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Hillsboro family named top Ohio Seedstock Producer

By DOUG GRAVES
Ohio Correspondent

HILLSBORO, Ohio — John Grimes is the Ohio State University Extension educator in Highland County. John’s wife, Joanie, sells crop insurance in their city of Hillsboro. Their daughters, Lindsey and Lauren, are active with high school sports.

This family of four has varying interests, but when it comes to the tending to Angus on their 600-acre farm it’s a total team effort. They produce top Angus breeding stock for other breeders across the country. And so successful are they that the Ohio Catttlemen’s Association recently recognized the family as the 2008 OCA Seedlot Producer of the Year in Ohio.

“We’re not a feedlot facility,” Joanie said. “We’re an extensive embryo transfer program.”

The family (with the help of a local veterinarian) puts embryos into commercial herds thanks to their intense and timed genetic efforts. Once born the calves are returned to their farm.

“We basically pay people to be foster-moms,” Joanie said. “We may only have 175 cows on the premise but we’ll produce 300 calves a year.”

With this pair the Angus business is booming. They have customers in 22 states as well as Canada and Brazil. They attend 20 cattle shows annually, 11 months out of each year. They attend shows in Colorado, Maryland, Iowa, Kentucky and West Virginia.

Beef cattle have been in John’s family since the 1960s. John and his wife did a major overhaul of their farm operation in the mid-1990s and really focused on the Angus breeding stock.

“We were always in the cattle business anyway,” John said, “so we decided to concentrate on the Angus. We’ve been dealing with Angus the past decade and we had to make a decision. We either had to scale back on the herds or hire someone full-time, and we chose the latter. There’s a real challenge with all this.”

“I used to show horses and this is a lot rougher,” Joanie added.
On the farm it’s a family operation for sure. John and Joanie take care of the genetics and mating end of the business. Their daughters tend to the grooming and training of the animals, especially at shows.

The embryo production is preformed on the farm. With help from a veterinarian, the embryos are taken from the cows, kept frozen until needed.

“This is labor intensive,” Joanie said. “From January 10 through February 11, for instance, we were busy daily and the animals had a series of shots set on a schedule. The babies will be due around November 15.”

Fifteen cows are on such a schedule at any one time and the Grimes’ perform this task every 60 days.

“Rather than diversify across multiple enterprises you need to be diverse within an enterprise,” Joanie said.

John refers to the family business as niche marketing.

“With purebreds here this is niche marketing,” John said. “We can raise beef cattle but we’re trying to do something with a little more value than just commercial cattle. We’re trying to develop a premium for our animals. We do sell commercial cows and we sell feeder calves, but we pay our bills with higher valued seedstock.”
Competition? Believe it.

“It’s a very competitive market,” said John, who began farming in adjacent Brown County in 1983 and began his career as an OSU extension specialist three years later. “There’s very good breeders around Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. We’re all trying to sell to the same people.”

And the Grimes are looking at other ventures on their farm on state Route 73.

“We’ve always been into cattle production but we’re predominately into Angus, but we’ll soon be venturing into the Simmental breed,” Joanie said. “We’re doing this just for diversity.”

“It’s similar with car dealers,” John said. “You don’t see just one kind of car on a lot.”

Neither John nor Joanie are close to retirement, but should they take that path it’s likely their daughters will step up to the plate.
“I definitely want to be in agriculture because I’ve met so many people through agriculture and I’ve learned so much through ag,” said Lindsey, who wants to study animal science at Ohio State University next fall.

“I’ll be working with agriculture someday,” said Lauren, now a freshman in high school. “I could never work behind a desk and never look at the corn, cattle and other stuff out in the field.”

1/21/2009