Breeding Legacy: How Red Doc Farm is Shaping the Future of Santa Gertrudis
For the first time ever, Red Doc Farms is bringing premium Santa Gertrudis females to an online-only sale format. This is a unique opportunity to add powerful, proven Red Doc genetics to your program — right from home.
Offering over 120 elite females, carefully selected to serve progressive breeders and commercial cattlemen alike. The lineup includes:
First-Calf Heifer Pairs
Spring-Born Weaned Heifers
Fall Bred Heifers
Yearling Heifers
These females represent decades of performance-driven breeding, backed by the Red Doc legacy of fertility, efficiency, maternal strength, and docility.
Sale Details
📅 December 1–5, 2025
💻 Hosted on DVAuction
🔗 Check back here soon for catalog & video links
In the late 1950s, a high school student named Roland Sanchez walked through the stalls of the New Mexico State Fair and saw cattle that stopped him in his tracks. They were Santa Gertrudis—elegant, efficient, built for the land he knew. He turned to his grandfather and made a promise: one day, he'd bring cattle like that into his life.
It took decades to make good on that promise. Roland became an engineer, then a physician. He married Elia, a farm girl from Bosque, New Mexico. But the dream never left him. One night, during his medical residency at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, he found a Santa Gertrudis Breeders Magazine and something clicked.
"It all clicked from those memories that he had way back in the early 60s," his son Roland "Scooter" Sanchez II recalls. "He bought his first commercial bull from De Leon, Texas. Mr. Peanut."
What followed was a masterclass in learning by doing—and learning from mistakes.
Roland bought Mr. Peanut but had no cows to breed him to. When four head finally arrived, they came from a rancher's "cut" pile—the wilder, harder-to-handle animals. They unloaded off a truck (no trailer; the Sanchez family didn't have one yet), jumped every fence in sight, forcing the family to hire a ropers just to contain them.
"Someone wants to ask what not to do, we could definitely advise you on what not to do because we've made every mistake that exists in this business," Scooter says. "And that's why we're excited to be where we are today and have changed that into a program that's very successful, very productive and feeding America."
But even in those chaotic early years, Roland's engineering mind was working. He irrigated alfalfa. He laser-leveled pastures. He worked with NRCS on concrete ditches and genetics adapted to the high desert. And critically, he began registering 100 percent of his herd—not because it was required, but because he couldn't measure progress without data.
"There were lot of times,” Scooter explains, “it'd be like, ‘you know, you really don't have to register 100% the herd.’ He's like, ‘how am I going to get the data?’"
The Bull That Changed Everything
In the mid-1980s, Scooter's sister picked out a bull named Cherokee General at Cherokee Ranch in Colorado. His owner, Tweet Kimball, initially said he wasn't for sale. But when she offered to sell Cherokee General's full brother instead, the Sanchez family had their animal.
Hauling him home in a van with six kids and a bobtail trailer, sliding "all the way down from Colorado," the family didn't yet understand what they'd just acquired. Cherokee General would become the inflection point in Red Doc Farm's history.
"Cherokee General was a freak in the industry. He was extremely heavy muscled, extremely efficient, easy fleshing, beautiful udders and teat structure on his heifers," Scooter says. "And we started gain testing his calves. They were the top of the Tucumcari gain test. And then we slowly led him into Mexico with semen sales. And he started building an international market."
King Ranch took notice. Out of two bulls in the nation, they selected Cherokee General for his accuracy in performance traits. His genetics spread across Mexico, Guatemala, and Latin America. Red Doc Farm suddenly had credibility.
But the real innovation came two decades later.
The Data Obsession
By the early 2000s, Red Doc Farm faced a problem that many seedstock operations never solved: how to prove their genetics translated into actual profit for commercial producers. Bulls were selling for $1,200 to $1,500. The show cattle market was tanking. The family needed a new strategy.
They found it through John Josserand and AZTX Feeders.
"Tito Morales, who has passed but was a good friend of ours and John, he worked for AZTX Feeders. Somehow he and my dad crossed paths, maybe at a bull sale in El Paso or something," Scooter recalls. "And they start working together and brought in John Josserand and his father."
What emerged was a buyback program. Red Doc would purchase steers sired by bulls their customers had bought. They'd feed them at AZTX and track every metric: feed conversion, water efficiency, carcass quality, and yield grade.
In the first year, the numbers were staggering. They were outperforming commodity cattle by a country mile.
"We were like, wow, this is astonishing,” Scooter recalls. “The national average at that point was like 8.5 to 1 conversion and then you got this pen at this point. It's maybe doing 6 to 1. We got to keep an eye on this and start tracking it.”
They invested in GrowSafe systems—the same technology used in progressive cattlemen's operations worldwide. For 26 years, Red Doc has measured everything: dry matter intake, water consumption, efficiency conversions, carcass hanging data, and ultrasound images. They don't estimate. They verify.
"We've got a very large system. It's 100% dry matter intake testing on GrowSafe systems. We know every pound that goes in that animal and we know what's coming out is red meat. We also have 100% water efficiency testing. So we know exactly how much water these animals are drinking to produce that red meat," Scooter explains.
