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. Today we are sharing a story
that, honestly, it stopped us in our tracks.
Yeah, it really is. This is the kind of conversation
that reminds you exactly why you got into dairy
in the first place. Absolutely. Yeah. So I want
you to picture this scenario for a moment. Just
put yourself right there. Okay. You're standing
in the farm office. It's that quiet, just...
brutally early hour before the sun is even thinking
about coming up. Right. The coffee's barely kicking
in. Exactly. The barn is just starting to wake
up. You can hear the hum of the bulk tank and
you have your herd's latest genetics report spread
out on the desk. Under that harsh, buzzing, fluorescent
light. We all know that light. You know the one.
And you are tracing your finger down the columns
of data, looking at the projections for your
replacement heifers. and you see a number that
makes your stomach completely drop. A number
nobody wants to see. The number is 9 .99%. Wow.
That is the average inbreeding coefficient for
the animals that are supposed to be the entire
future of your dairy operation. Almost 10%. Now,
if you explain that to just, you know, a person
on the street, it might just sound like a dry
statistic. But for anyone whose livelihood depends
on milking cows, What does a number like 9 .99
% actually mean for the reality of their daily
life? It means the margin for error on your farm
has effectively vanished. Poof. Gone. Exactly.
Gone. At a nearly 10 % inbreeding coefficient,
you are no longer just looking at a spreadsheet
problem. You are looking at a biological ceiling
pressing down on your entire herd. Right. When
a population of animals becomes that genetically
similar, you lose the biological resilience required
to handle the daily stresses of, you know, being
a high producing dairy cow. Because it's a massive
physiological stress. Oh, absolutely. You start
seeing these invisible ceilings on milk production
that no amount of premium feed can. breakthrough,
you start dealing with phantom fertility issues.
Phantom issues, like what? Like cows that simply
will not settle no matter what you do, driving
your veterinary bills through the roof. And ultimately,
you see an early exit from the herd. The cows
just, they just do not last. It's the genetic
equivalent of painting yourself into a corner.
And the paint is drying. The paint is drying
incredibly fast right now for a massive portion
of the global dairy industry. That paints just
a stark, terrifying picture of the stakes. And
that is... exactly the landscape we are going
to explore in today's deep dive. We really need
to get into this. We do, because we have gathered
a fascinating stack of agricultural analyses,
historical pedigree data, specific herd management
playbooks, and all of these sources point to
this massive systemic crisis in modern dairy
farming, which is the shrinking of the genetic
base. But there is a silver lining in all this
data. There is. More importantly, the material
points to a very strange, very unexpected historical
blueprint for survival. Our mission today is
to look at how five historical Plan B bulls somehow
saved the Holstein breed from catastrophic genetic
bottlenecks in the past. Plan B bulls. I love
that. Right. We are talking about bulls that
were ignored, overlooked, or actively laughed
out of the show ring by the mainstream establishment.
And the pattern hidden in the history of these
five bulls is what makes this deep dive so critical
for anyone managing a herd today. It's the roadmap.
It is. We are going to look at walkway chief
Mark. Carol Preludman, Toto, Oman, Blitz, and
Elevation. These were not the million -dollar
cover boys of the Sire catalogs. Or from it.
They were the backups, the ugly ducklings, the
total accidents. Yet... Their specific genetic
blueprints ended up being the exact life rafts
the industry desperately needed at various crisis
points over the last 60 years. So the goal is
to extract the survival lessons from these genetic
titans. Exactly. And translate their history
into actionable concrete barn math for your own
operation today. Because the relentless pursuit
of single trait perfection that created the crises
of the past, that is the exact same pressure
driving that 9 .99 % inbreeding number you're
looking at right now. Let's establish the sheer
scale of the current landscape before we dive
into the history. Because the Lactanic Canada
data specifically points out that Canadian Holstein
heifers born in 2024 are hitting that 9 .99 %
inbreeding mark. That's right now. That's today.
Yes. And young sires across the board are running
at 9 to 10%. So when we talk about inbreeding
depression, what is actually happening at a cellular
level that causes these production and health
ceilings? It comes down to how recessive treats
function within a closed population. Every animal,
humans included, carries a certain number of
recessive mutations. Flaws in the code. Right,
flaws in the genetic code that are masked by
a dominant, healthy gene from the other parent.
As long as the population is diverse, the chances
of two identical recessive mutations pairing
up in an offspring are incredibly low. Because
the gene pool is deep enough. Exactly. But when
the entire Holstein breed starts using the exact
same top 5 or 10 bulls for a decade straight,
you are heavily concentrating those specific
genes. You're shrinking the pool to a puddle.
At 10 % inbreeding, the mathematical probability
of an animal inheriting the exact same broken
piece of DNA from both sides of its pedigree
skyrockets. And when they pair up. When those
negative recessive traits pair up, they express
themselves. That is biological inbreeding depression.
It manifests as a weakened immune system, poor
feet and legs, lower milk components, and just
a general foilty. It just makes the cow incapable
of handling the metabolic demands of lactation.
She just can't do the job she was bred to do.
