Lautner Farms Fall Catalog

For many club calf breeders in the south, it's always a treat to get your Lautner Farms Fall Catalog in the mail. This catalog is jam-packed with pictures of the state fair winners sired by Lautner bulls, and gets the Texas and Oklahoma breeders pumped up about beginning their fall AI breeding season.

This year, after RHD had designed the past 9 catalogs for Lautner Farms, they decided to bring their advertising and their catalog production in house to be done by the talented ladies at the Lautner office.

This puts RHD on a different side of the design equation because now instead of designing the catalog myself, I have to wait just like everyone else to see the finished product. So when I got the final catalog e-mailed to me over the weekend, I eagerly sat and viewed the entire catalog on my Blackberry while I was at a cattle sale. And I'll just say, it takes FOREVER to download a huge catalog like that on a blackberry. And it's not that easy to look at. But, I was bound and determined to see it, so it was definitely worth the wait.

We posted the catalog on http://www.lautnerfarms.com/ today. Since doing Phil's work for nearly 5 years, I have gotten to know these sires backwards and forwards. I almost feel like a lot of these bulls are part of my family since I have watched their progress since whenever they were the "New for 200X" sires displayed at Denver.

This made me think about the first catalog I did for LF, which was spring 2005. I had never been so nervous to do a catalog in my life, but thanks to lots of phone calls between myself, Matt and Phil, we put out a very top notch catalog for that time period. I look back at that catalog and think wow -- hasn't catalog design changed a lot since then. I did that catalog in Pagemaker, and now that software program doesn't even exist anymore. The "New" bulls at that time were Cherry Bomb, Friday Nite Lights, Home Brew and others. Who Made Who was the lead-off bull in the catalog. Heat Wave 1 was still being advertised as "aka Wave on Wave". Ali was called the "NEW" calving ease knockout. The whole catalog was 22 pages.

Our most recent catalog for Phil was the 2009 Sire book -- which was 48 pages- and filled up nearly every piece of available white space in that catalog with winners, bulls, high sellers and information. Who Made Who had moved from page 1 to page 22 and there are 5 Heat Wave Clones pictured. Lautner bulls sired the Champion Steers at Denver, Louisville and Kansas City.

So as we publish the Fall 2009 LF catalog online, I just wanted to say congratulations to the talented team at LF for doing this elaborate publication in-house. I imagine a project of this site was a success due to teamwork from everyone at LF -- Phil, Mary, Katie, Chance, Stan and more. Congratulations! I know y'all are proud of your work, and you definitely should be.

So I invite everyone to visit http://www.lautnerfarms.com/ and see the Fall 2009 Sire Directory. And again, congratulations to everyone, especially Katie Johnson, at Lautner Farms on designing their own catalog! Great job!