Creeping over fields of green Remembering the
faces The moments unseen The hands that built
a dynasty The vision in their eyes Echoes in
the auction bar Beneath an endless sky This is
the bull buy Turn the bar Welcome back to the
Bullvine Podcast. I'm your host. And today we're
sharing a story that, well, it honestly just
stopped us in our tracks. And I'm your co -host.
And yeah, this is the exact kind of deep dive
that reminds you why you got into dairy in the
first place. But honestly, it also serves as
a massive warning about the decisions we're making
right now. Exactly. Because we usually sit here
and we talk about genetic progress as this linear
celebratory march forward. Like every year the
cows just get better and better. But when you
dig into the source material we have in front
of us today, you realize we are actually looking
at a bottleneck event. A singularity, really.
Yeah, a singularity. A moment. where the entire
global dairy industry basically passed through
the genetic filter of a single animal. Right,
and what's wild is that this didn't start in
some corporate boardroom in Chicago or a high
-tech genetic laboratory over in Europe. It started
in the mud, in Marengo, Iowa, right in the middle
of a brutal economic crisis. So let's drop you,
the listener, right into that context, because
you really can't understand the decision -making
here without understanding the fear that was
driving everything. The year is 1981, and for
the guys listening who were farming back then,
you know exactly what the air felt like. Oh yeah,
they do. But for the younger generation, you
have to understand, this was the post -Volcker
shock. Right, we aren't talking about margins
being kind of tight like we... complain about
today. We are talking about prime interest rates
hitting 20 percent, 21 percent. Which is just
unimaginable. It was suffocating. Operating loans
were literally strangling people out of the business.
Land values were beginning to wobble and crash.
So when we talk about the Tompkins family out
in Marengo and we see them standing in their
barn with a vet to do an embryo transfer, this
is not a hobby. This isn't them just playing
around with the genetics for fun. No. At that
kind of interest rate. Every single dollar you
spend has to fight for its life. And back in
1981, embryo transfer ET was not the routine
Tuesday morning task that it is for so many herds
now. Not at all. It was non -surgical recovery,
sure. But it was still a very high -end, high
-cost, high -stress procedure. You're pouring
expensive hormones into a cow. You're paying
for the flush media, the microscope time. You've
got recipient cows standing by just eating feed.
And you're doing the math in your head the entire
time the vet is working. That's the real gut
punch of the early 80s economy. You're standing
there thinking to yourself, I need five embryos
just to break even on this vet bit. Oh, you need
a jackpot. You need volume. If you flush a cow
and you get zero, or you get one, you haven't
just lost a morning, you've torched capital that
you probably borrowed at 18%. So picture the
scene. The vet finishes the procedure on this
cow. Her name is Tumar Wayne Hay. They take the
dish over to the microscope, and the tension
in that barn had to be just thick enough to cut
with a knife. And the result comes back. It's
not 10. It's not 5. One. One. One single viable
embryo. It's a complete disaster on paper. Statistically,
that is a total failure. You can just imagine
Randy Tompkins staring at that bill, then staring
at the cow and thinking, I just threw money into
a bottomless pit. Because you have to account
for the attrition rates, right? Exactly. Getting
an embryo in the dish is just step one. You have
to implant it. The recipient has to carry it
all the way to term without aborting. The calf
has to be born alive. And then the ultimate coin
flip, there has to be the right sex. In 1981,
long before genomic sorting was even a dream,
you're praying for a bull if you want to sell
to an AI stud or a heifer if you want to build
your own family line. If you get a bull calf
that nobody wants to buy, Well, you've got a
very expensive steer. But that one embryo, that
single, incredibly expensive, high -risk roll
of the dice, it stuck. It carried. And nine months
later, out comes a bull calf. Timur Blackstar.
And if Randy Tompkins had known what was standing
in the straw that morning, he wouldn't have been
worried about the vet bill for a single second?
No, he wouldn't have. He would have been worried
about the fact that he was looking at the genetic
architect of the next 40 years of Holstein history.