That explains the biology perfectly. But the
sources also dive deep into the raw economics
of this crisis, which is where it really hits
home. The wallet. Yes. There is a massive study
referenced here focusing on 27 ,735 Italian Holstein
cows. Why did researchers choose to look specifically
at the Italian dairy industry to understand the
financial cost of inbreeding? The Italian dairy
economy provides a brilliant, highly controlled
environment to measure economic loss, and it's
primarily because of Parmigiano -Reggiano cheese.
Oh, interesting. Why cheese? The Parmigiano -Reggiano
consortium operates under incredibly strict rules.
The cheese has to be made from raw milk, no additives,
and it requires a very specific dense profile
of fat and casein protein to age properly over
several years. So they're incredibly sensitive
to the exact makeup of the milk. Precisely. Because
the milk is paid for based entirely on its cheese
-yielding capabilities, meaning the total volume
of fat and protein solids, any drop in milk quality
is instantly reflected in the farmer's milk check.
No hiding it. None. So researchers tracked over
27 ,000 cows to see exactly what happened to
those milk solids as the inbreeding coefficient
rose. And what did the data show when those genetic
lines got too close? The data was staggering,
just staggering. They found that severe inbreeding
depresses the fat and protein yield so drastically
that it costs a farm the equivalent of over half
a wheel of Parmigiano -Reggiano per cow per lactation.
Wait, half a wheel of cheese? Over half a wheel
per cow every single lactation. That is a brilliant
way to visualize the loss. It takes an abstract
concept like genetic depression and turns it
into a physical product being carved away and
just taken right off your table. It makes the
invisible cost highly visible. In hard currency,
the researchers calculated that this equates
to roughly 310 to 600 euros per cow. per lactation,
simply vanishing. Poof, gone. Right. The genetic
engine of the cow is bogged down, so she eats
the same amount of expensive feed. She takes
up the exact same space in the barn, requires
the same labor to milk, but produces significantly
less cheese -yielding solid. If we run that math
out for a typical commercial operation, I mean,
the numbers get alarming very quickly. Do the
math. Okay. If you are losing, let's say, 500
euros or roughly $550 per cow per lactation,
and you are milking a 200 -cow herd. Which is
a very standard size. Right. That is $110 ,000
evaporating in a single year. Multiply that by
the three or four lactations you hope to get
from a healthy cow, and you are suddenly looking
at hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost lifetime
revenue. Just gone. And this is not happening
because of bad feed or poor heat detection or
a dirty milking parlor. It is happening purely
because the industry got too efficient at breeding
for a very specific type of perfection and the
irony of the situation is profound the dairy
industry's absolute obsession with perfection
is what built this exact trap also For decades,
the breeding world has chased the top of the
TPI lists. The Total Performance Index. Right.
The TPI is a formula that ranks bulls based on
a weighted combination of milk yield, utter conformation,
and various health traits. The problem is that
when a computer model tells the entire global
industry that five specific bulls are the absolute
most profitable. Everyone uses those exact same
five bulls. Everyone? The sons of those bulls
become the next generation of sires. The daughters
become the bull mothers. It's an echo chamber.
Within a few generations, you've engineered a
magnificent high -producing animal, but you have
also engineered a severe genetic bottleneck.
So how do we fix it? Well, to understand how
to break out of a modern bottleneck like this,
we have to look at how the breed accidentally
saved itself from similar corners in the past.
And that brings us to the first major historical
accident in our sources. It centers around a
bull named Walkway Chief Monk. Ah, Mark. What
a story. Walkway Chief Mark's story is so fascinating
because his entire legacy as the savior of the
breed is rooted in a sudden crisis that happened
to a completely different animal. The classic
backup plan. Exactly. The historical data takes
us back to 1978. Select Sires, which is one of
the largest artificial insemination cooperatives
in the world, had their sights set on a young
sire named Monroe. He was the guy. He was. The
industry magazines were hyping him up. He was
a son of the legendary Pawnee farm Arlinda Chief
out of a highly regarded cow named Walkway Matt
Mamie. Monroe was contracted to be the golden
boy, the catalog cover star. The plan A. The
plan A. But what actually happens to the plan
A in this scenario? The plan A simply drops dead.
Monroe died during his initial test services
at the cooperative before the technicians could
even freeze a single straw of his semen for commercial
sale. Oh my God. Imagine being the guy who bought
him. You have to put yourself in the shoes of
Charlie Will, the young sire analyst for Select
Sires at the time. This was one of his very first
major acquisitions. The pressure must have been
intense. Unbelievable pressure. His marquee signing,
the bull that was supposed to drive sales and
define the cooperative's lineup for the next
five years, is suddenly gone. So what does he
do? He had to pivot immediately. He looked at
Monroe's pedigree and went back to the breeder
to buy Monroe's full brother as a backup. The
understudy. The understudy. That backup brother
was walkway chief Mark. Okay, let's pause and
look at where Mark actually came from. Because
his origin stands in such stark contrast to the
glitz and glamour of high -end show ring cattle
breeding. It really does. Mark was born on Foster
Walk's farm, located outside the small town of
Neoga, Illinois. This was not the type of farm
that generated buzz in the glossy pages of the
Holstein World Classifieds, was it? Not at all.
