Harness Up! with Haste Draft Horses and Mules
🎙️ Harness Up with Haste Draft Horses and Mules — The #1 Podcast for Draft Horses, Mules, Ranch & Farm Life
Welcome to Harness Up with Haste Draft Horses and Mules, your trusted podcast for everything involving draft horses, draft mule teams, hitch driving, wagon training, and the rural Western lifestyle. Hosted by Steven Haste, lifelong teamster, mule man, and founder of Haste Draft Horses and Mules, this show brings you real, raw, unedited conversations with the folks who live and breathe this life every day.
We go beyond the barn to cover the ranch and farmer lifestyle, giving you authentic stories straight from the field, the farm, the arena, and the backroads of America. From Percherons and Belgians to John mules and Molly mules, from Amish farms to Western ranches, we shine a light on the hardworking people and animals who keep these traditions alive.
🔹 Discover tips on mule training, harness work, conditioning, horse-drawn farming, and wagon driving
🔹 Get behind-the-scenes insights on draft horse and mule sales, including teams currently available
🔹 Hear from horsemen, ranchers, farriers, vets, Amish families, and Western lifestyle legends
🔹 Recorded in-person and on the road, featuring raw and honest conversations—never over-edited or filtered
If you're searching for Draft Horse teams for sale, Draft Mule teams for sale, or just want to feel like you're part of the barn crew, saddle up with us. Every episode is packed with real voices, true stories, and down-to-earth wisdom.
🎧 New episodes monthly — available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and all major platforms.
🌐 Website: https://drafthorsesandmulesforsale.com
📺 YouTube Channel: Haste Draft Horses and Mules
📞 Call Steven at 606-303-5669 to ask about the current horse and mule teams available.
Subscribe now — Harness up, hit the trail, and enjoy the ride with us. It’s real. It’s raw. It’s the way it ought to be.
A Brand Is More Than Just a Mark — It’s a Legacy. In the world of horses, mules, and ranching, few things carry as much weight as a brand. At Haste Draft Horses and Mules, we understand that a brand is not just a physical stamp on hide or a logo on a hat—it’s a promise, a legacy, and a reputation built with every hoofbeat and handshake.
Harness Up! with Haste Draft Horses and Mules
The Longhorn Legend: Darrell Dickinson's Cattle Empire
Ever wondered why anyone would choose Texas Longhorns over standard black cattle? Darrell Dickinson, the "Longhorn Legend" himself, reveals how these iconic animals have built his multimillion-dollar empire through unexpected revenue streams that most cattle producers never consider.
At 83 years young, Darrell has transformed his Barnesville, Ohio, ranch into an international Longhorn powerhouse since buying his first six cows and a bull in 1967. While everyone told him he was crazy, that skepticism confirmed he was onto something special. Today, his operation has expanded far beyond just selling breeding stock (though they've sold the highest-priced bulls in history).
What makes Longhorns truly exceptional is their complete utilization potential. When Darrell processes a cow, he doesn't just harvest beef – he transforms the skull into a $6,000 showpiece for European steakhouses and American retailers like Bass Pro Shops. From the horns come 74 different artisanal products. The lean, grass-fed beef yields 34% usable meat compared to only 26% from Angus cattle. Even the tourism aspect generates revenue, with thousands of visitors annually taking narrated ranch tours to see these magnificent creatures up close.
The genetic aspects fascinate Darrell, who likens the breeding process to "a chess game where you're trying to think three pieces in advance." Through careful selection including IQ testing (!), he's developed cattle with exceptional horn growth, striking colors, and adaptable grazing habits that require less land than conventional breeds. His current headliner bull, Jam Box, sports massive 103-inch horns at just six years old.
Looking toward the future, Darrell sees grass-fed Longhorn beef as increasingly important. As concerns mount about feeding human-consumable grain to livestock, Longhorns' ability to thrive on brush, weeds, and marginal pasture positions them perfectly for sustainable ranching.
Ready to start your own Longhorn journey? Visit TexasLonghorn.com to explore Darrell's 14,000-page treasure trove of information, or join one of his upcoming business seminars, where he shares over 90 strategies for Longhorn profitability. As Darrell says, "You don't have to see to your destination – just start with the light you have and keep moving forward."
Check out Darol's Website - https://www.texaslonghorn.com/
Find us online at DraftHorsesAndMulesForSale.com
late evening to you folks. Steven hastier with haste draft horses and mules harnessed up podcast. Hope everybody's doing good today. Hadn't never done a podcast this way before. This is new to me and this is new to my guest on the screen there with me. But we worked through it and got it all taken care of and I appreciate you for hanging in there with me. Guys. We're going to try to start doing more of these as time goes along.