Just to anchor this for you listening. We aren't
just telling a fun Good Bull story today. According
to the USDA and the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding,
this specific animal, born from that one bad
bed flush, now constitutes 15 .8 % of the distinct
DNA of the entire modern Holstein breed. That
number is just staggering. I mean, it's higher
than Pawnee Farmer Linda Chief. It's higher than
Round Oak Rag apple elevation. If you walked
into your barn this morning and you milked 100
cows, statistically, the genetics of roughly
16 of those cows are purely derived from this
one single embryo in Iowa. He is the invisible
ghost standing in every single stall. How does
that even happen? Seriously, how do we go from
a single embryo in a working barn in Iowa? to
a bull that essentially colonized the entire
global breed. To figure that out, we really have
to strip away all the mythology and look at the
actual cattle themselves, because the Tompkins
farm wasn't a genetic boutique. Not at all. This
was a row crop and dairy operation. And that
matters so much to this story. It wasn't some
tax write -off for a millionaire trying to breed
show winners. Corn prices dictated the culling
rate. If a cow didn't breed back, she was gone.
If she had bad feet and couldn't handle the concrete
or the dirt lot, she was gone. There was absolutely
no tenderness for a pretty cow that couldn't
go out and work. It was a crucible. And that
environment perfectly shaped the maternal line.
Let's look at the dam for a second. Tamara Wayne
Higgy, she's a second lactation cow, doing over
25 ,000 pounds of milk, which in the early 80s,
that is serious, serious production. But when
you look at the classification reports and the
old photos, she's not this glossy magazine beauty
queen. No, she was functional. She was solid.
But, you know, the magic really happens a generation
back from her. We need to talk about the Grand
Dame, Hannah. Royal Cedar O 'Connor. This is
the archetype. When I look at her data, I see
the exact kind of cow that every commercial berryman
quietly loves but never writes articles about.
She's the invisible cow. And I mean that as the
highest possible compliment. You know this cow.
Every farmer listening knows this cow. She's
the one in your herd with the faded 300 series
ear tag because she's been there for so long.
She's a deep heart girth. Massive capacity for
roughage. She has an udder that isn't sty high,
but it's just welded on. Right. The texture is
right, but mostly she's invisible because she
never appears on the vet's problem list. Exactly.
She never has ketosis. Yeah. She never has milk
fever. She breeds on the first service every
single time. She just stands at the bunk, eats
her corn silage, and fills the bulk tank. Hannah
was the engine. And Randy Tompkins, smart breeder
that he was, realized that while Hannah wasn't
going to win the World Dairy Expo, she was exactly
the biological machine he needed to replicate.
So he takes that highly functional, high capacity,
invisible maternal line and he crosses it with
Cal Clark, board chairman. Now, why that specific
mating? This is the key to everything. Break
down the sigh for us. What did board chairman
bring to the table? Board chairman was the frame
bowl. He brought the stature. He brought the
stretch. But he needed a cow with real guts to
handle that frame. If you put a big, massive
frame bull on a frail cow, you get an absolute
disaster. But you put him on Hannah's line, you
get the perfect synthesis. And that's what Blackstar
was. He was this perfect synthesis of show ring
stature and commercial bunk capacity. Born May
17th, 1983. Coal black calf. And honestly. They
probably just hoped he'd be good enough to sell
to a stud to cover that awful flush bill. Oh,
they probably would have been thrilled with a
$500 check just to break even. But to really
understand why Black Star exploded, why he became
this absolute singularity, we have to pause the
biography of the bull himself and look at the
battlefield he was born into. Because the mid
-1980s in the Holstein world wasn't just a time
of transition. It was a full -blown civil war.