Foster Walk was a quintessential, gritty, commercial
dairyman. Working in the mud. Exactly. His breeding
philosophy was completely removed from the catalog
hype. At one point, the records indicate he was
buying groups of commodity heifers for 21 cents
a pound. 21 cents a pound. He was effectively
buying animals at commodity beef pricing and
building a dairy herd from them. He didn't care
about flashy pedigrees or show ring ribbons.
He bred strictly for raw, practical cow scents.
He just wanted cows that worked. He wanted cows
that got to work, milked hard, and stayed out
of the way. It is incredible to think that one
of the most genetically influential animals of
the 20th century emerged from a herd built on
21 cent a pound commodity heifers. From absolute
obscurity. Right. So Charlie Will brings this
unglamorous backup bull, Mark, into the select
sire's lineup. When his first crop of daughters
finally freshen and enter the milking parlors
across the country, what exactly does the industry
see that makes them lose their collective minds
over him? They saw the udders. The udders. The
boom was instantaneous and undeniable. In the
early 1980s, the Holstein breed was really struggling
with udder confirmation as milk volumes increased.
Because they were pushing for more yield. Right.
Cows were producing more milk, but their udders
were not physically strong enough to carry that
weight. You had deep pendulous udders that were
prone to mastitis, easily injured, and difficult
to attach to milking machines. A management nightmare.
A total nightmare. But Mark completely revolutionized
the bovine udder. His daughters exhibited four
attachments that blended smoothly into the body
wall, incredibly high and wide rear attachments,
perfect teat placement. And they lasted. Yes.
A shallow, utter depth that kept the mammary
system well above the hawks, even as the cow
aged. They were light years ahead of the competition.
The AI catalogs must have been completely saturated
with Mark Daughters, based on that physical advantage
alone. Everyone wanted one. But as the sources
point out, reaching for a backup bull is never
a flawless solution. Mark brought elite udders,
but he also carried a severe structural curse
that traveled down his maternal line, originating
from a bull named Nonarmi Fondmat. Hidden flaw.
How did this flaw manifest in Mark's daughters?
It manifested in the feet and legs, specifically
in the pasterns and heels. Okay, break that down
for us. So the pastern is the shock -absorbing
joint between the hoof and the fetlock. A strong
pastern has a steep angle, keeping the cow up
on her toes. A weak pastern slopes backward,
dropping the cow's weight onto her heels. Like
wearing bad shoes all day. Exactly. Mark's daughters
were notorious for having shallow heels and weak
pasterns. When a cow with shallow heels stands
on concrete all day, the soft tissue at the back
of the foot bears the brunt of the weight. Ouch.
Yeah, this leads to bruising, ulcers, and chronic
lameness. So you have this massive paradox standing
in the show ring. The historical accounts describe
it perfectly. A breeder would watch a mark daughter
walk into the ring and immediately fall in love
with the sheer perfection of the udder. Beautiful
up top. But the moment the cow turned sideways
and you looked at her foundation, The illusion
completely shattered. How did the dairy farmers
of the 1980s handle a bull that was simultaneously
a miracle and a disaster? It forced a hard division
between the farmers who understood the concept
of specialist tools and the farmers who engaged
in indiscriminate breeding. The ones who did
the math versus the ones who just followed the
hype. Exactly. The master breeders looked at
Mark and recognized that he was not a universal
fix. They mapped out his precise hole, his fatal
flaw in the feet and legs. So they protected
against it. They only mated Mark to specific
cow families within their herds that already
possessed rock -solid structural foundations,
steep foot angles and deep heels. Balancing the
equation. Those farmers used the cow's existing
strengths to mask Mark's weakness, and they were
rewarded with the most profitable, beautiful
udders of their generation. But what happened
to the farmers who just bought into the hype
without analyzing the structural mismatch? Oh,
they paid a heavy price. The farmers who viewed
Mark as a magic wand and spread his semen indiscriminately
across their entire herds. Thinking he'd fix
everything. Right. They ended up spending the
entire next decade dealing with the fallout.
They spent countless hours and dollars trimming
hooves, treating heel warts, wrapping ulcerated
feet. The vet bills must have been insane. And
prematurely culling cows that simply could not
walk to the feed bunk anymore. It is the ultimate
lesson of the outcross or the backup bull. You
have to know a bull's flaws just as intimately
as you know his strengths. That structural flaw
in the feet and legs was painful, and it was
expensive to manage. But the research points
to a much darker hidden cost associated with
Walkway Chief Mark. Much darker. Bad feet were
visible. You could see them. You could manage
them if you were careful. What was hiding deeper
inside his DNA was completely invisible, and
it leads to one of the most devastating chapters
in dairy genetics. You're bringing up the APAF1
mutation. I am. It's terrifying. It is a textbook
example of what happens when a single genetic
line becomes too dominant. Because Mark was so
intensely popular for fixing udders, his genetics
rapidly saturated the entire Holstein breed.
He was everywhere. He eventually recorded over
57 ,000 production -tested daughters. Through
those daughters and his thousands of sons, his
DNA was woven into the fabric of the industry.
