David Murray

dmurray@greatfallstribune.com

Dave Hinman knew bull 5405 was going to be something special nearly from the moment the Black Angus calf hit the ground. Just how special wasn’t clear until the auction gavel struck last Tuesday.

On April 5, at the annual bull sale on the Hinman Angus Ranch east of Malta, bull 5405, now known as HA Cowboy Up 5405, sold for $350,000. It is the highest price ever paid for a bull in Montana’s history, and a testament to the success of a family ranching operation that’s been in business for 43 years.

“We are a complete family outfit,” Hinman said. “One of our daughters and my son-in-law are full partners with us here. I have a grandson that’s with us now, and I’ll tell yuh — it’s a pretty exciting time for the whole family.”

To put the record price in some perspective, good quality bulls on the open market typically sell for between $5,000 and $8,000. The bidding for Cowboy Up started at $25,000 and quickly spiked above the $100,000 mark.

Hinman said he and his family were pretty confident Cowboy Up would draw bids in the $200,000 range, but they had no expectation that Cowboy Up would draw a final sale price of more than a third of a million dollars.

The previous high sale price on a Hinman Angus bull was $100,000.

“We’ve sold some for $80,000 and $70,000 and $50,000, but it’s unbelievable to sell a bull for this kind of money,” Dave Hinman said. ”For him to go on and do what he did was completely unexpected to us. We had absolutely no idea he would do that.”

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Before a crowd of about 300 people at the Hinman Ranch Auction Barn, the bids on Cowboy Up ratcheted up beyond the $300,000 mark. When the bidding finally stopped, Cowboy Up went for a record $350,000. It was sold to a collaborative bid between the Wilks Ranch of Texas (owners of the N-Bar Ranch in central Montana) and the Express Ranch of Oklahoma.

What made Cowboy Up so valuable were some unprecedented performance records.

“When he came in at weaning time, he was the heaviest calf we had (952 pounds) and had an exceptional deep, thick body,” Hinman said. “We knew then we had a pretty special calf then, but there are so many hoops they’ve got to go through in the performance testing that you never get very excited until you get a little farther down the way with him.”

“In December we took a check weight on him and the bull was gaining over five pounds a day,” he added. “We started to see right there we had a special bull.”

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At one year, Cowboy Up weighed an impressive 1,609 pounds and had averaged approximately 4.25 pounds of weight gain every day throughout his first year of life. According to the Mississippi State University Extension Service, a good quality bull can be expected to gain 3.5 pounds a day during that same period.

“He was a unique bull in the sense that he was extremely high performance, high-gaining, heavyweight bull that excelled in his group with a moderate frame that will sire moderate frame cows that will last out here in the big country,” Hinman said. “It just made him a special bull from as many different traits on a bull as we’ve ever had.”

Cowboy Up already has been delivered to the ORIgen livestock genetic production company east of Billings. ORIgen will soon begin harvesting Cowboy Up’s semen, which could sell for more than $1 million throughout the bull’s productive lifetime.

“Usually a bull like that will sell semen anywhere from $30 a straw to $50 a straw,” said Jared Murnin, general manager of ORIgen.

A “straw” is the amount of bull semen necessary to impregnate a single cow.

“Some of them can produce 20,000 straws a year,” Murnin said of high quality production bulls. “Some of them can produce 50,000 a year. If you sold all of that at $50 a straw and 50,000 units, that could be a lot of money.”

The Hinman Ranch has retained a one-third revenue share interest in Cowboy Up that will allow the ranch to incorporate the record setting bull’s genetics into their breeding program for generations to come. The notoriety of having sold Montana’s most valuable bull likely will propel their family operation into the national spotlight.

“We’re really very humble people in that sense,” Hinman said.”Obviously something like this will help with name recognition — there’s no question about it, and we’re very fortunate for that.”