It was incredibly tribal. You had two camps that
were drifting so far apart they could barely
even speak the same language anymore. You had
the production purists on one side and the type
purists on the other, and both of them were hitting
a massive wall. Let's unpack the production side
first. The dominant force was a bull named Carlin
M. Ivanhoe Bell. Everyone just called him Bell.
If you look at these sire summaries from 1986
or 1987, Bell is essentially a god. His production
numbers were plus 1 ,704 pounds of milk. In that
era, that is just astronomical. He was single
-handedly flooding the bulk tanks. But there
was a catch. And it was a really heartbreaking
one for the farmers milking his daughters. Bell
is often called the worst best bull in history.
His daughters would milk their absolute hearts
out, but physically they were built like matchsticks.
It was the udders specifically. We need to get
a little technical here. It was the medial suspensory
ligament. For the listener who isn't staring
at an anatomy diagram right now, that is the
central wall of tissue that divides the outer
right and left and physically anchors it up to
the body wall. It's the primary support system
holding everything together. Exactly. And adult
bell daughters had almost zero strength there.
So you'd have a heifer, she calves in, she looks
okay. She milks a hundred pounds a day, which
is great. But by the time she hits her second
lactation, that ligament just snaps. The udder
floor completely drops out. The teats splay out
sideways. We call it strutting. And once that
happens, it's basically over. You can't get the
milking machine on her. The udder is dragging
in the mud. It's getting stepped on by her own
hooves. She's getting mastitis constantly. Farmers
were having to cull these incredible, unbelievable
producers at just four years old because they
literally fell apart. It was emotionally draining.
I remember talking to guys from that era, and
they absolutely hated it. You raise a calf for
two whole years, she milks like a freight train,
and then you have to put her on the cull trailer
because her body just failed her. It was financially
stupid. So naturally, the pendulum swings wildly
the other way. Everyone runs to the type solution.
And the absolute king of that side was Hanover
Hill Starbuck. The glamour bull. Beautiful, beautiful
cattle. Wide rumps, perfectly attached udders,
incredibly strong feet and legs. They won literally
every show in North America. But in this of a
bit, but you looked at the milkshake at the end
of the month and it was incredible. light. They
lacked the volume. They lacked that sheer metabolic
will to produce massive amounts of milk that
the Bells had. They were pretty, but they didn't
pay the mortgage. So this is the desperation
of 1988. You're sitting at your kitchen table
trying to order semen for the year. Use Bellet
and get a cow that pakes the bills but essentially
dies in two years. Or do you use Starbucks and
get a cow that lives forever but doesn't actually
make any money? Everyone was searching for the
unicorn. The type and production crossover, the
absolute holy grail. And honestly, nobody thought
it actually existed. The genetic correlation
between high type and high milk was widely accepted
to be negative. You weren't supposed to get both.
It was biologically contradictory. Enter Ron
Long. And this part of the story plays out like
a detective novel. Ron is working with select
sires. He's traveling all over the country, scoring
cows, looking at classification sheets. And remember,
there's no internet. He's digging through actual
paper stacks. And he starts seeing this ghost.
in the data code 7h 1897 he doesn't even know
the bull's actual name at first he just sees
the pattern he goes into a herd to score some
cows and he sees this heifer that is big strong
has a great udder he checks the paper sire 7h
1897 he goes to the next farm the next day another
incredible one sire 7h 1897 He starts calling
back to headquarters. He's telling them, I don't
know who this bull is, but his daughters are
the real deal. They are fixing the bell udders,
but they are milking exactly like bells. And
that is the absolute definition of proof on concrete.
There was no slick marketing hype. Nobody was
pushing this bull in magazines. This bull was
proving himself in the stanchions before anyone
even knew how to pronounce his name. And when
the veil was finally lifted, when the numbers
officially dropped in January of 1989, it was
a complete stampede. The numbers were shocking.
Plus 58 pounds of fat. plus 63 pounds of protein.
And a plus 3 .16 PTT for type. We really have
to contextualize that. Plus 3 .16. Today we see
high type numbers and we just think, okay, sure.
But in 1989... It was literal science fiction.