Today, his genetics sit in roughly 7 % of every
Holstein on the North American continent. But
buried deep within that DNA, inherited from his
sire, Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief, was a recessive
lethal mutation on the APAF1 gene. How does a
lethal mutation hide in plain sight for decades
while a bull is being used tens of thousands
of times? Yeah. Why wasn't it noticed immediately?
It hides because of the exact biological mechanism
we discussed regarding inbreeding. The APAF1
mutation is recessive. Okay. When a farmer mated
Mark to a cow from a different genetic line,
the resulting calf inherited one mutated APAF1
gene from Mark and one healthy dominant gene
from the mother. So she was fine. That calf was
perfectly healthy, but she was a carrier. She
grew up, entered the milking herd, and performed
beautifully. The trap wasn't sprung until a generation
or two later, when the industry became so saturated
with mark -in -chief genetics that they started
breeding carriers to carriers. Unknowingly, yes.
Farmers started mating carrier cows to carrier
bulls. And when two carriers are mated, the mathematical
probability dictates a 25 % chance that the embryo
inherits the mutated gene from both parents.
That's the danger zone. When that happens with
APAF1, what is the biological result? The result
is embryonic death. Just death. The mutation
fundamentally breaks the cellular development
process early in gestation. The calves simply
do not develop. The cow appears to settle. So
the farmer thinks she's pregnant. Right, but
then she quietly aborts the microscopic embryo
and returns to heat a few weeks later. So frustrating.
And because early embryonic loss is a somewhat
common occurrence in dairy cattle due to various
environmental factors, heat stress, minor infections.
The farmers just assumed it was a standard fertility
issue. Exactly. They had no idea a genetic time
bomb was quietly killing a quarter of these specific
matings. It took researchers nearly 30 years
to finally track this down. 30 years of lost
calves. The team led by Harris Lewin at UC Davis
finally identified the APA F1 mutation and traced
it back to chief. When they finally tallied up
the historical data, the economic toll was almost
unfathomable. What did this invisible genetic
curse actually cost the dairy industry? The retrospective
analysis estimated that over the course of those
three decades, the APA F1 mutation caused the
loss of 500 ,000 calves worldwide. 500 ,000.
More than 100 ,000 of those lost pregnancies
occurred in the United States alone. When you
calculate the lost value of those calves, the
extra semen used to rebreed the cows, and the
lost milk production from cows experiencing extended
days open. The financial hit. The financial hit
was estimated at $420 million. Nearly half a
billion dollars. It really drives home the reality
that greatness and genetic risk travel together
in the exact same pedigree. Mark fixed a massive
physical problem for the breed, but his dominance
created a bottleneck that cost half a billion
dollars. That is staggering. Which is exactly
why the modern dairy farmer cannot rely on a
single savior. If you reach outside the mainstream
to fix an inbreeding problem, you must do your
homework. Always. But Mark's story is an example
of stumbling into a backup bowl. The sources
outline another crisis, about two decades later,
where the dairy industry did not just stumble
into a backup, but actively and desperately needed
an outsider to fix a slow -motion systemic disaster.
And that brings us to the late 1990s and the
absolute dominance of the Bell genetic line.
Ah, Bell. The late 1990s crisis is a perfect
illustration of the industry chasing a single
trait right off a cliff. Yep. Following the utter
improvements of the 80s, the entire dairy world
became fixated on first lactation milk records.
They wanted it all right away. Exactly. The goal
was to breed a heifer that would calve for the
first time and immediately pump out. Astronomical
volumes of milk. We are talking 100 pounds of
milk a day from a two -year -old animal. Incredible
stress on a young body. And the bull that delivered
that specific trait better than anyone else was
Carlin M. Ivanhoe Bell. The Bell genetics were
incredibly potent. His descendants flooded dairy
barns across the globe with unheard of volumes
of milk. The production numbers looked phenomenal
on paper. The herd averages spiked. And the milk
checks grew. But the biological debt of that
extreme production was about to come due. The
sources paint a visceral, almost agonizing picture
of what it looked like inside those barns once
the bell daughters hit their peak. They were
producing massive amounts of milk. But what was
happening to the cows physically? They were physically
falling apart. Literally falling apart. The bell
line cows possessed an extreme amount of what
the industry calls dairy character. They were
very angular, very sharp, with a massive drive
to convert feed into milk. But they lacked the
sheer bodily substance, the chest width, and
the bone structure to support it. You had these
relatively small -framed, frail cows trying to
hold up incredibly heavy milk -filled udders.
