Bullseye

Dairymen from around Ohio provide their insider knowledge of what bulls they are using in their herd and what observations they are making about the daughters.

Ack-Lee Registered Holsteins, Kristy Ackley, East Liberty, Ohio

Sidekick –We like their length, and we also like their dairyness.

Unix – We have calved a couple of them in, and we are finding they are really nice-uddered cows that are well-balanced.

Tattoo –We used him, but we aren’t sure he will have the width that we need. But they are definitely square with good udders.

Delta Lambda – We have used him because we have seen some super-uddered, well-balanced daughters, but we don’t have anything on the ground yet.

Sexed Warrior-Red – He’s a good red bull, he puts on a lot of rib, but we won’t use any conventional semen of him because we have had calving trouble with bull calves.

Diamondback- We are still using a lot of him because these daughters are slower maturing, and they make great older cows that only get better with time.

Brownhaven Farm, Lou Brown, New Bremen, Ohio

On the NextGen list we are using Conway and Parfect. We chose them because we liked their data. We have a couple of Conway calves and find them to be leggy and taller while the Parfect calves are medium in size. Another reason we use them is because they get cows pregnant. Conception rates are a big reason why we use the bulls we use. We use them once, and if they catch, then we will use that bull again.

In the Select Sires lineup we are using Captivating, Parsley and Roadster. They all have strength and low SCC. They must have strength, three-quarters of the bulls that get released are frail. If they do not have strength, they don’t last in the free stalls and we don’t want them. We feel like all we are getting out here are narrow rumps and frail cows and that just does not work.

The Semex bulls that we are using are Lambeau because he is high on their Genomax list and Obsidian, he’s high on the TPI list. Although he is not as strong, he has good health traits, according to the data.

We have purchased a few Delta-Lambda daughters because they are higher on type and we want that in our herd. We also have a few fresh King Docs, and they have very acceptable udders, some I’d even call fancy.

Overall genomics is 80 percent of what we are looking at while the other 20 percent is proven bulls. To make sure we keep different bloodlines in the herd, we like to find sons of good daughters that we might have missed along the way.

I will end with a question; if there is a bull with a SCC of 3 or higher, why are we marketing those bulls? In my opinion, that is a huge problem. We have so many other better bulls to choose from, there is no reason to market bulls like that.

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