The average breed type was hovering right around
zero. A good type bull was maybe plus 1 .5. To
be over plus 3 .0 and have massive positive milk
components, it completely broke the paradigm.
It was like seeing a semi truck that could corner
like a... Ferrari. It just wasn't supposed to
happen. And by 1992, he officially tops the PPI
list with 1 ,256 points. And then the frenzy
really begins. Oh, it was absolute chaos. Describe
the scene at Select Sires when that happened.
The switchboard was completely overwhelmed. You
have to remember, you couldn't just go online
and click order and have it shipped. People were
physically calling in. Wire transfers were coming
in from Germany, from the Netherlands, from Australia.
Breeders. All over the world simultaneously realized
that this was the answer to the Bell versus Starbuck
problem. And there was a massive scarcity issue,
too. Today, with modern technology and collection
methods, we can produce millions of units of
semen from a top bowl. Back then, they just couldn't.
Jeff Ziegler from Select Sires actually said
they only ever sold about 500 ,000 doses of Blackstar.
Only. Still sounds like a massive amount of semen.
It is a lot, but compared to the global demand,
it was a drop in the bucket. Distributors were
actively rationing straws. You had to know someone
or call in a favor just to get a tank full of
Blackstar. Price skyrocketed. People were paying
hundreds of dollars per straw in 1992 money just
to get their hands on his genetics. I just want
to pause here and reflect on the emotional side
of this for a second. Imagine Randy Tompkins.
He's back in Marengo, Iowa. He gets that proof
sheet in the mail. It probably just looked like
another piece of junk mail from Select Sires.
He opens it up and he realizes that his one embryo.
Gamble the calf he almost didn't get because
of a bad flush is now the most important animal
in the entire dairy world. It's the ultimate
validation, isn't it? He wasn't trying to be
famous. He wasn't trying to change the industry.
He was just trying to breed a better cow for
his own barn. And he accidentally changed the
world. So we know the numbers on paper were great.
But what did the cows actually look like? What
did Black Star physically put in the tank? Because
numbers on a page are one thing, but living,
breathing cattle are another entirely. If you
walked into any barn in the 90s, you could spot
a Black Star daughter right from the center aisle.
They just had a distinct look. Describe it for
us. Paint that picture. It really starts with
the rib. We talk about spring of rib a lot in
show judging, but for a commercial, farmer rib
is strictly synonymous with engine capacity.
Black Star Daughters had this massive open sweeping
rib structure. Why does that matter specifically
for the guy milking them? Because of the rumen.
The rumen is essentially a giant fermentation
vat. If you want a cow to make 100 pounds of
milk, she needs to physically consume a massive
amount of dry matter, TMR, silage, hay, whatever.
If she has a flat, tight rib, she physically
can't fit enough food inside her to support that
level of milk production without stripping all
the body weight right off her back. So the rib
structure directly allows for the intake. Exactly.
Black star daughters could eat. And because they
could eat, they held their body condition so
much better than the frail bell daughters. They
were incredibly strong. And then you go to the
udders. The great bill fixer. He completely fixed
the ligament. He put that deep, strong cleft
right back into the udder. He pulled the teats
squarely underneath the quarters where they belong.
He made udders that stayed high and tight even
in their fourth or fifth lactation. And that
physically translates to longevity in the herd.
And longevity is pure profitability. A cow doesn't
even start making real profit for the farm until
her third lactation. If she leaves the herd after
two, she's at net cost. Black Star daughters
stayed. They became the old ladies in the barn
that everyone relied on. Let's look at two specific
examples from the source material that show just
how incredibly versatile this bull was. Because
usually a bull is strictly a production bull
or strictly a show bull. Black Star did not care
about those labels. First, let's talk about the
producer, L .A. Foster Black Star, Lucy. Lucy,
man, what an absolute beast of a cow. She was
the world production champion in 1998. Listen
to this. In a single 365 -day lactation, she
gave 75 ,275 pounds of milk. 75 ,000 pounds.
That is so hard to even wrap your head around.