Which is just a recipe for disaster. Because
their drive to produce milk was so genetically
overwhelming, they would pull calcium and energy
straight out of their own bones and muscle reserves
to keep the milk flowing. which leads directly
to metabolic collapse. The accounts from farmers
during that era described barns looking like
battlefields. Like a hospital ward. You had high
-producing cows going down with milk fever left
and right, unable to stand because their blood
calcium levels had completely crashed. Their
legs were splaying out on the concrete under
the weight of the udders. They simply could not
handle the physiological stress. They had bred
a Ferrari engine into a golf cart chassis. Wow,
a Ferrari engine in a golf cart. And the wheels
were flying off. A cow might give an incredible
amount of milk in her first and second lactations,
but the sheer effort would destroy her. She would
wash out of the herd, meaning she had to be culled
for health or structural reasons before she even
reached her third lactation. So the industry
recognized they needed a correction, right? A
way to add strength and durability back into
the cows and they needed it fast. But the massive
problem was that they couldn't find the cure
in the mainstream North American catalogs. Because
of the inbreeding. Exactly. Because the industry
had chased Bell so aggressively, virtually every
top ranking bull available was heavily related
to him. They were all carrying the exact same
genes for extreme first lactation yield and physical
frailty. So they were trapped. To fix the bell
hangover, they had to look completely outside
the established system. They had to look to Italy.
Which introduces one of the most unlikely heroes
in the Holstein breed, Carol Prelude Makoto.
He was born in 1993 in the Parmigiano -Reggiano
region of Italy, the exact same region we discussed
earlier, where the demands for milk components
and durable grazing cows were entirely different
from the North American confinement model. A
completely different world. If a North American
dairy farmer looked at McToto's paper proof in
1998, he looked like a complete joke compared
to the bell line rockets. A total joke. His genetic
projections for milk production were totally
mediocre. He was not going to give you that massive
immediate first lactation milk spike that everyone
was addicted to. No, he wasn't. And yet when
his semen was imported to Britain, it was priced
at an exorbitant 40 pounds per straw. That was
roughly four times the going rate for standard.
proven bulls at the time. 40 pounds. Unheard
of for a bull like that. Why on earth was a quote
-unquote mediocre Italian bull commanding a 40
-pound premium? It sounds like sheer madness
until you dissect the architecture of his pedigree.
Matoda was deliberately designed by the Italian
breeders and a correction formula. He was a specialist
tool. Yes. He was not bred for peak explosive
milk. He was bred for survival and longevity.
If you look at his sire, he was a son of Hanover
Hill Starbuck, a bull legendary for injecting
essential frame size, bone quality, and capacity.
Building the chassis. His dam was a daughter
of Tumar Blackstar, providing incredible constitution,
chest width, and strength. And on the maternal
line, bringing it all full circle, we find Walkway
Chief Mark. Delivering those elite, welded on,
utter attachments we talked about. Exactly. So
his entire genetic profile was built to construct
a stronger chassis. He was the exact antidote
the industry needed for the fragile bell line
cows. How did that translate when farmers actually
started milking Mtoto daughters? It translated
into time. When Mtoto's daughters hit the milking
parlors, they were not the ones winning the production
awards in their first year. They milked moderately.
But they survive. The critical difference emerged
over time. They were still in the barn in year
three and year four and year five. They were
steadily, reliably completing six profitable
lactations while their bell line contemporaries
were already rendering into dog food after two.
That is incredible. The health traits of those
Emtodo daughters are legendary. Even today, looking
back, it is mature proof from 2025 that the data
is just rock solid. It holds up perfectly. His
somatic cell scores, which measure mastitis resistance,
sit at a deeply negative 13, which is phenomenal.
His healthy cow index is a plus 17. 30 years
after he was born, those health traits have not
eroded. in the genetic evaluations which brings
us to a specific historical moment that perfectly
encapsulates this shift it is one of the greatest
turning pint stories in modern dairy history
highlighting the tension between the catalog
salesmen and the farmers actually doing the milking
i really want to dig deeply into this story because
it takes place at the pickford family's pixton
farm in staffordshire england around 1999 the
pickfords great dairymen they had a specific
cow in their herd named condon arrow sharon She
was an eight -year -old cow. Why is an eight
-year -old cow in a commercial dairy setting
such a significant anomaly? Because the average
commercial dairy cow, especially during the height
of the bell line frailty, rarely made it past
four or five years of age. An eight -year -old
cow means she has survived at least six calving
cycles, handled the metabolic stress of six lactations,
maintained her fertility, avoided severe mastitis,
and kept her feet intact. She's a tank. She represents
the absolute pinnacle of durability and profitability.
Because after her second lactation, she has paid
off her rearing costs, and every drop of milk
she produces from then on is pure profit. But
despite Sharon being this living, breathing testament
to profitability, the artificial insemination
representatives visiting the Pickford farm did
not want to talk about her. No, of course not.
They were pushing the new hotness. They wanted
the Pickfords to focus on flushing embryos from
their young, completely unproven first lactation
heifers that had sky -high index numbers on paper.
Right. The reps were selling the algorithm. But
the father, Anthony Pickford, pushed back against
that narrative. He physically points at Sharon
in the barn and asks this fundamental question.
He says, but Sharon is still here. She's still
producing. These flashy heifers you're pushing,
will their daughters still be milking in eight
years? What a question. He refused to play the
high -index catalog game. He wanted to breed
for the durability he could see with his own
eyes. So the Pickfords make a massive contrarian
gamble. Massive. They take this incredible, proven,
eight -year -old survivor cow, and they breed
her to the 40 -pound Italian import, Mentoto.
The bull that the rest of the high -end breeding
world thought was too mediocre for elite matings.
