 Thanks, Rungie, with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. And I'm Ken Kelly with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. We get the question a lot, what's the best cattle to have? Well, the answer is pretty simple. It's the ones that make the most money. Now, answering that question is a little more difficult. It depends sort of from year to year on which cattle will make the most money. But if we look at developing a market plan and developing replacement heifers, we can develop something that will help add value to our feeder calves. Typically, steers bring more than heifers. And that's one reason the herd builder sale was developed. Over the last three years in Alabama livestock auctions, the 500 to 600 pound steers brought $18 a hundred weight more than heifers. Six to seven brought $16 more. And 7 to 800 pound steers brought $10 more a hundred weight. So what can we do to increase the value of our heifers? Well, one of the things we can do is look at the traits that are desirable in the markets. Mississippi State studied down a few years ago, looked at 22,000 feeder calves over a period of a year. And they came up, they looked at over 40 characteristics that added value or decreased value. A couple of the ones we'd like to look at and talk about today as you look at your cattle herd and what you want to develop is muscle score and body condition score. Muscle scores range from one to four with one being heavily muscled and four being light muscled. The market gives a premium for the heavier muscled calves that are coming through. Body condition scores run from one to nine with one being very thin and nine being obese. What you want to shoot for is in the middle. There's four, five, six, and seven body scores bring the most money. But that doesn't always mean it's the most profitable. We'd like to shoot for that body condition store of four to five. The other thing that needs to be done is a uniform set of calves. And how do you do that? Well, you have a defined breeding season to shorter the better and try to have no genetics in developing your feeder calves. There are several different ways to market replacement heifers. You can certainly market off the farm, but a lot of people choose to market through and organize replacement heifer sale. The herd builder sale is a sale that's been around for several years. Mr. Kevin Tucker does a really good job running that sale. We've got some really good considers in that sale. So we decided to look at that sale to see if we could pick up on any keys for maybe being a little more profitable with our replacement heifer. So we took all the data from the last 10 to 12 years, put it in a spreadsheet. Dr. Brittany Goodrich did some research, did some regressions for us to kind of see what made money and what didn't make money at the herd builder sale in particular. And we looked at several different things and we'll talk about a couple of those that might relate to you as far as your heifers go. One thing we looked at was breed effects. People always wondered, does one breed bring more than other breeds? And for our sale, absolutely they did. And bear in mind, when we talk about this, we're talking about herd builder numbers. It's going to be different for you in your area of the world and the people that you're trying to market to. But we saw Brahman-Herford crosses bring more than any other breed that we had in the sale. And again, this is herd builder specific, but specific breeds are going to be more desirable to a particular buyer. So you have to kind of know yours. With the herd builder, we saw the Brahman-Herford being the most profitable. Matter of fact, they were worth about $300 more per pen of four heifers than any other breeds we had. We also looked at registration effects. Sometimes folks say, well, should I register my heifers or should I not register my heifers? And herd builder, we're marketing two commercial cattlemen for the most part. So we looked to see if there was some registration effects with it. Absolutely there was. We saw about $350 more per pen than we saw with non-restored cattle. And it's a much smaller group we looked at with that. So those numbers are not quite as concrete as other numbers, but we absolutely saw an effect from that. We looked at AI versus conventional breeding. Did they want to pay more for AI versus conventional breeding? And absolutely they did. We saw $125 more per pen for AI exposed. Now, when we had heifers that were AI guaranteed, they brought even more. But AI exposed meant they had been AI, but then they were also covered by bull. So possibility of them being AI, but possibility of bull. Also, we looked at color. Does color make a difference? Absolutely it does. Now, again, depending on your market, who you're selling to, what your buyers are doing, that the color is going to be different for each group, obviously. For ours, as you would guess, when I told you the Brom and Herford brought the most money, the color that brought the most money was our tiger stripes, our Brindle cattle. Again, that's for our sale. That's not in particular. But I think you'll find that any particular group of buyers is going to have a certain type of animal, color of animal they're looking for. A couple of other things we looked at. We looked at sale order. If you're in a sale, because we always have people that are interested in sale order and nobody ever seems to like their sale order and everybody thinks that if you're in a particular point in the sale, it brings you more money. What we found was the sale order had no effect. The higher reputation cattle, what we would probably say were the better cattle, brought the better money. No matter where they were at in the sale. So sale order had no effect on it whatsoever. So then we removed everything else and kind of tried to look at the reputation of the cattle producer themselves. When we took all the other variables out and all the other regressions out and nothing was left but differences based on reputation, we saw there was an absolute value for reputation or you building your reputation of good, solid cattle. So what we saw was over the years, over the past 10 years, we had one consignor that consistently brought more money for the same type cattle, the same color cattle, all this as compared to the other consignors, brought about $500 more per pen and that can only be attributed to reputation. So does your reputation make a difference? Absolutely. Even beyond the color and all that, reputation meant more for our consignors than any other variable we looked at as far as the herd builders sell went. There are no guarantees in making money in the cattle business. But if we look around, there are opportunities for us to add value to all our cattle. Now it will require a commitment, a high level of management and you will have to work at knowing your market and knowing the genetics. So if you're willing to do this, there is an opportunity for you to be in the replacement heifer business.