When Data Meets Heritage
The data confirmed something Santa Gertrudis breeders had long suspected: the breed's heterosis advantage was real and quantifiable.
A Utah State study on Santa Gertrudis crosses gave the hard numbers. Cattle with Santa Gertrudis genetics showed reduced death loss in cold exposure—not because of inherent hardiness alone, but because of behavior. "Those Gert cross cattle got up and suckled," Scooter notes. "That was going back to the heritage. That's not something your Red Doc just inherently put in there."
The same study showed Santa Gertrudis crosses increased ribeye area, decreased yield grade, and reduced feed intake by 15 to 20 percent compared to straight Angus cattle—without sacrificing carcass quality.
"You're not sacrificing by coming over the fence," Scooter says. "We understand everybody's in a different marketplace. But that's the value of Santa Gertrudis is you can take these red bulls, put them on black cattle."
The Real Competitive Advantage
For a young producer considering Santa Gertrudis genetics, Scooter's pitch is simple: heterosis is free.
"I think the only thing free in the cattle market that exists today is heterosis and hybrid vigor. That's it. Protein costs the same, feed costs the same," he says. "You're gonna crank upwards towards 25% enhanced performance with it. When you enhance the heterosis plus the hybrid vigor with Santa Gertrudis cross on Bos taurus cattle—that's definitely number one reason to come in if nothing else."
But the advantage extends beyond genetics. Red Doc's commercial female sale—launching in December for the first time—offers another layer of value. These aren't show heifers or halter-broken animals. They're production cattle: weaned heifers, open heifers ultrasounded and ready to breed, bred females carrying Santa Gertrudis or Red Angus calves.
"This is an opportunity for a lot of people wanting to get in the cattle business, that want top genetics and registered genetics, to be able to get in without all the challenges and the red tape," Scooter says. The oldest female in the sale is barely a 2-year-old, ready for her second calf—production cattle built to last.
Red Doc cattle routinely live to age 12—four to five years longer than the national average of 7.5 years. That means three to four additional calf crops per cow, per lifetime. In economic terms, it's almost impossible to overstate.
For Young Producers: Look at It Objectively
When Scooter advises young producers just starting out, he doesn't talk about romance or tradition. He talks about business.
"You have to ask yourself: Am I a businessman first? Follow the data. Look at the test trials, look at the testimonials. And if you follow those things, you're going to get where you need to be."
His advice circles back to first principles: fertility as non-negotiable, efficiency as survival, easy fleshing as proof. These principles existed before genetic tests. They'll exist after.
"If you do not focus on fertility, it's all a joke. If there is not a calf every single year that's brought to the table and you cannot follow that cow and her cow lines, you're already out of business," he emphasizes. "That is a non-negotiable for me: fertility and early maturity."
The second non-negotiable is efficiency—but with an asterisk. Efficient genetics are only valuable if they look the part.
"We breed it into them. But they got to look the part because I've been around a lot of efficient genetics out there. They've got to flesh up," Scooter says. "Our bulls have to hold up and our females got to hold up whether they're in grass, belly deep, that's all water or out west where there's not much of it."
A Generational Play
Red Doc Farm isn't a one-generation story. Scooter and his five siblings grew up around the dinner table, where their mother Elia enforced a simple rule: argue there, walk out unified.
"Any argument, any problems we have happens at this table. Every business decision, every life decision happens at the dinner table," Scooter recalls. "But my mom says it doesn't matter what gets let out here at this table. But the second we step away from this table, we're on the same page, and that's all there is."
That discipline has held through expansion into multiple operations, partnerships with major feedlots, retail ventures, and the decision to launch the commercial female sale. The 13 grandchildren now growing up on the ranch will learn the same rule.
"In agriculture, it's really, really easy if the kids are involved since they're born," Scooter says. But the family's approach to youth development has evolved. It's not about winning shows anymore—it's about building character.
"We're passionate about showing cattle, but we're looking to educate these kids. We're looking to give them work ethic, give them a sense of responsibility, pride, self-confidence," he explains. "Whether the kid wins a champion or not—we’ve got that competitive spirit."
The Next Ten Years
When asked where Red Doc sees itself in a decade, Scooter's vision extends beyond cattle. The operation is grazing row crops—corn, pumpkins, green chili—and managing an expanding orchard operation. The goal is a Red Doc Farm retail outlet selling natural meat products, vegetables, and crops directly to consumers.
But even as they expand, the family's focus remains on the cattle genetics that started it all. The data collection, the testing, the verification—it's all in service of a simple goal: helping commercial producers make money.
"Our goal at Red Doc—it's not to do business with you one time. We want to have you as a repeat customer. We want our kids to sell to your kids," Scooter says.
It makes perfect sense. It's the promise Roland made as a high school boy at the State Fair, kept through decades of mistakes and learning, secured through 26 years of data obsession.
The best lessons, as Roland once said, are learned "out of my back pocket."
The rest is just genetics.