That's well over 200 pounds of milk a day, every
single day for a year. That is a biological,
metabolic outlier. The Foster family said whenever
you looked for her, she's either at the bunk
eating or at the trough drinking. That's exactly
what I mean about the engine capacity. To do
that, a cow has to be a flawless metabolic machine.
She has to be able to process that much energy,
physically converting feed to milk without getting
sick. Most cows, if you push them even half that
hard, would immediately get ketosis. Their liver
would shut down. Or they would pull so much calcium
out of their own bones to make the milk that
they would go down with milk fever. Lucy proved
that Blackstar genetics created a metabolic system
that was almost bulletproof. But then you have
the complete other side of the coin. You have
Stukion Park Black Rose. The absolute queen.
She was EX96, All -American, Royal Winter Fair
Champion. She's the absolute epitome of the beautiful
cow. The kind of cow that literally makes you
stop walking when you see her enter the show
ring. But here is the kicker with Black Rose.
She wasn't just a pretty face standing in deep
straw. She made 42 ,000 pounds of milk herself.
Exactly. She proved that Black Star could win
the biggest banners in the world and still completely
fill the bulk tank. And that is the universal
truth of Black Star. He completely bridged the
gap. He ended the Civil War. You didn't have
to choose between type and production anymore.
For the first time, you could actually have both.
And there is always a bite. But in these kinds
of stories, when you find something that works
this perfectly, what does the dairy industry
immediately do? We use it. We absolutely abuse
it. We double down on it until we break it. And
that leads us directly to the ripple effect.
Yeah. The genetic avalanche. Because Blackstar
didn't just stay in the barns as milking daughters.
He became the ultimate sire of sons. The numbers
here are just as crazy as the production records.
The industry ended up sampling 2 ,500 of his
sons. 2 ,500 sons. That represented fully half
of the entire world's sampling capacity at the
time. Think about that. For a few years, every
other bull entering an AI stud, whether it was
ABS or Select or Alta, was a Black Star son.
That is an incredible concentration of genetics.
It's a massive funnel. It is. And it worked beautifully,
which is actually the core of the problem. If
his sons had been duds, the line would have naturally
died out. But the sons were fantastic. You had
MJR, Blackstar, Emery. He sired a bull called
Blitz. And Blitz sold 1 .5 million doses? A total
record. And then Blitz sired Socrates. Socrates
sired... robust robust sired super sire let's
stop there for a second super sire if you were
milking cows today you know super sire he was
the absolute milk king of the early genomic era
he basically defined the modern commercial cow
for a decade and that is a direct unbroken male
line straight back to blackstar and then you
have the m total line over in europe right Through
the damn side, you get in Toto who gives us Pixton
Shottle. Shottle. I feel like everyone listening
on a tractor just nodded their head at that name.
Yeah. Shottle was the bull of the 2000s. He was
the ultimate satisfaction bull. If you used Shottle,
if you use Super Sire, if you use Mogul, if you
use literally any modern elite bull, you're using
Blackstar. Jeff Ziegler at Select Sires currently
estimates that 60 % of their current lineup directly
traces to him. 60 % from that one single embryo
in Iowa. It's a total genetic avalanche. But
avalanches can be incredibly dangerous. They
alter the entire landscape. And they completely
destroy diversity. They destroy everything in
their path if you aren't careful. And this brings
us to the challenge. The ultimate cost of monopolies.
Because while Black Star was an absolute miracle
for the farmers struggling in the 90s, he has
left us with a massive, invisible bill. that
is coming due right now. A massive bill is right.
We really need to talk about the inbreeding reality.
The cautionary tale of this whole deep dive.
The industry found a sure thing. And just like
with the stock market or with planting monopulture
crops, when you go all in on one single thing,
you create massive vulnerability. Let's look
at the data on this. We mentioned the 15 .8 %
relationship to the current population earlier.
