Ideas and Details: The Team Behind Big Angus Innovations
The Bowmans earn Angus Heritage Foundation honors.
March 4, 2025
Bill Bowman was a Missouri farm boy, who spent his college weekends driving from the University of Missouri home to Stet, Mo., to care for the small Angus herd he’d started during his FFA years. He was judging livestock and earning his animal science degree. Sally Northcutt was a “town kid” from Lexington, Ky., who participated in sports and was first-chair bassoon in the orchestra. She found a home at the University of Kentucky and stumbled upon the animal science department.
Separate paths brought them to the American Angus Association, but they had this in common: a similar heart for service to the industry and the people in it.
Eventually they’d become “Bill and Sally,” a pair synonymous with some of the greatest genetic changes in the Angus business; their body of work, together, earning them induction in the Angus Heritage Foundation in 2024. They received their award at the Angus Convention in Fort Worth in November.
With time and teamwork, they found they balanced each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
Bill was the ideas guy, and Sally the executor, and they’d double-check each other’s work.
Bill had a lot of vision and just had to mention something, and Sally could take it and run with it. They just knew they could just keep pushing each other until they figured it out.” – Lou Ann Adams, American Angus Association chief information officer, who worked with them both for decades.
The route to St. Joe
Fresh off earning his bachelor’s degree, Bill first came to Angus as a regional manager trainee in 1979. Then he added experience to his belt, including time at couple of Angus operations and a sale management company before returning to the Association as a regional manager and director of commercial programs. Eventually Bill would become director of performance programs and the first president of Angus Genetics Inc. (AGI), when it was formed in 2007.
“I really enjoyed working with the breeders and producers. There were so many great people out there you had a chance to work with, and learn from,” Bill says, noting he especially liked watching them expand and have success. “It was really gratifying to see how that growth occurred and how the industry provided opportunities for a lot of families to do a lot.”
At the same time, Sally was on her own journey to Saint Joseph. She earned her undergraduate degree in animal science, a master’s in animal breeding and moved to Iowa State University to complete a doctorate before working for Oklahoma State University as an extension beef breeding specialist. She worked extensively on the Oklahoma Bull Test. There was a lot of Angus in the background, from Iowa State’s close working relationship with the Association to consulting work later on.
“I didn’t think there’d be any way we’d get her. We’d worked with her before as a contractor, and I thought, ‘She’ll never come.’” Adams admits. “But she did, and it was quite the gift.”
Sally knew it would be a challenge, but she felt the call.
“I can remember it felt like a big decision, but you’ve got to go with your gut, and it was the right decision to step outside the box and be uncomfortable with my next professional stage,” Sally says.
The position, director of genetic research, was newly created with a blank slate for a mission.
An evaluation revolution
“We had begun to think about the components that go into what was the dollar beef value eventually,” Sally says, noting there needed to be a feedlot component and a carcass grid component. “So those inner workings were beginning to evolve.”
By 2003 they introduced the first dollar value indexes, combining several traits into one easy-to-use selection tool to help commercial producers make directional change for specific traits.
At the same time, there was a movement to bring the genetic evaluation in house from university partners.
“The big picture was any time you control your data, then you have a better job to make the data sets work,” Sally says.
There were more areas for growth, too.
Bill adds, “We wanted to be able to be more fluid and be more efficient, and be able to do more research and do things on a more timely basis.”
There were plenty of skeptics, but they had confidence they could do it because of the support around them.
“To step into an entity like the American Angus Association with an IS (information systems) department like they had, and their leadership, you could see the opportunity to run genetic predictions,” Sally says.
By 2004, they were doing it all in Saint Joseph. Five years later, they started running the National Cattle Evaluation on a weekly basis — a feat that was only possible because of the support from Adams and the IS team.
“They were good at just teaching first and getting us to understand what we were going to do,” Adams says. “Sally had all the details worked out before they gave us the information, and that helped a lot instead of trying to figure it out ourselves.”
The next big challenge they’d tackle together was the incorporation of DNA testing data.
Never say never
“When the first couple of DNA tests came out and it was the best that the industry had, I told everybody, these don’t work,” Sally says. “I did not think in my lifetime that I would ever be working with any DNA technology …made a liar out of me!”
But the technology improved, and Sally was always one to follow the data.
“When you could see it was accounting for more of the genetic variation than those initial tests, I talked everybody out of, then I was ready to go with it, and there were some breeders who were ready to turn the key and go with it as well,” she says.
