There's a Lot of Good in That One

  There's a Lot of Good in That One.

  How a summer in Missouri, a consultant named Jeff Ward, and two words changed everything.

  Isaiah Shnurman · Genetic Hedging Solutions LLC · June 2026

In June of 2020 I was managing Square B Ranch and Cattle and B3Genetix in Missouri. We had over 400 Angus cows and a serious genetics program — embryo transfer, AI, the whole operation. The ranch brought in a consultant named Jeff Ward to help us evaluate the herd and improve the cattle.

I had been around cattle my entire career. AI work, embryo transfer, bull studs, semen evaluation, the highest-selling bulls in the industry. I thought I had seen most of it. I was not prepared for what Jeff Ward did when he walked into that pasture.

The Way He Evaluated Cattle

Jeff Ward evaluated over 400 cows. He moved through that herd faster than anyone I had ever watched. Thirty seconds per animal. Sometimes less. He would stop, look, maybe put a hand on the animal, and move on.

When he liked what he saw, he had one thing he would say.

When he liked what he saw, he had one thing he would say.

'There's a lot of good in that one.'

That was it. No elaboration. No catalog language. No list of EPDs. Just that sentence, and he was already moving to the next cow.

It was up to you to figure out what the good was. And that, I realized later, was the whole lesson. If you could not figure out what the good was by looking at the animal yourself, you were not ready to be making selection decisions. He was not going to do your seeing for you.

Over the following year, Jeff helped us develop a mating strategy and advised on older semen we should source for our ET program. His criteria were specific and consistent. He wanted bulls with superior daughter data. His focus was on structure, fertility, muscle, and what he called convenience traits — a topic worth its own article, and one I will write eventually.

The Daughter Standard

For a sire to make the list at Square B and B3Genetix, he needed 25 daughters in three different herds. Not 25 daughters total. Not 25 daughters in one operation that could manage around the bull's weaknesses. Twenty-five daughters in three different herds — meaning three different environments, three different management systems, three different sets of selection pressure all confirming the same result.

If the daughters held up across all three, you had something real. If the daughters only looked good in one program's controlled conditions, you had a marketing story, not a genetics program.

We also looked closely at the dam side. How many calves had she raised? What were the ratios across her production record? Were her daughters still in production? A cow with eight calves at 107 weaning ratio whose daughters were still in other herds was telling you something no genomic prediction could.

His standard for proven was not complicated. It was just honest. Twenty-five daughters in three herds. Either the genetics performed across environments or they did not earn the word.

Our marketing approach from this program was built on that standard. We called it alternative genetics — bulls from the last 40 years whose daughters were proven across multiple herds, whose cow families were documented, whose production records were real. No EPDs in the marketing. No flashy catalog language. Just the story of what the sire had produced and where his daughters were still working.

The Moment the Term Appeared

We had the calves on the ground. We had pulled performance pedigrees on every bull we used. We had evaluated daughter information, confirmed dam production records, built the story of each sire and donor — not just a photo and a number, but what they had done for the industry, what kind of females they left, how they had performed across decades and across herds.

Jeff looked at what we had assembled. The older sires with deep daughter records. The proven cow families. The deliberate selection across diverse, documented bloodlines rather than concentrating everything into the newest, most aggressively marketed genetics.

He said we were hedging our genetics with proven sires.

That was the first time I had ever heard that term applied to cattle selection. And it hit me the way the right idea hits you when you have been living the thing before you had the words for it — not like new information, but like recognition. Like someone naming something you already knew was true.

We were hedging our genetics with proven sires. The first time I heard those words, everything clicked.

A financial hedge reduces your exposure to variance — to the risk that the thing you bet on does not perform the way the prediction said it would. A genetic hedge does the same thing. Proven, diverse, structurally correct genetics selected across documented cow families and confirmed daughter performance reduces your exposure to the failure mode that the industry has been selling as progress for decades: narrow genetic concentration in unproven bloodlines marketed primarily on prediction.

The name of this business came from that moment. Genetic Hedging Solutions. The philosophy came from that conversation. The whole framework that I have been applying to the 11 programs I work with — the back-to-basics evaluation, the preference for proven older genetics, the structure-first sequence, the insistence on daughter data before any sire earns a recommendation — all of it traces back to a summer in Missouri and a man who could evaluate 400 cows in a day and tell you everything you needed to know in six words.