Speaker 1:I really wanted to. When I first started this podcast, I wanted to do all of them in person. I wanted to bad, but I learned quickly that that's hard to do. I can't travel the country all the time doing podcasts like I want to. So I got this program. Now that's going to let me record a lot of podcasts with people all over the country by the way of the internet. So that sounds good. So I'm looking super forward to it. But as always, guys, I'm Stephen Haste, I'm your host of Harness Up Podcast and on the other side of the screen here with me today, I got the one and the only the Longhorned legend, mr Darrell Dickinson. How are you, darrell?
Speaker 2:Good.
Speaker 1:Good to see you, buddy. I've never met you in person, but I'd like to sometime, and I like that. Hat you got on right there? That's nice guys. What daryl does is he's a longhorn breeder and a longhorn cattle rancher and he lives up in ohio. We're at in ohio.
Speaker 2:Daryl is exactly we're in barnesville, ohio. We're right in the central eastern part of ohio.
Speaker 1:We're 100 miles straight east of columbus okay, you know I had a good friend that lived right in there, amish boy that I know here by the name of john. His mom and dad live in barnesville, ohio, enos and mary schrock and a super good people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've heard the name but I've never done any business with them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, super good people. I was there one time and I met them. That's a beautiful place up there. I love that country up there.
Speaker 2:Well, it's good cattle country and it's all been reclaimed and mined, and so they've really turned it into ranch country.
Speaker 1:How long have you been in the longhorn business, Darrell? When did you get started?
Speaker 2:I bought my first cattle in 1967, and I bought six cows and a bull. One of the things that was good about it is every neighbor I had, every friend and every relative told me I was crazy. When you get that kind of feedback right off the bat, you know you're doing the right thing yeah, my grandpa always told me that.
Speaker 1:He said if somebody's giving you bad feedback, you know you're doing something right well, that means you're not going to have any competitors that is the truth. You've had some good bulls along your time and a lot of good cattle, and not only do you raise cattle, but you help people, you teach them about the breed and I've really enjoyed a lot of your things on your website and talking about all your different cattle and genetics and things.
Speaker 2:Well, it's a fascinating study and you know, in the Bible a lot of the kings bred horses and had vineyards and even Hitler had a genetic breeding program for people. But genetics have fascinated minds of all kinds of people for thousands of years, trying to identify ways to connect the genetics to create a better product. And it's like a chess game. You move every little piece and you you're trying to think three pieces in advance and it's uh, it'll tax your brain.
Speaker 1:Definitely that's the truth. That is the truth. Not only do you sell longhorns, though, you invite people there to check out your longhorns and take tours and you sell beef and all kinds of stuff. Tell the people a little bit about your business there, what you do there.
Speaker 2:Well, our main business is selling registered cattle and we've started more people in the Longhorn business than any other ranch in the nation. We've sold some very high-priced cattle. We've sold the highest price bullets ever sold. But our stuff is all private treaty so it doesn't. The numbers don't get published. When people start bragging about big numbers, they generally didn't do it, you know. You know how that goes so. But we've started a lot of people into business and we sell some really high-priced cattle. But you don't have to do that. You can be in the middle range and the business is very good. But the Longhorn gives you opportunities and we've got a store here where we sell about 200 animals a year out of our stores beef products. And I've got a Walmart 16 miles east of us and one 22 miles west, so everybody knows what meat sells for at Walmart. So I've got to live here in this world between two Walmarts and some days I sell more beef than Walmart. You know, I don't mean all Walmart, I mean like one of the stores I can. But the deal is people drive here to buy all natural beef, no steroids, no hormones, no implants, and they buy halves of beef and they may buy. Well, I had a guy come from Nashville and bought 28 boxes of grass fed ground beef 50 pound boxes. And so people don't aren't trusting as they used to be and they're hunting somebody they can trust and they can drive down the road and see our cattle. They know they're eating grass and they can watch how we handle them. And we drive cattle right down the highway here and people come down with their cars and drive through the herds as they're moving along Musgrat Road which goes through four miles through the middle of the ranch here. So we sell beef, we sell breeding stock, we sell feeder steers, we sell bull semen embryos and we've exported now to 33 countries and we've started longhorn herds in 33 countries of the world. And the exporting is not easy and those governments normally try to make it hard, but regardless we've got nucleus herds started in several countries and that's a project I've worked on. I won't say that it's been profitable, but it's been a dedication effort.
Speaker 2:And we do the tours. But it's been a dedication effort and we do the tours. We take several thousand people on pasture tours and we do a 75-minute narrated tour and that's during the summer. We have a lot of people flow through here but you couldn't do a tour of an Angus herd because nobody cares, they're just a blob out there in the pasture. But the longhorns people love to look at them and they hand feed them and so you know. Those are things that we work on and that we do and it all you know. Like the COVID year, our tourism went to nothing and the last two years after COVID, where people are getting out and moving, the tourism is really great. So a lot of people are coming in. So we do tours for 10 or more people and our website is longhorntourscom. You can see kind of what we do and how we do it there.
Speaker 2:But the spinoffs is what makes the other parts of it more profitable. If you didn't have the spinoffs like, for instance, when Walmart sells ground beef, they order it in wholesale and get it really cheap and they sell a product what it is. But when we process a longhorn cow, we grind her and we sell a product a little better than Walmart and we sell a product a little better than Walmart. But then, after we've put that in our inventory, we also have a skull that we sell and we clean and polish skulls and we sell about 200 skulls a year. So sometimes our skulls will sell, like our skulls that are over 100 inches, tip to tip. We sell those for $6,000 and we send them all over.
Speaker 2:We just sold 10 skulls to Bass Pro Shops that we shipped to Missouri and they're starting to make a chandelier out of longhorn skulls and we've got some contacts in Europe. When they put in a steakhouse somewhere in Europe they'll order a dozen polished skulls from us and hang skulls all over their steakhouse there and so whenever there's a new steakhouse goes on in Paris or any place, well, we're going to sell several crates of skulls. So the spinoff of the longhorn breed makes them easily the most profitable breed of cattle in the United States, makes them easily the most profitable breed of cattle in the United States and they're the easiest to raise. They'll eat more brush and browse and weeds and stuff than other breeds. You can feed four longhorns on the pasture where you could put three Angus cattle, because the Angus are picky, but the longhorns will eat multiplier rows and all kinds of crazy stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, One thing about longhorns that really interests me. It's so much more than just a black cow. You know, you got the horns, you got the history of them, you got the colors. There's so many different colors and so many different patterns. And also the one thing is too, some people ride them things. Have you ever rode a longhorn?
Speaker 2:we used to. We used to break and train about three a year and they're they're really easy to sell, but now we're more to just selling them to people that break them and ride them, rather than doing that here. It's just, we've got 11 employees here and we are. We've got 72 miles of fence to maintain. And just the workload here is that sometimes we're not really adding any more projects right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the truth. You've got your hands full the way it is. Talk to us about Longhorn Beef. I've had it. It is so much leaner to us about longhorn beef.
Speaker 2:I've had it. It is so much leaner. Well, during COVID we ran out of cattle to grind because we were selling so much ground beef that I bought a couple of truckloads of cull Angus cattle from some registered Angus breeders and I wanted their biggest cattle that were poor. I didn't want fat cattle because you just throw the fat away. So when we got through processing those cattle, when we took the live weight that I bought them from and process them, we got 26% lean grind off of those cattle from live weight to ground beef.
Speaker 2:And we had to fight getting it lean enough for our market because our people like lean. And we found we could take a longhorn cow and we could get 34% lean beef out of her because although she wasn't shaped like a propane tank, we didn't have all that fat to throw away. So they'll give you 34% lean grind compared to an Angus 26%. Now I'm not saying that's every animal and all through the breed. I'm just saying on my sampling of about 25 Angus cattle that we processed and weighed it, and then our other cattle that we process and weighed it and then our other cattle that we've done several thousand of that's numbers that we have, but then of course we have a skull to sell and we sell hides and all kind of stuff that are also spinoffs. We sell 74 kind of horn products in our store things made out of horn wow, that's amazing really.
Speaker 1:There's so many uses. You're really using the whole cow, you're not just using the meat.
Speaker 2:There's a use for all of it well, you know, a lot of people only want to mess with the easy stuff and some of that stuff is is slow and hard to work with, but it, but it works are you what?
Speaker 1:what's your main bull now you're breeding like? Do you have? How many bulls do you have that you're breeding right now?
Speaker 2:I've got 18 bulls in the pasture and we put we put 125 cows in the ai pasture to artificially breed and we breed them one time and we get around a 69% to 71% conception with one straw and then we turn them with a cleanup bull. So we put 125 cows in the pasture and the other day the guys told me they bred 109. And some of the others they had caught them in heat or they didn't come in heat yet, whatever. So out of that we'll get about 75 AI calves and then those cows go out. Out of that we'll get about 75 AI calves and then those cows go out. Total numbers we're putting 643 cows.
Speaker 2:We have breedable females this year that are either AI or natural service. We have a breed called Bulingo, which is a Dutch breed. It comes out of Holland and it's got a white belt around them. They're a slick-haired, real thick, beefy animal. No-transcript. And our, our most popular bull now is a bull called jam box and he's you mentioned the cowboy tough checks, but he's actually went over 100 inches, tip to tip, several weeks younger than cowboy tough checks.
Speaker 2:So he's gonna be big he's 103 quarters now, just turned six years old wow so he is going to be real big. You got kids floating around your studio there oh yeah, well, I'm in the kitchen.
Speaker 1:I ain't got much of a studio here at home, but uh, I had to just make do where I could. And this little boy is supposed to be in the bed, but he's been standing here watching us, so I guess I'll let him watch well, the key on this kind of zoom stuff is keep your family members pretty well dressed if they're're going to wander around behind you.
Speaker 2:The kids running by with no clothes on doesn't work the best.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's something else. Now, that's the truth. These kids, they come out all the time now. Yeah, man, that bull's a beautiful bull. I was actually looking at him the other day. He's super nice, super nice bull, and I'd say y'all got a lot, a lot planned for him, for sure we're.
Speaker 2:We're trying to get 100 calves out of him this year and it takes about 100 calves to know what a bull's strengths and weaknesses are. But some bulls have a genetic balance where they actually breed better than themselves and sometimes they do it only on heifers and sometimes only on bulls and in 100 calves. If you keep them and get your numbers and weigh and measure, you'll find out the genetic identity of that bull and how to mate him. But a lot of these young bulls are buying. They're all excited about some young bulls. Well, they're just starting. They have no clue what they're going to do. So you know we found the best genetic improvement comes with bulls, where we got a lot of data on them. We can figure out how to mate them.
Speaker 1:For sure, do you do a lot of embryo transplants.
Speaker 2:When there were just a few really good cows in the breed. At one time we had 80 over 85 donors and that was an 80, 81 to 83, 1981, 83, and it was the right thing to do then. But now there's so many really good cows we just find very little need for embryo transfer anymore because there's really great cows and you can buy great cows and you can buy semen on the really top bulls and you can raise them so easy and so much more economical than the embryo thing. And we've done AI embryo transfer, cloning, ivf, and we'll probably never do cloning again, although we haven't written that out. But to clone one's about $16,000.
Speaker 2:But if you've got the right animals. It's not off the chart anymore, but I doubt if we ever do any IVF. That is so difficult to get efficient numbers and most people lose money by wrong matings. They put the wrong bull with a cow. That just isn't right. That's where I think some of the biggest losses are in the industry is just not figuring out the matings.
Speaker 1:By what we're going to title this episode. You know about longhorns. It's going to have longhorns in the title. You know it is. There's going to be probably a lot of people come on here and listen to this podcast. That's new to longhorns, you know, wanting to get into them. What's some advice? Some of the main advice you have for people wanting to get into longhorns.
Speaker 2:Well, the first step of it is to. There's three steps. One is to develop your genetic base. You got to get out someplace where you're off, where you can get land values reasonable, and you got to be in an area where the taxes, where you can stand that, and then study your lesson and find out the families that are consistently good and that can be developed. And then the the real success is the matings I mean, excuse me, the man the marketing part of it at the end.
Speaker 2:Uh, if you know, I started in with a breed of cattle one time and I bought a bunch of cattle like twice as many as I wanted and I worked at marketing some of them. I just wanted to test and see how hard they were to sell. And so when you get started working on your marketing right at the first and start getting some clients there that you can have repeat buyers, that's a good, healthy way to start. But the better cattle you have, the more success you're going to have. But you're not going to, you're not going to lose any money because any kind of old, cheap cattle, anything nowadays is profitable. The, the cattle or the meat is so high you just can't lose. It's never been as high in history as it is right now yeah, I know, I know it's unreal Like cattle.
Speaker 1:I watch that Superior Livestock Auction a lot on YouTube. I enjoy just watching it and see what they bring. And yeah, it's unbelievable Unbelievable. I don't know why it's so high. Do you have a reason why?
Speaker 2:Well, the American Farmland Trust told us about 15 years ago that 3% of the United States goes under cement every year, either cement or development. And you drive, stephen, you drive through Iowa and you'll find beautiful cornfields and there'll be a subdivision taken into 40 acres of a cornfield on this side and 40 acres over there. And if you look at 3% of the United States farm ground going under cement or subdivision every year and you multiply that by 10, that's what's happened in the last 10 years Then the government has decided years ago the Agenda 21, united Nations that private citizens shouldn't own land. The government should really own all the land. So the government is taxing people and taking tax money and buying land from private enterprise. So now the federal government owns right at a third of all the landmass of the United States.
Speaker 2:Our little state of Ohio owns 860,000 acres of Ohio that the state has bought from private enterprise. Last month Mike Lee from Utah said hey, they put in the big beautiful bill that they wanted to sell three and a half million acres of government land. And boy, the tree huggers went crazy and it was like they were going to put cement on top of Old Faithful and doze down Pikes Peak, but millions of acres of this land is just a Nevada desert and, like in Ohio, this is fertile land. The government's bought and it's just turned.
Speaker 2:They call it public land but it's not. It's just land that you can't trespass on or you can't put a four-wheeler on it or you know there's limitations. They call it public land so you think it's yours, but it's really their land. They control it and you try to buy one acre back from the government. The government will not sell you back one acre once they get it. They never need the money, they don't have to pay any taxes, they don't have to pay any interest. So this gulping up of the government taking the land is one of the factors behind. I mean, you know if you were building anything and the government took a third of your property away from you. It changes things and right now Mike Lee tried to sell three and a half million acres back to private enterprise and the big beautiful bill and they went crazy and he didn't get an acre in it. He didn't get that anywhere. He got nothing done with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and a lot of Ohio too is Amish land the other part of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, the Amish do stuff with it and they pay taxes.
Speaker 1:They do exactly.
Speaker 2:When the government buys land, a third of the United States is not taxed, and so the people who own the other two-thirds have to pay for the schools, the roads and the law enforcement, because the government doesn't pay tax on the land that they own.
Speaker 1:That's the truth.
Speaker 2:So part of that is where your price of beef is is coming in. It's just more costly to grow cattle than it used to be do you see it?
Speaker 1:keep it on going up, or do you think it's peaked right now?
Speaker 2:well, it's like the, the old rancher and his wife are arguing and she says, honey, we're not making any money with cattle. And he says, well, we can't go into turkeys, the government may outlaw Thanksgiving. So just, you know some of this stuff. You can talk about it and guess about it, but people in the United States are not going to quit liking beef.
Speaker 2:They're not going to quit eating hamburgers, and so let me throw one thing to your listeners, Stephen. But right now, 90% of what a chicken, a turkey or a hog eats, and about 70% of what cattle eat, is human consumable. So the corn which is the main factor in the diet of dairy cattle, and everything is corn.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true 90% of what chickens eat is human consumable. So somewhere down the line, some group of bunny huggers are going to say, hey, All this corn is being thrown in the bunk and these cattle or chickens or whatever is eating it? That could go to Africa and feed starving orphans. This is really bad. These chicken growers or pig growers, they're bad people. They're just not efficient. So there will be some pressure at some time. I'm telling you this for a fact, but I can't tell you the timing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Somebody will wake up and say, hey, I think this is bad. And they're going to say everybody that's raising a hog is a bad person. And so at that point it's like right now, when they started talking about colored additives and Cheerios or something all of a sudden the manufacturer says, hey, we can take that color out. So all of a sudden, then the producers are going to say, down the road, when the bunny huggers get mad, they say, well, we don't have to feed corn, we can do this different. So at that point everybody has to be ready to transition to a non-grain food producing thing which is grass-fed longhorn beef, I believe, or catfish or sheep or goats, and those are some meat products and some protein that can be raised with no grain. So that's what I'm just telling you. That's what the future is going to be, but I can't give you the date on it.
Speaker 1:But you asked me to make some projections, but that will happen. It's coming. I like goat meat, though now.
Speaker 2:I've had goat when I was a little boy and it's good.
Speaker 1:Well, it's like possum, it's just how you cook it I've eaten possum. I've eaten possum and coon both and I like them.
Speaker 2:My daddy used to cook them real good. Well, we have turtle here. In this country there's a you better believe it people that have a turtle festival once a year and they, they cook turtle every way you can fix turtle.
Speaker 1:But they say a mud turtle's like seven different types of meat in it too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, some of it is red as pork and some of it is white as the breast of a chicken, I don't know, how the turtle does that.
Speaker 1:Since we're on the subject of all this meat, what do you think about lab-grown meat?
Speaker 2:That's coming on too, you know about lab grown meat is that's coming on too. You know well the people that I've talked to and the things I've read to get the taste of a charcoal steak off the grill. They are so far from being there that you know it's almost like eating dirt. They, they're just, they're still not, they're not close yeah, I don't like them.
Speaker 1:Vegan beef burgers either. I had one of them suckers oh not good I've never heard anybody that says boy.
Speaker 1:It's great, you know I think it's a hard, it's a hard sell it is, it has to be I mean, it has to be a hard sale. So you're selling a lot of beef up there, you're offering tours, you're selling cattle every day. You know me and you, we kind of had a hard schedule. Yeah, as you all know, I sell mules and horses every day and daryl sells cattle every day. And he said he sent me an email and it it was really true, sales come first and that's the. You know, that's part of it, and I thought I emailed him back. Hey, it does here too. So, uh, but um, it's about 11, 10, 30 at night and we're hanging in there. And, daryl, how old are you?
Speaker 2:I'm 83 this year still kicking, still going well, my, my 60s and 70s were my most profitable years. I I got, I got a lot of things done in my 60s and 70s and you know I believe the Bible and if you read the Bible, stephen, you will hunt and hunt to find anywhere where anybody retired. People in the Bible were workers.
Speaker 2:And they worked from daylight till dark and they achieved stuff and they were efficient. And you know, there's only one guy in the Bible that retired. And one guy says you know, I'm not doing this anymore, I'm quitting. And he took off on a cruise and they kicked him overboard and he got swallowed by a big fish and even the fish got sick of him and puked him out on the bank and he went back into business. But that's the only person in the whole Bible that ever retired and it didn't work well for him now?
Speaker 1:yeah, that's true. What's your most fondest memory of your longhorns? Like something that just sticks in your head, a good one of the fondest memories you'll always remember in your career with the longhorns?
