Twenty-Five Years of Angus and Hereford Cattle

Jonathan Jefferson has been breeding cattle at Rochelle, in McCulloch County, for more than twenty-five years. Four lines run on the same ground here — Hereford, Miniature Hereford, Black Angus and Red Angus — and the operation is deliberately small enough that every animal listed on this site is one we know by sight and can tell you about without going to look at a file.

Twenty-five years in one place teaches you things a sale catalogue cannot. You learn which cows hold condition through a dry Central Texas summer and which ones come apart in August. You learn which bulls throw calves that arrive without help at two in the morning, and which lines stay quiet in a chute generation after generation.

Almost every cattle site in the country says "call for price". The reasoning is that a conversation lets a seller read the buyer, and price accordingly. We think it mostly wastes everyone's afternoon and tells a first-time buyer that they are about to be sized up.

So every animal on this site carries its price, and what drives those figures is set out on the cattle prices page. You can decide whether a cow is worth the difference without ringing anyone.

The ring gives you a few seconds and a lot number. Buying from the people who raised the animal gives you the rest of it: how her dam performed, whether she calved unassisted, what she is like in a chute, and the honest reason she is for sale.

We also tell buyers when an animal is wrong for them. Someone with eight acres and no working facilities does not need a full-size bull, however much they like the look of him, and we would rather lose that sale than have the phone ring in six months.