That is higher than elevation. It's higher than
chief. And in 1999, a researcher named Van Raden
published a major study. He warned us. He flat
out said Black Star had the highest expected
inbreeding of future progeny at 7 .9%. He saw
this coming almost 30 years ago. But the train
had already left the station. It was moving way
too fast to stop. And now today we are facing
an effective population crisis. Explain that
term to us. Effective population size. Yeah.
Because it sounds very academic, but it's actually
a very scary concept for the breed. Okay, imagine
a human village. If you have a million people
living in a city, but they all directly descend
from just the exact same two families, the actual
genetic size of that city is very small. That's
effective population size. For Holsteins, even
though there are millions and millions of cows
standing in barns across the U .S., genetically,
the population size is down to between 40 and
70 animals. Wait. 40 to 70? Yes. The most numerous
dairy breed in the entire world is genetically
the size of a small isolated village. That is,
honestly, that is terrifying. It is. For wild
species, anything less than 50 is considered
critically at risk of extinction. We are dancing
right on that line with our commercial dairy
cows. And this directly leads to haplotypes,
right? Yes. When you severely narrow the gene
pool, you drastically increase the chance that
two carriers of a bad recessive gene will mate.
We call them haplotypes, HH1, HH2, and so on.
These are genetic defects that cause early embryonic
death. So the cow gets pregnant, but the embryo
basically just dies at 40 days. Exactly. To the
farmer, it just looks like the cow didn't catch.
She comes back in heat a little late. You think,
oh, just bad luck, or maybe it was too hot. But
it's not bad luck. It's genetics. It's the direct
biological cost of inbreeding. And this obviously
hits the wall at heart. Absolutely. I'm the farmer
translator here, so let me translate all this
science into actual dollars. Inbreeding causes
what we call inbreeding depression. That means
fertility drops across the board, embryo loss
goes up. The immune system is just a little bit
weaker than it should be. So what does that actually
cost the farm? Back in 1999 dollars, every 1
% increase in inbreeding cost about $22 to $24
in lost lifetime net income per cow. And today?
What are the current estimates? Today the estimates
are sitting between $200 and $400 in hidden losses
per cow. $400 per cow. That's money you don't
actively see leaving your bank account. Nobody
writes a check for inbreeding. It's the cow that
takes three services to breed instead of one.
It's the calf that gets pneumonia and just never
quite catches up to her pen mates. It's the heifer
that calves in and just doesn't milk the way
her shiny genomic numbers said she should. That
is the cost of inbreeding. That is the direct
cost of the Black Star avalanche. So we clearly
have a problem. We have a genetic base that is
incredibly narrow, largely because we found a
bull that was just too undeniable good not to
use. We did it with Bell. We did it with Blackstar.
And frankly, we are doing it again right now
with genomics. The inbreeding rate is currently
rising by plus 0 .4 % every single year. We are
accelerating our truck right into the wall. It's
the sure thing versus diversity. It's that constant
temptation to just use the highest number on
the list, even if literally everyone else is
using it too. So the real question is, For the
guy sitting on the tractor right now listening
to this, what do they do? You can't just stop
breeding cows. You can't just quit dairy farming.
No, you can't. So let's get right into the list
and takeaways. The real lesson from Marengo.
Give us the actionable plan here. We call it
the 30 -93 -65 plan. Okay, break that down for
us. What do they do right now? Right now, the
30. When you get off the tractor today, go into
the office and turn on your computer. Pull your
herd's inbreeding report. Every modern herd management
software, has it Dairy Comp, BovaSync, whatever
you use, looks specifically for the F coefficient.
What's the magic number they should be looking
out for? If your herd average is over 8%, you
are actively losing money. Plain and simple.
You are firmly in the danger zone where those
hidden costs, those $400 losses start really
kicking in. You need to know exactly where your
herd stands today. Okay, so that's step one.
What's step two for the next 90 days? The four
April proofs. The 90. The new sire proofs come
out in April. Before you buy your semen for the
year, sit down and pick 8 to 10 completely unrelated
sires. Unrelated is the key word there. But how
do you actually find them when the gene pool
is this small? You have to force yourself to
look past the top 10 TPI list. Because very often
the top 10 bulls are all brothers or cousins.