How He Evaluated Cattle in Under 30 Seconds

After the herd evaluation, Jeff taught me the system. We had to be fast — evaluating a whole herd in a day means you cannot spend five minutes on any single animal. The scoring system was designed for speed without sacrificing depth.

Every animal was scored on a scale of 1 to 5 — 1 being least desired, 5 being most desired — across five primary areas: fertility, angularity, capacity, muscle, and udder structure. Udder structure had four components of its own: cup size, teat length, support, and formation.

The thing that surprised me at first — and that I have repeated to every producer I have worked with since — is that you do not want all 5s. You are not chasing extremes. You are chasing balance.

A cow with a 5 on angularity is too fine, too dairy-type for the beef environment. A cow with a 5 on muscle is pushing toward an extreme that compromises fertility and maternal function. The target was not the highest score on every trait. The target was a specific balance — femininity at a 3, angularity at a 4, capacity at a 5, muscle at a 3 on cows and a 4 on bulls, udder always striving for a 5.

We were not after extremes. We were after balance. And the difference between those two things is the difference between cattle that look impressive on sale day and cattle that last a decade.

That balance is what produces the cow that stays in the herd. The cow that is feminine enough to be fertile, angular enough to be efficient, deep enough to harvest forage in tough conditions, muscled enough to produce a calf that performs, and sound enough in her udder to milk that calf through weaning every year for ten years.

The scoring system made that evaluation fast because it made it consistent. You were not reinventing your criteria every time you looked at an animal. The 1-5 scale was the same for every cow in the herd, every time. After enough animals scored the same way, you stopped counting and started seeing.

The Udder Standard

Jeff spent more time on udder evaluation than any other single trait — not because it takes longer to evaluate, but because it matters more to the longevity of a cow herd than almost any other functional trait. A cow with a broken udder leaves the herd. A cow with long, pendulous teats creates calving problems and mastitis. A cow with an unbalanced quarter fails to milk or creates calf nursing problems that cost weaned weight and management time for years.

The four components were specific: cup size, teat length, support, and formation.

The udder standard is one of the most direct expressions of the convenience trait philosophy. You will not see udder scores in a sale catalog. You will not see teat length EPDs or medial suspensory ligament evaluations in a breed association database. But every commercial producer who has pulled a calf off a cow with broken teats at 2 AM in February knows exactly what that trait costs, across a lifetime of that cow and her daughters.

The Advice I Did Not Take

The time I worked with Jeff Ward was short. The ranch was sold in 2023. But the work we did together — the herd evaluation, the sire selection methodology, the daughter standard, the scoring system, the marketing philosophy built around proven genetics and the story behind them — I absorbed all of it. I was a sponge when he talked.

Before I left, Jeff gave me one piece of personal advice. He meant it from the heart.

He said: get out of the cattle business. Politics and industry practice are not worth the fight.

There are certain days when I think he was absolutely correct.

And there are other days — mornings in Montana, mountains in the distance, elk bugling in the dark before first light, cows as far as the eye can see — when I am profoundly grateful I did not listen.

I will always give Jeff Ward credit for explaining the idea and term of hedging our genetics. From that, the name, the philosophy, and the business of Genetic Hedging Solutions was born.

The industry he told me to get out of is the same one I am trying to make more honest. The philosophy he taught me in a Missouri pasture in 2020 is the foundation of every program I work with today. The term he used — genetic hedging — became the name of everything I have built since.

There's a lot of good in that.

Isaiah Shnurman owns and operates Genetic Hedging Solutions LLC, managing the complete digital presence for 11 seedstock programs across the country. His background includes artificial insemination, embryo transfer, bull stud ownership and management, semen evaluation, farm and ranch management, and sale management. The name Genetic Hedging Solutions traces to a conversation with Jeff Ward in June 2020 at Square B Ranch and Cattle in Missouri. Isaiah evaluates cattle the same way Jeff taught him: structure first, performance second, pedigree third, EPDs last — and in under 30 seconds per animal when the herd demands it.

GENETIC HEDGING SOLUTIONS LLC  ·  THE GHS EDITORIAL SERIES  ·  ISAIAH SHNURMAN  ·  JUNE 2026

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