Built to Last | March 2025

By Cheryl Kepes

Photos courtesy Wildberry Farms

Wildberry Farms, a Simmental and SimAngus seedstock operation, utilizes generations of performance data, concentrates on maternal traits, and develops its animals with longevity in mind.

Chaotic workdays saturated with the rapid buying and selling of futures contracts on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade consumed 31 years of Jim Berry’s professional life. During those years and now well into his retirement, Jim pursued his passion for raising beef cattle. Jim and his wife, Ann, started Wildberry Farms with 16 Simmental cows in the 1970s near their home in McHenry, Ill., about an hour outside of Chicago.

After years of growth and development, Wildberry Farms relocated to Hanover, Ill. The seedstock operation runs under Jim’s oversight and with daily direction from cattle manager Ben Lehman, as well as herdsman, Dean Elder. Wildberry Farms manages 400 Simmental and SimAngus momma cows and hosts a production sale each March, featuring as many as 70 bulls.

The cattle operation utilizes dozens of data points to direct decisions, puts a heavy focus on maternal traits, and takes a unique approach to bull and female development. “We are trying to improve the reliability of what we are raising and trying to develop a good product that meets the needs of our customers,” Jim Berry, owner of Wildberry Farms said.

Data Driven

Jim is a numbers guy through and through. When he was 72 years old, he attended a college course and learned how to design his own cattle management software program. His system includes more than 9,000 herd records including calving scores, docility ratings, breeding dates, weaning weights, yearling weights, udder scores, and ultrasound data.

Ben Lehman and his family

The vast amount of herd data guides Wildberry Farms in many of its operational decisions especially when it comes to breeding selections. “When I’m doing matings, I can pull up the cow, the granddam, the great-granddam, and the great-great grandam, and go back and look and see what type of bulls that this specific cow line has worked with and then make my mating decisions off that,” Ben Lehman, Wildberry Farms cattle manager, explained.

Tapping into the data provides Wildberry Farms with a resource to increase reliability and predictability within the cow herd. “We work to have something we can stand behind and feel good about,” Jim said.

One of the most important pieces of information gathered on the animals is a docility score. Wildberry Farms collects three docility scores on all its open heifers, bulls, and steers. Even if a bull possesses the right phenotype and genotype to become a herd bull, if he fails the docility scoring test then he doesn’t make the bull pen. “We’re in the part of the world where cows are not the main source of income for most people. Many of our customers have a job in town and run about 40 cows. So, docility has got to be on the very top of the priority list,” Ben stated.

Maternal Strengths Matter

Tracking the data on the cow herd helps Wildberry Farms’ managers to concentrate on developing females with strong maternal traits. Since Ben started working at Wildberry Farms 14 years ago, he’s worked to grow the herd based on solid maternal characteristics.

“The main focus since I’ve started has been building better females that adapt and survive wherever they go. The bulls are just kind of a byproduct. I’ve never made a mating thinking, ‘Well, that could be a really good bull calf.’ I always want the female side of it, so it’s maternally focused,” Ben stated.

Crops and Hay

Wildberry Farms owns about 1,900 acres in a region called the Driftless Area due to its soaring bluffs and rolling hills near the Mississippi River. A crop specialist assists the operation with its row crops, hay, and machinery. The operation tills and harvests 200 acres of corn and soybeans as well as bales 300 to 400 acres of hay each year.

The cracked corn is utilized to hand feed weaned calves with buckets for 45 days post weaning before they are switched to a TMR. The rest of the corn along with all the soybeans are marketed.

Managing the Cows

Though rooted in a part of the country where corn is bountiful, cows at Wildberry Farms never receive silage or corn feed. The cows graze fescue-based pastures, cornstalks, and fescue hay. They must possess solid structural conformation in order to traverse an environment consisting partially of bluffs, rocks, and timber.

Wildberry Farms’ cows are required to display self-sufficiency and breed back easily. “We want the cows to work for us, not us to work for the cows,” Ben explained. About half the cow herd, which includes heifers, undergo a synchronization protocol and then are bred via AI. The remainder of the cow herd is bred natural service.

Recently, Wildberry Farms stopped breeding first-calf heifers through AI. Instead, first-calf heifers are pasture exposed to a bull in Wildberry Farms’ bull battery. The new protocol reduces additional strain on the females. “They don’t have to go through the chute an extra three times. They go right with a bull,” Ben said. “They can get comfortable on grass raising their calf, they seem to cycle a lot better, and our breed back has been significantly higher on those first-calf heifers without stressing them even more than they’re already stressed.”

After taking a decade long hiatus from embryo transfer (ET) work. Wildberry Farms decided to start flushing one proven cow a year. The animals chosen for donors are not heifers without track records, rather cows with a long history of production. “If we’re going to flush them, we want to know what they’re going to work with, and we want to know that it’s going to work for our program and our customers,” Ben shared.

In an effort to promote highly productive females, Wildberry Farms does not creep feed its calves. “We want to know exactly what the cow is producing year in and year out. Creep feed to me disguises the actual genetic and milking ability and rebreeding and fertility of the cow,” Ben said.

The females calve in February and March. Wildberry adheres to a tight 60-day calving window. The calves are typically weaned at the end of August or early September. This gives cows time to regain their body condition before winter arrives.

Bull Development

At weaning the bulls are put into one big group and turned out on pasture to graze the stockpiled fescue well into December or January. Then, they’re sorted into pens by size and type and fed a ration developed by a nutritionist to help them grow slowly.

“We have all the feed in the world at our fingertips compared to out west and south, this is corn country. It’s really easy to just pour the feed to them and make them look good. It’s been more of a challenge working with my nutritionist and making sure they don’t get too fat. And since we’ve gone to this, our semen checks have been 99 percent,” Ben explained.

All Wildberry Farms’ bulls undergo an ultrasound to measure their backfat, carcass quality, ribeye area, and IMF (intramuscular fat). Ben monitors their backfat closely to keep them in proper body condition. “We ultrasound all the bulls and I really don’t want any more than a quarter inch of back fat. Every year there’s outliers, you’ll have a .3 or something, but we get a lot of .18 or .19,” Ben explained.

Most of Wildberry Farms’ bull buyers are producers running small commercial or registered beef cattle operations. Many of Wildberry Farms’ bulls are sold to customers within a 100-miles of the farm. The operation sells about 70 yearling bulls at its production sale the last Saturday in March.

Wildberry Farms offers its bull customers an added benefit after the sale. “When we have our sale at the end of March, we keep the bulls and develop them further for the next two months and then deliver them in June. I don’t know anybody else that does that. It helps us have control of our product a little bit longer,” Jim explained.

As Wildberry Farms next production sale approaches, Jim, Ben, and Dean look forward to offering thoughtfully developed bulls in hopes of helping their friends in the cattle business reach their goals.

Upcoming Sale:

Saturday, March 29, 2025

1 p.m. at the farm in Hanover, Ill.

learn more at www.facebook.com - Wildberry Farms Simmentals