They literally all come from the exact same flush.
You have to actively look for outcross sires.
Look for bulls that don't have super sire or
mogul anywhere in the first three generations.
They do exist. They might be a few points lower
on total TPI, but the heterosis, that hybrid
vigor you get from using a truly unrelated bull,
will absolutely more than make up for those few
lost index points. Make a hard rule for your
breeding program. Yes. No single bull makes up
more than 15 % of your total matings. Period.
Spread your risk out. Do not put all your genetic
eggs in one basket, even if it's a really, really
nice looking basket. And what about the long
term? The 365? The 365 is about mindset. Treat
your genetic diversity exactly like you treat
your feed inventory. You wouldn't let your bunker
run completely empty before you thought about
ordering more corn. Don't let your herd's genetic
diversity run out before you try to fix it. Monitor
it constantly. If you see that inbreeding number
creeping up year over year, make a hard change.
Use entirely different bloodlines. Maybe even
look at a different breed for a crossbreeding
program if you have to like procross or something.
But at the very least, within the Holstein breed,
aggressively find those outcrossed bulls. It's
really about being intentional rather than just
going with the flow. It is. It's about realizing
that the absolute best bull bull on a piece of
paper isn't always the best bull for your specific
herd if he happens to be related to every single
cow you own. You know, I think there is a profound
philosophical lesson here, too. It directly goes
back to Randy Tompkins and that initial bad bet
flush. It really does. We constantly keep chasing
the sure thing. We want the absolute guarantee.
But the deep irony of this whole story is that
Blackstar wasn't a sure thing at all. He was
a massive gamble. He was an unglamorous working
cow bred to a solid frame bull. He wasn't the
result of some massive computer algorithm trying
to maximize TPI. He was simply the result of
a farmer trying to breed a cow that could actually
work in his barn. And I think that brings us
to the final thought we really want to leave
people with today. go ahead lay it out somewhere
in the semen catalog right now maybe it's the
one literally sitting on the dash of your pickup
truck there is a bull he's ranked maybe 300th
on the active tpi list he's cheap he doesn't
have a glossy full page ad he's completely unglamorous
just exactly like hannah was just like hannah
just like blackstar was in the very beginning
but he's the next one he's the one who will make
cows that actually last in the herd he's the
one who brings something structurally different
to the table and 99 of people are going to flip
right past his page because his composite numbers
aren't quite elite enough but he might be the
exact one who steps in and saves your herd's
fertility Exactly. History consistently tells
us that the cheap bulls with the deep, solid
maternal families often outlast the high -number
shooting stars. So take a second look at the
bulls you usually ignore. Look closely at the
cow families behind them. Look for the Hannahs.
I just love that. It brings it all right back
to the emotion and the core of farming. Randy
Tompkins just wanted to make a good cow better.
And in the end, when you strip everything else
away... That's what we're all just trying to
do. It's the entire job. It's about stewardship.
It's about leaving the herd and the land better
than you found it. So we really want to hear
from you. Take our advice and check your herd's
numbers. Did you pull that software report? Did
you find out you were sitting at 10 % inbreeding
and didn't even know it? Or maybe do you have
a Black Star story, an old cow that traced back
to him that fundamentally changed your farm?
Share it with us. We actively want to hear the
reality from the barn floor. Tell us about the
absolute best cow you ever milked. Was she a
black star daughter? You can find us and share
your stories at www .thebullvine .com. Send us
an email or leave a comment on the site. We honestly
read every single one of them. That's another
deep dive from the Bullvine podcast. These are
the incredible people building the future of
dairy. Find more deep dives at www .thebullvine
.com. Next time we're talking to a breeder who
completely rewrote the rules on crossbreeding,
make sure you subscribe so you don't miss it.
Thanks so much for listening. See you next time.
Legends live here.