What was the result of that specific combination?
The result was a bull calf named Pixton Shottle.
Shottle. Just saying that name is enough to make
anyone who understands dairy genetics stop and
pay attention. Shottle did not just succeed.
He completely redefined the global dairy industry
for a decade. He really did. He took the durability
of Entodo and the proven survivability of Sharon
and packaged it perfectly. He hit number one
on the USTPI list in 2008. He dominated the rankings
on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously,
which is incredibly rare. Rare is an understatement.
He eventually achieved nearly 10 ,000 excellent
classified daughters worldwide, and he sold over
1 .17 million doses of semen. All because one
farmer looked at a durable old cow and decided
to mate her to an overpriced Italian outcross
that the algorithm said was not good enough.
How does this specific story of durability connect
to the real -world pressures a dairy farmer feels
today? Let's look at the economic environment
Schottl's daughters were born into. In 2008,
the global dairy industry faced a massive, brutal
economic crisis. The 2008 crisis was a perfect
storm. Feed costs absolutely skyrocketed due
to global grain shortages and ethanol mandates,
making corn incredibly expensive. The feed bill
was terrifying. Simultaneously, the global milk
price completely crashed. It was an absolute
bloodbath for dairy balance sheets. If we look
at who survived that era, it provides the ultimate
validation of the M. totoshottle blueprint. Because
who survived? The farming operations that had
chased those extreme, fragile, high -producing,
bell -line genetics, many of them went under.
They couldn't afford to feed them. Their cows
required massive amounts of expensive, high -energy
feed just to maintain their body condition while
producing milk. When the milk price dropped,
the cost of the feed vastly exceeded the value
of the milk, and the math simply broke. But what
about the farms that were heavily invested in
the Schottel daughters? The farms that had prioritized
the moderate production and extreme durability
of the metodoline weathered the storm. Their
cows were lower maintenance. They didn't need
as much inputs. They converted forage more efficiently.
They had fewer vet bills. And most importantly,
they stayed in the herd for five or six lactations.
Which means no replacement costs. When you don't
have to spend money raising replacement heifers
constantly because you're older cows refuse to
die, your overhead drops significantly. That
durability paid the mortgage when the milk check
could not. It is a profound lesson. Durability
pays, especially when the market turns violently
against you. And that directly connects to the
feed cost anxieties every single farmer feels
right now as they watch the commodity markets.
It never really goes away. But Metodo was just
the beginning of this rebellion against the shiny
catalog cover boys. The next era in our sources
takes the concept of, quote unquote, ugly but
profitable to a level that actively angered the
show ring elite. Oh, this is a great era. Let's
dig into the anti -type kings of the 2000s, O
Man and Blitz. To understand the sheer disruption
caused by Oman, you first have to understand
the era of Holstein aesthetics he was born into.
The supermodels. Exactly. The late 90s and early
2000s were dominated by absolute giants of the
show ring. You had bulls like Reagan Crust Elton
Durham, who achieved something almost mythical
by winning five consecutive premier sire banners
at the World Dairy Expo in Madison. Five in a
row. Then you had Braydale Goldwyn, who came
along and won 10 premier sire banners. Unbelievable.
These bulls sired cows that were breathtaking
to look at. They were incredibly tall with long
bodies, perfectly broad and flat rumps, and a
sweeping angular rib structure. They represented
the absolute peak of bovine aesthetics. And then,
lumbering out of the shadows to challenge these
show ring gods, comes a bull named O .B. Manfred
Justice, universally known as O -Man. Good old
O -Man. He was born in 1998. The sources provide
his linear profile from the National Association
of Animal Breeders database. And compared to
the show winners of the day, his numbers are
frankly hilarious. You're so bad. His udder composite,
or UDC, was a negative 3 .22. His dairy form
was a negative 3 .45. His feet and legs score
was a negative 1 .07. What does a negative 3
.22 udder actually look like on a living, breathing
cow? It looks remarkably plain. A negative 3
.22 utter score means the utter might be a bit
deep. The attachments might not be perfectly
smooth, and the teats might be a little thick
or placed slightly wide. Not camera ready. A
negative 3 .45 dairy form means the cow is fleshy,
round, and thick -necked, rather than sharp and
angular. By every single metric the World Dairy
Expo valued, Oman was a disaster. Total disaster.
The breeders who chased ribbons looked at him
and declared him too plain for the room. If you
let an Oman daughter onto the colored shavings
at Madison, you would be laughed out of the building.
So if he was that ugly on paper and in person,
why did anyone buy his semen? Why didn't he just
fade into total obscurity? Because the commercial
dairy world simply did not care about the ribbons.
They care about the tank. The commercial dairy
farmer is the one milking cows at four in the
morning in a freezing parlor. They do not get
paid a premium for a flat rump or a sweeping
rib. They get paid for milk in the tank and healthy
towels that do not require constant veterinary
intervention. And the research backs that up.
A landmark study published in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences specifically
highlighted Oman to explain this exact phenomenon.
The researchers noted that while he lacked physical
type, he was a massive, unprecedented outlier
for an index called net merit. How does net merit
differ from the TPI formula we discussed earlier?
