Getting Gene home
We'd been talking about the bull for months before we did anything about it. That's fairly typical of how decisions get made here — a lot of conversation, a fair bit of second-guessing, and then eventually someone says "right, let's actually do it" and things move quickly from there.
The bull in question is Gene, and he came to us through Karoo Angus. We'd been keeping an eye on their program for a while, mostly because the traits we cared about — good temperament, sound structure, cattle that do well without a lot of fuss — kept turning up in the animals they were breeding. Buying him wasn't an impulse. It was the first time we'd put real thought into genetics rather than just working with whatever bull happened to be available and affordable.
Sight-mostly-seen
We saw plenty of photos and figures before we committed, and Rachel had been in contact with the team at Karoo Angus long enough to trust what we were being told. But there's a difference between assessing a bull on paper and standing in a yard with him, and we didn't get to do much of the latter until the deal was more or less done. That's the reality of buying genetics from outside your own patch — you do your homework, you ask the right questions, and at some point you decide to trust it.
It paid off. Gene turned out to be exactly the kind of animal we'd hoped for — settled, easy to be around, the sort of temperament you notice within the first five minutes of being near him.
The trip back
Getting him home was its own small saga — the kind of logistics day that involves more phone calls, fuel stops and rearranged plans than anyone tells you about when they talk about "buying a bull." Nothing went dramatically wrong, which on a farm counts as a genuine result. He travelled well, settled into the yards without much drama, and by the next morning was already behaving like he'd been here for years.
He wasn't the first bull we've owned, but he's the first one we bought on purpose rather than by process of elimination.
What it means for the herd
Gene is now doing the most important job on the property, and we're treating this as the real start of a deliberate Angus breeding program rather than just another bull replacement. We're not going to publish breeding dates or numbers here — those change too often to belong on a website — but we'll keep writing about how the genetics side develops, because it's the part of the farm we're most interested in getting right.
