Keeping a successful cattle operation going almost in the shadows of Houston's skyscrapers has been Arlie Beckendorf's mission for several years. He has a commercial Brangus operation with about 70 mother cows near Tomball, Texas, about 30 miles northwest of Houston's skyscrapers.

Arlie grew up in the cattle business, although it was in the dairy cattle business. After attending junior college, he went into partnership with his father and brother in the dairy operation. After working at that for a while, he decided to go back to college, obtained a degree and began a career in education, but all the while maintaining a connection to the cattle business. In 1964, he switched to a beef cattle operation and has been in the beef cattle business since. He retired from his education career several years ago and now devotes his time fully to the cattle operation.

As he began the beef cattle operation, he always bought and used quality bulls and, because of time, used artificial insemination sporadically. He first purchased and began using CattleMax in August, 2004. Coming from the dairy business, he was accustomed to keeping detailed records and, prior to CattleMax, kept the records on index cards and in ledgers. In 1990 he upgraded to a simple 205-day program developed by Texas A&M, then progressed through two other software programs before switching to CattleMax. Arlie says, both of those programs were very cumbersome and hard to work with, and "when I discovered CattleMax, I felt like I'd gotten into the candy store!"

Three years ago, Arlie began using AI seriously. He searches for the best AI bulls to help him do the best job of developing replacement heifers, both for his herd and to sell to others. Close to 1/2 of his present cow herd is AI bred. Because of the development of those good heifers, he has a demand for those replacement heifers, more than he can readily supply. He sells by private treaty and also through some replacement sales. "With CattleMax, I can provide extensive records to the buyer(s) of the replacement heifers," Arlie says.

"CattleMax helps me keep up with my customers and their purchases", Arlie comments. He gives an example of how that helps in his operation: If a buyer of a heifer comes back a couple of years later and says he was very satisfied with that heifer and he'd like to buy another heifer out of that same dam, all I have to do is go to my CattleMax records, determine which heifer was bought by that customer.

Arlie uses CattleMax extensively in helping with his culling process. He says since he began using CattleMax and quality AI sires, there has been a steady increase in breed back percentage of his cows and also in weaning weights of his calves. He uses the flexibility of the program to customize the data and reports to his operation and takes advantage of the ease of retrieving the historical data, especially in the culling process.

Tips for other users of CattleMax from Arlie:

Patience - the program is so powerful and offers so many features, it's just like walking into a candy story and saying, "Where do I start?"

Explore - take time to go through the features just for your own information.

Begin with your own data/reports currently used and grow from there.

Take advantage of Cattlesoft's education programs and support.

Arlie makes good use of the reports feature of CattleMax. He says he uses the weaning report heavily. Other features he finds very helpful include being able to determine calving intervals. He uses that in his culling program. The bull progeny report is another feature he uses to compare how one bull's progeny performs compared to other bulls.

Since first learning of CattleMax at a Texas A&M Beef Cattle Short Course, Arlie says he's been that "kid in a candy store" with his record keeping. "There are so many features, I seem to keep discovering something new I can do with the software the longer I use it," Arlie comments. "It's been said that the two hardest things to handle in life are failure and success. The next hardest thing is selling a cull cow with a name. Though my cows wear an ear tag number and not a name, CattleMax records have helped me never to get to attached to a cow because you never know when she will need a one way ticket."

Arlie Beckendorf can be contacted at arliebeck(at)gmail(dot)com