referenced in my work with the programs I consult for — describes the body shape that characterizes the productive cow. The wide base (capacity), the narrowing through the shoulders (refinement, femininity), the depth and spring of rib that lets a cow harvest forage and sustain a pregnancy. It is a visual model of functional efficiency. The opposite shape — narrow through the middle, heavy through the front, shallow and tubular — is a cow that will struggle to maintain condition, breed back reliably, or stay in the herd long enough to pay off her development cost.

Campbell's additional emphasis on rumen development is the piece most overlooked. A nursing calf whose rumen is stimulated to develop early — through access to quality hay or pasture alongside the dam — becomes a more efficient forage converter for life. The investment is made in the first few months. The return continues for a decade.

Where My Own Evaluation Standard Comes From

When I evaluate cattle — for the programs I work with, for buyers who ask my opinion, for my own judgment — I work in a specific sequence. Structure and phenotype first. Performance second. Pedigree third. EPDs last.

That sequence is not arbitrary. It is the synthesis of what Bonsma, Lasater, Zietsman, and Campbell figured out across sixty years of observation and practice, applied to the evaluation problem I am trying to solve every time I walk into a pasture.

Structure and phenotype first because the animal in front of me has already integrated its genetics with its environment and produced a result I can see, handle, and evaluate. I look at the feet and legs before anything else — because structural failure is the most common reason productive cattle leave herds before their time, and it is visible at a glance. I look at the secondary sex characteristics because Bonsma was right that they signal endocrine balance. I look at the eye and disposition because a difficult animal creates management problems that compound over years. I look at body capacity and the wedge shape because that is the structure that holds condition on grass and sustains reproductive function without supplemental inputs.

The phenotype is not cosmetic. It is diagnostic. A correct animal looks correct for functional reasons — and an incorrect animal will tell you what it costs you before it ever costs you, if you know where to look.

Performance second because what the animal has actually done is more reliable evidence than any prediction. A cow with seven calves and a weaning ratio of 110 across all of them has proved herself. A cow with an elite EPD and two calves on the ground is a prediction. I weight proof over promise every time — not because the prediction is useless, but because it carries more variance than a production record, and I am in the business of reducing variance.

Pedigree third because a proven pedigree is where the preference for older, deeper genetics lives. A proven cow family has expressed its genetic potential across hundreds of relatives over decades. The longevity is documented. The fertility is observable. The consistency is there in the production records of daughters and granddaughters. A trendy new bloodline is, by definition, an unproven bet on the traits that only reveal themselves over a cow's lifetime — fertility, longevity, feet and legs at year eight. A proven pedigree has already paid those traits out, in public, across years.

EPDs last because by the time I have evaluated the structure, the performance, and the pedigree, the EPD is confirmation or caution — not a decision. An EPD that confirms what I already saw makes me more confident. An EPD that contradicts what I saw makes me look harder. But an EPD alone, on an animal I have not evaluated and whose daughters I have not seen, is the least reliable piece of information on the list.

The Conversation Worth Having Again

Bonsma, Lasater, Zietsman, and Campbell were not anti-science. They were scientists and serious practitioners who spent their careers studying what actually produces profitable cattle over the long arc of time — not what looks impressive on a sale day, not what photographs well in a catalog, not what tops a contemporary group in a feedlot pen.

What they figured out, independently and from different angles, converges on the same conclusions. Fertile, structurally sound, adapted, easy-fleshing cattle that stay in the herd and keep producing are the most profitable cattle. The traits that produce those cattle are visible in the animal, measurable in the production record, and confirmed in the pedigree. They are not reliably captured in a genomic prediction on a calf with no production history.

The industry has been selling that prediction because there is money in selling it. There is no money in marketing what Bonsma knew — that the animal is already telling you everything you need to know, if you are willing to look.

I have spent my career looking. This is what I have seen.

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Isaiah Shnurman owns and operates Genetic Hedging Solutions LLC, managing the complete digital presence for seedstock programs across the country. He is the host of The Stockman's Standard — Straight Talk on Cattle, Land, and the People Who Care for Them, and evaluates cattle structure first, performance second, pedigree third, and EPDs last.

THE STOCKMAN'S STANDARD — Straight Talk on Cattle, Land, and the People Who Care for Them