Net merit strips away the aesthetic biases. It
focuses purely on the expected lifetime profitability
of the cow. Oman dominated in net merit because
he possessed extreme, off -the -charts traits
for calving ease, productive life, and daughter
pregnancy rates. The survival traits. His daughters
calved completely unassisted, they bred back
on the very first service, they rarely got mastitis,
and they milked reliably year in and year out.
So he occupied this bizarre, awkward middle ground
in the industry. The high -end genetics guys
thought his daughters were too ugly to look at,
and the pure production guys thought he didn't
yield enough peak milk. But the commercial farmers
who were doing the brutal daily math of dairy
farming saw something else entirely. What did
they see? They saw the ultimate invisible moneymaker.
An Oman daughter was the cow you never noticed
in the barn because she never gave you a reason
to. I love that. She was never on the sick list,
never needed the vet, never needed calving assistance.
And that is exactly where the true profit in
dairy farming lies. Because of that undeniable
commercial success, Oman eventually sold over
one million units of semen. One million. Today,
he makes up roughly 13 % of the entire Holstein
breed's genetics. A bull with a negative 3 .22
udder score is mathematically the 12th most genetically
important sire in U .S. Holstein history. It
is the ultimate underdog story of the dairy world.
But he was not a solitary phenomenon. The sources
reveal that Charlie Will, the exact same select
-sires analyst who found walkway chief Mark decades
earlier, struck gold again with another anti
-type king named Fisted Emery Blitz. Blitz is
a fascinating case study in how the market communicates
what it actually wants versus what the glossy
catalogs tell it to want. Blitz came from a completely
unknown, unheralded prefix, the farm of Brian
and Wendy First. He was a son of Blackstar, so
the underlying breeding was solid, but he possessed
an unremarkable working -class pedigree that
commanded absolutely zero premium in the high
-end sail rings. So no one was fighting over
him. He was described by the analysts as a rough
diamond that nobody really wanted to polish.
But what happened when the Blitz daughters actually
started freshening and hitting the commercial
milking strings? They certainly didn't have the
flash or the height of the Durham daughters,
did they? No, they were not pretty. They were
rough, rugged, and somewhat coarse. But man,
did they work. They got the job done. They showed
up to the parlor every single shift. They produced
massive volumes of milk with incredible consistency.
And they possessed the bodily capacity to consume
enough feed to maintain that production without
falling apart. And this brings us to one of the
most bonnest, unassailable metrics in the entire
dairy industry. The reorder rate. The reorder
rate. Explain the reorder rate because the sources
lean heavily on this as the ultimate proof of
a bull's value. The reorder rate measures what
happens after a farmer uses a bull for the first
time. Anyone can sell 100 straws of semen based
on a fancy photo or a high genomic index. Marketing
is easy. But when a commercial farmer milks those
resulting daughters for a full year, observes
how they handle the stress at the barn, and then
actively picks up the phone to call their AI
representative and says, give me 100 more straws
of that exact same bull. That's reality. That
is the truth. That is the commercial signal cutting
through the marketing noise. Blitz eventually
sold 1 .52 million units of semen. He recorded
over 42 ,000 daughters in 11 ,000 different herds.
The sheer volume of repeat customers tells you
everything you need to know. The catalog rankings
and the show ring judges took years to catch
up to what the farmers milking cows at 4 a .m.
had already figured out. They always do. Blitzen
-O -Man fundamentally proved that the commercial
signal, the repeat order rate from the dirt -level
dairyman, is vastly more accurate at predicting
profitability than any algorithm or TPI formula.
It is a profound lesson in listening to the barn
rather than the boardroom. These anti -type bulls
reshaped the 1990s and 2000s by injecting desperately
needed durability. If we really want to understand
the origins of this phenomenon, if we want to
find the granddaddy of all overlooked matings
that accidentally built the modern dairy industry,
we have to travel much further back in the archives.
We have to look at 1965. Okay. Setting the scene
for 1965 is crucial because artificial insemination
was a very different landscape back then. We
are at Round Oak Farm in Virginia. We have two
first cousins, Ronald Hope Sr. and George Miller.
Great historical figures. They are standing in
the barn staring down a mating decision that
literally nobody in the industry would have prioritized.
They have a bull named Tidy Burke Elevation.
What was his reputation at the time? Tidy Burke
Elevation was a bull with known documented fertility
limitations. Which is bad for a bull. Yes. He
was not a highly sought after sire. He was difficult
to settle cows with. And they are looking at
mating him to a cow named Round Oak Ivanhoe Eve.
She was notoriously slow maturing. So a slow
starter. She did not look impressive as a young
cow, and she did not produce impressive volumes
of milk early on. So you were combining a bull
that struggles to get cows pregnant with a cow
that takes forever to look or milk like a profitable
animal. Exactly. It is the absolute definition
of a low -priority throwaway mating. Neither
parent was anyone's top choice. When the resulting
bull calf is born a calf, they named Round Oak
Rag Apple Elevation. Nobody cared. Nobody even
blinked. There were no bidding wars. When he's
eventually acquired by the Virginia Animal Breeders
Association, which later became part of Select
Sires, how is his semen priced for the commercial
market? His semen was sold for under $1 .50 per
unit. $1 .50. There was no premium attached to
him whatsoever. There was no marketing hype,
no full -page spreads in the magazines. There
were absolutely zero expectations. He was just
another cheap, obscure straw of semen sitting
in the nitrogen tank used primarily when a farmer
just needed a cheap cleanup bowl. That is, until
his daughters actually began to freshen in the
early 1970s. When those elevation daughters hit
the milk line, the results completely shattered
the established paradigms of dairy breeding.
The results were Earth -shattering. Elevation
achieved something that had never been done before.
He became the very first proven Holstein bull
in the modern AI era to combine a genuinely massive
high -production proof with the physical confirmation
desire show -winning type. The Holy Grail. He
brought together the two deeply divided camps
of the dairy world, the production chasers and
the type enthusiasts. The historical production
numbers from the sources are wild to look at.
Elevation daughters were averaging 29 ,500 pounds
of milk in their first lactation. We're talking
about the 1970s. That volume was unheard of.
That volume of milk was staggering. It was 15
% above the absolute best of their peers. And
the crucial factor is that they did not worn
out and collapse like the high production cows
of later decades. Exactly. The industry average
at the time was roughly 2 .8 lactations per cow
before they washed out. Elevation daughters averaged
4 .2 lactations. They were living nearly 50 %
longer, staying in the herd years past their
contemporaries, while simultaneously producing
15 % more milk every single day. The sheer biological
efficiency of that combination was unprecedented.
The scale of his financial impact on the cooperative
system is almost impossible to overstate. There
is a quote in the sources from George Miller
that summarizes it perfectly. He said, Elevation
built the barns at sire power and select sires.
He literally paid for the bricks. The sheer revenue
generated from selling the semen of this one,
cheap $1 .50 backup bull, literally funded the
physical infrastructure of what would become
the largest AI cooperatives in the world. It
is no wonder Holstein International eventually
named him the Bull of the Century. To understand
the true weight of elevation, you have to look
at the genomic footprint he left behind. Because
he was so universally loved for combining type
and production, he was used Everywhere. Everywhere.
Today, he makes up 15 .28 % of the entire Holstein
genome. He recorded over 10 ,000 registered sons
who went on to sire their own daughters. He has
an estimated 8 .8 million descendants scattered
across the globe. 8 .8 million. But there is
one specific statistic from the genetic analysis
that truly contextualizes everything we've discussed
today about bottlenecks and inbreeding. Yes,
this is the number that completely stops you
in your tracks when you read the report. What
is the modern reality of elevations like? Up
to 99 % of all artificial insemination bulls
born after the year 2010 trace their lineage
back to either Elevation or to Walkway Keefe,
Mark Sire, Ponty Farm, or Linda Chief. 99%. Just
let that reality sink in for a moment. The entire
modern Holstein breed, the entire foundational
genetics of the global dairy industry, billions
of dollars in global commerce, rests almost entirely
on the shoulders of an accidental backup purchase
in Illinois and a $1 .50 throwaway mating in
Virginia. It's wild to think about. The bulls
that actually push the breed forward, the ones
that offer something genuinely different and
necessary never come from the fashionable center
of the industry. They always, always emerge from
the fringes. Which brings us back to the stark
reality of the present day. It raises a critical,
urgent question for you sitting in the farm office
right now. Right. If the entire industry is currently
chasing the exact same top 50 TPI genomic young
sires and the average inbreeding coefficient
is rapidly approaching that 9 .99 % danger zone.
How do you find the next elevation? How do you
spot the next M. toto or the next O -man before
the genetic bottleneck chokes off your herd's
profitability? We have to take this rich history
and translate it into a concrete modern playbook.
We need to move from the archives into the barn
math. This is where the rubber meets the road
for the daily operation. If the next 40 -pound
savior is hiding somewhere in today's massive
sire catalogs... How do we actually spy him?
Because history tells us he is not going to be
the heavily promoted bull on the front cover.
No, he's going to be buried somewhere on page
40, ignored by the algorithms. So where do we
start? You have to start by completely changing
where you look. You have to look outside the
U .S. top 50 TPI list. The European breeding
programs actually recognized this inbreeding
crisis decades ago and started taking active
measures. Like who? If we look at the CRV cooperative
in the Netherlands, they operate with a completely
different philosophy. They deliberately draw
from 40 different distinct black and white sire
families specifically to maintain population
diversity. It's spreading the risk. They have
a bull in their current lineup named Delta Boyan.
If you look at his profile, he scores incredibly
high for biological efficiency and health. He
has a breeding value of 112 for udder health
and 111 for hoof health. He's a phenomenal preventative
tool for mastitis and lameness. Or we can look
at Viking genetics over in Scandinavia. They
have a bull named V .H. Sandro. The projections
for his daughters are remarkable. They average
nearly 1 ,000 days in production. That is massive.
That is almost three full years of relentless,
healthy, uninterrupted milking. But what is the
catch with bulls like Boyan and Sandro? