A Look Back at Four Decades of Production Sale Catalogs

Our 42^nd annual sale catalog recently landed in mailboxes all over the country…and I’m  exhaling a long sigh of relief.

Assembling the sale catalog has been my job since 1998. That was the year our long-time sales manager, Dr. Bob deBaca, passed away from cancer; he had supervised the design and printing of the catalog since our first sale in 1978. While I was in college in the 1990s, working on a degree in Scientific & Technical Communication (i.e., tech writing), I had started offering input into the catalog’s design. When Bob died, we decided to produce our own catalog. Soup to nuts.

This American idiom conveys the idea ‘from beginning to end.’ It is based on the description of a full course dinner, progressing from the first course of soup to the final dessert course of nuts. It’s an apt analogy for the production of the sales catalog, which contains many courses that must be served sequentially.

One might assume that it takes only a week or two to produce a glossy magazine packed with data for up to 100 head of cattle. Actually, work on the catalog begins 2 ½ years before it’s printed and mailed. One needs a menu before planning a multi-course dinner. Likewise, we started planning for the 2019 catalog back in January of 2017.

We always begin a new year by selecting herd sires for the summer breeding season. After breeding, we wait nine months in anticipation for those calves to be born. Another year passes while those babes grow to young adulthood. During that time, their data is collected and evaluated, resulting in expected progeny differences, ratios, and genomic traits. The final ultrasound test takes place at the end of April. By the first Friday in May, we have those test results and the latest updates from the American Angus Association to select the animals going into the sale.

Then my job begins in earnest.

Once the sale cattle have been selected and sorted in the database, I have about 48 hours to pull their numbers into a catalog format and transport the files to the commercial printer in the city. Prior to that, I have designed the pages of the catalog that don’t require numbers, of course, but 70% of the catalog—the main course of yearling bulls, heifers, and sires—is created over two days.

Crunch time.

For 48 hours I am chained to my desk, surrounded by past catalogs, photo files, industry reports, my cell phone, and numbers. Thousands of numbers. Also close at hand are other essential tools: caffeine and chocolate.

Technology has evolved rapidly since I started producing the catalog in 1998. In the early years, I would take the catalog files to the printer in pieces (the cover pages, the bull photos, the data pages, etc.) and have them assemble it for me. In later years, better computers and affordable software enabled me to build the entire document at my desk. Thanks to the help of YouTube videos, graphic design friends, and staff at the commercial print shops, I have learned enough to produce a master catalog document on my own by utilizing seven software programs. Today I simply hand over a flash drive and say, “Here’s the catalog.”

Those three little words really mean, Here, on this small electronic device the size of my thumb, is a digital file that represents our plans, hopes, dreams, and labor for the past 2 ½ years.

Creating the catalog didn’t start out so high tech, however.

In the 1970s, my mom sat at the kitchen table, her Smith Corona electric typewriter humming under her flying fingers. As my sister and I played quietly on the floor, we listened to Dad call out birthdates, weights, and other numbers from his Angus Herd Improvement Records. Mom typed each animal’s information on a large card provided by the catalog printer. One card per animal. Though there were only 50 animals in those early sales, the task took hours. And intense concentration. Delete keys and undo commands hadn’t been invented yet. The cards were then sent to the commercial printer where they were retyped for printing plates.

1978 Catalog

The data featured in the first catalog included the animal’s pedigree, weights, ratios, and breeding values, reflecting the infancy of performance testing. Subsequent catalog data reflects how performance testing in the Angus breed has evolved over 40 years.

1987 Catalog

1997 Catalog

2007 Catalog

2017 Catalog

Even mailing the catalog has undergone change over the decades. For the first forty years we labeled and stamped the catalogs ourselves. In the 1970s and 1980s, we used a large yellow sponge to moisten the gummed stamps before pressing them onto the back cover. Each catalog would require two to four stamps, depending on the denominations of postage we could acquire.

But when self-adhesive stamps debuted in the 1990s, we joyfully threw out the sponge, elated by how much time these miraculous postal stickers saved us, not to mention how they spared our fingers from a thick build-up of postal glue. We still needed an assembly line, of all ages, however, to spend a couple days sticking on labels and stamps.

As any farmer can tell you, many hands make light work. After we had grown and left home, my sister and I would often return to join Mom for a stamping party. While Dad looked over the mailing list, reminiscing about his customers and the animals they had purchased, we girls would apply stamps and chat. The process took hours and hours, so we had plenty of time to catch up on our lives as well as the goings on in the neighborhood.

As the next generation started joining the stamping party, we would inevitably hear a little voice cry, “Uh-oh, Grannie! I put the wrong stamps on this one…” Or, “Grannie, does it matter if the label is upside down?” Once in a while even one of the adults would utter, “Uff da,” when a stamp went astray.

In recent years I switched to a different printing company, and the senior project manager encouraged me to take advantage of their bulk mailing services. What a marvelous change! I provided the addresses, and within an hour, a machine had printed them on nearly 1,000 catalogs, along with a postage permit number. The print shop also transported the catalogs to the post office for us. No more labels, no more stamps, no more lugging crates of catalogs to the back door of the tiny post office in town to wait for a truck to pick them up. Once I sign the paperwork, all we have to do is wait for them to arrive in our customers’ mailboxes!

Ever-evolving technology has certainly enabled us to streamline the catalog process over the decades. More importantly, genetic sciences have allowed us to provide our customers with data that would have seemed right out of science fiction back in 1978.

The sale will be held on June 3rd. After that, I can start thinking about designing the catalog for 2020. The menu has already been selected; calves sired by S S Odyssey H71, Byergo Black Magic, and SydGen Enhance, among others, are enjoying green pastures with their mothers. Now we wait for the ingredients to prepare the soup course: their first set of performance numbers.