Speaker 2:well, if you look at it as a business, the two, two fun things are number one when you cash a check for selling one.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And number two is getting them off your grass so your other cattle can eat the grass. But you know we've won. It's always kind of fun to sell cattle to go to Texas and have them win championships in Texas with the competition there. But last year at the International Championship Show we raised the all-age champion cow and the all-age champion steer at the show and we had sold them to clients. So it's more valuable to us for our clients to win than for us to win stuff. So we're always excited when they win. But in Texas, when you went down there and beat everybody in Texas, there's a lot of stuff in Texas.
Speaker 1:There is.
Speaker 2:And there's a lot of people working really hard at raising cattle and good cattle down there.
Speaker 1:A lot of good longhorns. We're trying to raise longhorns down there. A lot of good Longhorn. We're trying to raise Longhorns down there too, like crazy.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:There is a difference. In Longhorns though I love Longhorns I always have I got an addiction of sitting at night and looking at your website. Like I said, I just really enjoy them. And when I made the brand for the business, you know we sell draft horses and mules, but you know if you notice my hat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it looks like horns that's preparing for the future there you go I got the haste brand and I got my horns too, so it's my brand for my cattle and our draft horses and mules and that's why I've done that. A lot of people might not have knew that, but, um, I really want to get me a herd started someday and just start out with you know 10 cows and get them bred and see what happens.
Speaker 2:You know well, the math is if you buy one cow with a heifer calf and she's bred, she'll have you a calf next year and the heifer calf will be old enough to breed next year. And the assumption that she has half heifers and half bulls and that something happens and one out of 10 animals either aborts or doesn't breed, or something happens, you lose one for some reason. In 10 years you'll have 37 breeding age females. So you get a 37% increase just by the normal multiplication of the breeding Heifers, bulls, heifers, bulls. And then you take that, which the stock market won't tell you anything. It'll do 37%. And I've had guys try to call me and say, hey, we'd like to sell you shares in this or something like that.
Speaker 2:And I said, well, do you have anything that does better than 37%? Oh, no, no, nothing, nothing's better than 37%. Well, if you can't do better than that, boy, I'm not a good player there. But then you take the 37% just in the normal multiplication. But then you take the 37% just in the normal multiplication and if you upgrade them and you buy semen on the very best bulls in the breed, then you can get about a 30% jump in value, not just 37% in numbers, but in value, no-transcript. So you can be looking at a Longhorn investment and if you work it right, you could make a 50%, 75% profit on your cattle. And somebody says, well, I'm studying my lesson, I'm going to keep reading this and I'm going to read that and read that. But, stephen, it's like when you drive home from church Sunday night, you may live 20 miles from church and your car lights may only shine a city block, but you'll be able to safely get home.
Speaker 2:You don't have to have the light shine all the way to your driveway to get to your house, so you just got to get started and just go with the light you got and keep moving.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's true, and you know there is a difference in these longhorns. Like people around here around home I heard my whole life growing up you can't make no money on them. Old longhorns, what do you want them old longhorns for? My uncle, my grandpa, all my people cattle raisers, angus raisers. They say that. But once you study it and you understand it, you know there is money to be made. But I do understand by looking at the cattle and studying them. There's like different steps. There's there's the backyard longhorn. That's never going to make it and you got to. I've tried to study those horns, how they turn, how they tip the bases.
Speaker 2:There's so much to it well, you could go out and look at the EPDs and buy 20 Angus heifers on EPDs and buy semen on the three best Angus bulls and next year you could have calves born that were top of the line in the Angus breed really the best.
Speaker 2:That's how easy it is and you don't have to be smart. If you just do that and it's made it so easy, well, anything that's easy to do, then the whole world can do it. But the harder it is. And the longhorn puts a bunch of factors in where you're looking at conformation, disposition, color horns, horn shape, horn growth. We even do IQ scores on our cattle.
Speaker 2:And we have a score on them, where and there's an article on our site you may have read but we halt or train all of our bulls in the fall and if they don't get a certain IQ score, we just castrate them and put them in our steer pasture, and we've done that since the early 70s. But the intelligence you can develop with these cattle by calling them for IQ and with a number of different tests that we used to identify the smarter ones With genetics, you can move any direction you want to do, and I'm sure you do it with your horses. You've got horses that learn faster and horses that are just jumpy or whatever, and and you, you can, you can turn that into a number, and, and, and and breed that direction If, if you try.
Speaker 1:But in the longhorn industry, even though you castrate a bull and you make a steer, there's a market for show steers in the longhorn industry.
Speaker 2:It's amazing to me. I had a guy come here a few years ago and they said they wanted to buy 32 steers and I sold him a full semi-load of steers, a whole load of steers, semi-load of steers, a whole load of steers. And they went to Somerset, Colorado, and we loaded and just filled a semi-load of steers, but they wanted them just for looks.
Speaker 1:Hey, a lot of people I'm telling you, if they don't know longhorns and stuff, you walk up and look at one for the first time. It's like a wild animal. It's like an exotic animal like whoa. Look at this thing first time. It's like a wild. It's like a wild animal. It's like an exotic animal like whoa. Look at this thing. I mean I'm sure you hear it all the time there's people come to your farm and drive around. You know, go on those tours. It blows their mind. It's like better than the zoo well there.
Speaker 2:They've been a great joy for our family and people tell me it's as well. I'm just going to do this for the fun of it. I'm not doing it for the business. I says no. I said do it as a business and then enjoy your business.
Speaker 1:That one boy you've got. I can't remember his name. He's like splashed up all over. It looks orange and black and blue and brown. What is his? I can't remember his name.
Speaker 2:Oh, you're probably talking about Dre Gary he's brindled and he's got the polka dots and everything.
Speaker 1:Unreal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, he's actually got a combination of colors. He's got a spot pattern like an Appaloosa horse, and then he's got the tricolor pattern which goes from like black on the knees up to like gold up on the top of his back. It's like a bay horse that blends in color. And then he's got the brindle factor that puts a stripe down through it, so you can breed him to all kinds of cows and you don't have to get all of those factors, but you can get one or two or three of them, and they're all popular, but you get them all in one package and boy, it's a beautiful thing you breeding him still yes, we sold him.
Speaker 2:He died last year and he was 16 but we sold him, I think, when he was nine. But we we kept enough semen that we'll always be able to breed about 20 cows a year to him oh, wow of of the Of the bulls, many bulls and you find it in your horses too.
Speaker 2:They're popular for two years or three years and then something comes along and kind of kicks them off the throne. But drag iron has been around now for, I think, like 18 years and his daughters are still topping the sales. You can watch the sales on online and and there'll be a drag iron daughter come in and she'll bring 20 or 40 thousand dollars and just boom, boom, boom, and there's people out there says I've always wanted a drag iron daughter and and they eventually get one bought I'd like to have me about 10 cows, 80, at least 80 plus all black.
Speaker 2:Well, you can do that. I love them. We've got a bull called Shoman that's homozygous black, and every calf he has is either black or black and white spotted. So we can breed him to a cow that's just dirt colored, just the color of pale cement, desert sand, just blah, and he'll get a black and white polka dot calf just black or black and white every time.
Speaker 1:I love those all black longhorns. That's my favorite.
Speaker 2:Well, you could put a herd together and other people like them too. Oh, yeah, but you got the homozygous black factor and if you use some of that well boy bang, you can have a whole black herd. That it's.
Speaker 1:It's impressive my favorite thing on your website. I look at it a lot, but I love going back and looking at all your reference cows and your reference bulls way back. That's interesting and how, how they've evolved over the years. If anybody's out there, if you're interested in longhorns, if you're even not interested, you just like looking at things online. Or, like cattle, you've got to look at Daryl's website. Tell them about your website a little bit, daryl, and how they find you online.
Speaker 2:Well, the ranch site is TexasLonghorncom and there's over 14,000 pages of information and graphics and so forth and history stuff. And then the store is wwwhead2tailcom. It's H-E-A-D, number two T-A-I-L, and we sell tails and we sell head mounts. So everything from head to tails we sell in our store and our tours are wwwlonghorntourscom. So any of those will go to those different pieces of the business and I was just googling before this podcast.
Speaker 1:I like to check out people you know, make sure I know everything about them. You did you write a book?
Speaker 2:I'm not a writer okay but I worked with dr ben green, okay, from combi texas, which you may know something about, dr green well, I was reading about it well, he, he wrote a bunch of books about horse trading and cow trading stuff.
Speaker 2:But but anyway, dr green says, well, you don't have to write to be a writer. He said you just get a little tape recorder and tell a story and hand it to your secretary and she types it up and you look over it and prove it. And there you go, you got yourself a chapter. I thought, well, whoa, that's not that bad. So I've written.
Speaker 2:I wrote a book in the seventies on livestock photography and it sold out six printings. And then about 20 years ago I wrote a book in the 70s on livestock photography and it sold out six printings. And then about 20 years ago I wrote a book called Filet of Horn and it's just chapters I think 32 chapters of buying and selling and getting shafted by crooks and so forth in the cattle business. And then about eight years ago I wrote a book called Horn Stew business. And then about eight years ago I wrote a book called Horn Stew and it documents a lot of really good business, people that had good or bad business plans and did well or didn't do well, and just observations of people in their business plans. And I did one about two years ago. We call Larapin Horn. Have you ever heard the word Larapin?
Speaker 1:No, I've not.
Speaker 2:L-A-R-A-P-I-N. You can look it up in Google and Google barely knows what it is. But I've heard fastest on gun smoke use it seven times. But the old timers and the frontiers people used it and it's just a word that went away. Old timers and the frontiers people used it and it's just a word that went away. But in a sentence I'd go visit my mom when she was alive and she says daryl, here, have a piece of pie. I just made a mincemeat pie and it's larapin good. But larapin is a word that means really, really good, better than you expected, higher than you thought it was going to be, above and beyond. So the larapin horn book is one of my mom's favorite words. But and and this is an old-timer's word, now I've heard that word, I've heard it.
Speaker 1:Here's the difference in kentucky and ohio our pronunciation you're calling it larap. My granny used to call it larpin.
Speaker 2:Oh, really Lar.
Speaker 1:Larpin Down here. We say things different, so it's lar instead of lar.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, well, either one.
Speaker 1:She used to say that herb, biscuit and grass, that's larpin good. She'd say that sometimes.
Speaker 2:Okay Well, it's just a word that went away, but yeah Well it's just a word that went away. But anyway, that book deals with people that I've known and enjoyed living and doing business with that were persistent. There were people that were told don't do this, you can't do this, this won't work, and they just did it anyway, and there's a bunch of chapters about people that I just dearly love that were those. Everybody that you admire is a persistent person.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:You don't admire anybody that gives up. You admire the Donald Trumps of the world that won't give up and won't quit fighting. You love those people.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm. I know a lot of them and I'm thankful for them. And they help me still till today, you know they help everybody they do, and, uh, you're a legend too. Man, I'm glad to do this podcast with you. You're a great guy and I've really enjoyed sitting here talking to you. I'd love to meet you sometime.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna come up here and see you on these days well do, and we can uh send you a little package of like 10, 10 cows and a bull and we'll get your make your dreams come true pretty fast. All you gotta do is write the check.
Speaker 1:Man, I'm on the other side of the block now. That feels weird. I'm usually the one saying that now I'm on the other side.
Speaker 2:Darrell.
Speaker 1:I've sure appreciated you. I'm glad you done this podcast with me. Do you have any final thoughts you'd like to tell the folks out there that may be going to listen to this anywhere in the world?
Speaker 2:Well, our biggest enemy in production and commerce is the government, of course, and everybody needs to be more diligent in avoiding taxes and really knowing about taxes, because taxes may be 30 to 50 percent of all your lifetime. Energy, your sweat and blood goes in taxes, and you need to study the tax codes and know everything about that, because while you're achieving your dream, the government is clipping the cream off the top of your dream all the time. So that's something a lot of people just don't think about or don't work at very much, and they need to, and you know, I know there's people that are profitable in draft horse business and thoroughbreds and all kinds of cattle, but to me the Longhorn thing has been the easiest over the years to work with and it's been. You know the cattle have a lot of longevity and there's just a number of profit things. So do something that you can handle. The key is buy a nice piece of land as far from the airport as you can get, and you'll get more land for the dollar. You know more acres.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:I'm going to do a business Zoom next Tuesday night at seven o'clock and I'm enrolling people for it and I've advertised it on my site. But I'm going to deal with 90-some-odd ideas of how to be profitable in the longhorn cattle business and I've got people enrolled from Germany and Canada and all over that they need more answers and I've done a lot of things wrong and tried to correct it as fast as I could. I'm going to try to help. I can take up to 100 people on my Zoom call how many do you have?
Speaker 1:so far.
Speaker 2:I haven't counted them, but I know it's not 100. Okay, it's halfway there or something, but it'll be the 29th of July, tuesday evening 7 o'clock, but I'm looking forward to that. We're going to talk about a number of things just to be more profitable and you're a better provider and parent if you can be profitable for your family.
Speaker 1:If anybody out there wants to join, you can go to his website and they can join, can't they? Yep For sure. All right guys. Well, we're going to go ahead and cut this off. It's about 1043 here on the east coast and eastern time, and we probably need to go to bed, because I don't know what time you got to get up, but I got to get up pretty early, so well, I get a lot done after nine o'clock at night because my phone generally quits ringing and I I get caught up for that's right I have to wait till the.
Speaker 2:When people answer the phone, sometimes I tell them I'm the janitor and he says really? And I said, yeah, I clean up the messes after the employees leave.
Speaker 1:That's right, guys, check out all Daryl's websites. I'm going to put all of his websites in the description on this podcast and this will be on YouTube, so y'all go down the description, check them all out. And uh, we appreciate daryl and we want to support y'all. Come up and see you and we thank you for being on, daryl. You didn't have to do this and we sure appreciate it well, it's always fun, yep yeah, exactly and you do a good job.
Speaker 2:You do my best I'm learning.
Speaker 1:We're tonight was a learning curve, but we got through it, so that's good guys, thank you all for listening to this podcast, as always.
Speaker 1:We appreciate you. God bless you. And check us out on the World Wide Web at wwwdrafthorsesandmulesforsalecom. Also, we're all over social media Facebook, instagram, tiktok wherever you want to find us, we're there. Also, subscribe to our YouTube channel if you like what we're doing. We've got a goal to get to 100 000 subscribers by the end of the year, and we're over halfway, so we're going to get there. So without your help, though, we can't, so we need your help. Thank y'all. God bless you until the next podcast. We'll see you real soon good enough.
Speaker 2:Okay, bye, steven.
