Monte Shockley said his Hereford operation grew slowly, organically
POTEAU, OKLA. – Monte Shockley was just curious. When he began looking into breeding bulls, he was just an inquisitive teenager in 1990 who wanted to know how things worked.
Monte’s dad purchased him 10 registered Hereford heifers to breed with his Brahman bull to produce some tiger-striped calves, and Monte started to see how things worked, or didn’t work.
“The bull didn’t breed any cows, he just didn’t work,” Monte recalled. “That was the goal was to have some tiger-striped calves from these cows because they were kind of in demand and they still are. It didn’t work. So, I went to an AI school and learned how to AI cattle. I got online, just typed in Hereford semen, bought some from Wade Herefords, and by chance, I got really good semen. I didn’t even know I did.”
Monte’s plan worked and he was able to finally get the calves he wanted.
Now more than three decades later, that curiosity has turned into a thriving family-owned and operated business with Shockley Ranch Herefords.
“I continued to artificially inseminate them for about three years without ever owning a bull,” Monte said. “I just bred them and bred them again, whatever it took to get them bred. Fast forward to now off those original 10, I’ve got 200 plus registered females that all stem back from those 10.”
It didn’t take long for Monte’s initial curiosity to turn into something much more. His interest transformed into a passion and potential business.
Located near Poteau in the river valley of southeastern Oklahoma, the Shockley Ranch was established in 1998.
“It was never meant to be big,” Monte said. “I didn’t have much land then. We had about 40 acres and as the cattle grew, as the numbers grew and kind of kept the better heifers, started buying more real estate, increasing that. So as the numbers grew, the land grew, and as my numbers grew, my customer base grew.”
Monte said he had attempted to start a business in the same manner today, it would never work.
“If I just started out today, if I had 200 bulls to sell, I probably couldn’t sell them,” Monte said. “I didn’t have a market. People didn’t know I had them. I didn’t have the contacts, I couldn’t sell those things. The way it grew organically, it grew small. So one year we had five bulls to sell. The next year we had eight bulls to sell. The next year, 15, 25, 30, 40. As the herd grew, the contacts and the customer base grew too. So it grew linearly at the same time as we were growing the numbers, the amount of customers grew and now we sold bulls to like 15 states, but it worked well together as it.”
The Shockley Ranch Hereford now spans 1,500 acres, and Monte knows each animal there.
“I know these cattle really well and have continued to use AI. Every single cow in here gets a straw seed, gets AI bred and it all stems back to those original 10, which is kind of cool. Since then we’ve bought some of the cows off of Churchill and Atkins and different places. We have about 200 cows and we have more than 100 recip cows that we do embryos that we’ve bought or identified as the best cattle we have. Now that’s our main focus is trying to take those super cows until we have about 10 of those and we flush and the embryo thing’s kind of new for us. That’s the direction we’re going. We’re building all off of them.”
As the ranch shifts gears away from just AI, Monte looks back and says he wishes he had actually started embryos.
“That’s my main focus going forward. If I had to do it over again, I would’ve borrowed money and I would’ve bought five super cows,” Monte said. “I would’ve found five and I would’ve started that way if I could do it over again. We’re kind of doing that in reverse. We love what we got, but we think we can make it better and make it more uniform. With embryo transfer, we can just mass-produce those really good ones. A ranch would come up here and buy 10 bulls, but they’re at four different sires and 10 different cows. We can now offer them 10 full siblings sometimes. We get them just what they want and we can just get it in the right number. So uniformity and consistency are really key in this deal. And with the embryo stuff, we can get there.”
Along with embryos, Monte and his family have also diverted their time and efforts into showing bulls. Being able to produce the Show Bull of the Year has been a great advertisement for the business while also being fun for his kids.
As Monte looks toward the future, he plans to one day leave the ranch to his children as he sits back and watches them run it. But before then, he wants to make sure he has the Shockley Ranch Hereford in a position where it can keep producing The “Best Hereford Genetics.”
“I want them to have it. I want them to do it,” Monte said. “I know that I have at least two or three that want it. I don’t know what that looks like for me after that, but I’d like to step away and just watch them run it. I just want to have them set up the right way and have them built for success from a customer base. I want them to be set up if everybody wants it.”