They strategized ways genomics could add value to the Association’s database, not compete with it, and then did a lot of education to get breeders comfortable with this new tool.
“We had a tremendous board of directors and members that helped to guide and direct those programs,” Bill says, giving them credit for being eager learners and open to testing. “There’s no breed that even rivals the percentage of animals that are genomically tested today.”
With the addition of more information, breeders made progress at a quicker pace.
“When you put in the DNA piece, you’re better able to differentiate the young animals, the herd prospects, the new genetic material for the breed,” Sally says. “That ramps up that genetic improvement to a great extent.”
During their tenure at the Association, they tackled complex challenges, like new genetic defects. They helped develop AngusSource®, the Association’s first genetic-, age- and source-verified program and a precursor to today’s AngusLink. Bill and others created the Beef Leaders Institute, a weeklong program that walks young Angus breeders through each of the industry segments to teach them more about the entire beef value chain. It’s still hosted annually.
“It was just fun to get and go to work and try to help people and do things that were hopefully going to make a difference,” Bill says.
Then, one day, everything changed when they found themselves without a job at the American Angus Association.
A new path
“I was raised that you don’t sit around, and you can be sad for about 30 minutes, and then you need to get up and do something,” Sally says. “There I sat in the middle of the dining room, and I thought, ‘OK, what are we going to do?’”
There, with her personal effects from her office and her own thoughts, Sally began to plan a path forward that could still include helping Angus families.
“It was daunting because I always thought I’d be working at the American Angus Association in AGI, and I knew I was going to have to do something different,” she says. “I never dreamed it’d be starting a business.”
With some help from the local business incubator program, Sally wrote a business plan, got legal counsel and gathered resources.
“I asked Bill Bowman to come work for Method Genetics, provided he didn’t want any salary or benefits,” she says.
It might have seemed like a tall ask for anyone else, but the way Bill saw it, Sally was starting her own company and he couldn’t imagine not working with Sally. So, they built it — together.
“I bled Angus,” Bill says. “I had a lot of different opportunities to go do different things, but they probably weren’t going to satisfy me because I felt a real passion for the Angus business.”
Today Method Genetics provides customized tools to both commercial and seedstock producers.
“We got started in 2014, trying to provide commercial producers who were using Angus genetics selection tools they could turn around and make selection on some of the female sides of their herds,” Bill explains. “That’s been some of the most rewarding we’ve done, being able to watch them change their herds short-term to produce cattle that hit all of the goals.”
Bill focused on the customer-facing interactions and business development; and Sally computed and calculated, creating the tools.
“From then on, it was just non-stop,” Sally says. “It was collecting data, making contacts, ranch visits and making a lot of promises that we knew could come through on.”
They were working all the time, and they were together more than they were apart.
“Then three years later, we were driving and Bill said, ‘Do you think we should get married?’” Retelling it, Sally laughs. “I said yes before he could change his mind.”
Only their families knew, but the day they headed to the justice of the peace, the Saint Joseph News Press betrayed their secret.
“Our phones were blowing up with text messages and calls,” Sally says. “It was perfect. We didn’t want a fuss.”
Receiving the Angus Heritage Foundation honor falls in the same category. Both admit they were “humbled” and “shocked,” but also deflect credit to the field staff and the in-office support from the customer service representatives to other teammates.
“There were always people willing to try to help in any way they could,” Bill says. “ [That culture] has always been something I wanted to foster as well, to create a team environment that was going to really be able to get things accomplished.”
It is part of the legacy they’ve left at Angus.
“We weren’t trying to direct how people bred cattle. You were just trying to provide them the tools and the ability to select [animals] that were going to work in their operation,” Bill says, giving the breeders high praise. “They’ve identified how to use genetics to make that function in a lot of different places and become very profitable and sustainable in our world today.”
From the creation of AGI to the tools still in use today, their fingerprints are all over some of the largest advancements in the past few decades.
“There’s so many things, like bringing the evaluation in house and doing the DNA markers — things I didn’t think were possible — it might have taken us a lot longer to get to that point,” Adams says. “They just saw a need and did it.”
As the couple looks to the future, with a different vantage, it’s clear they’re still part of the Angus family.
“I don’t think there’s a rival in terms of the information that we can put together on Angus-influenced cattle,” Bill says. “The more we can tie the chain together and identify the genetics and the management that work at the consumer level back to the producer, I think we are just going to continue to grow and dominate.
“If we keep an aggressive approach at things, I think the sky's the limit.”
Topics: Award winner , EPDs , Genetics
Publication: Angus Journal
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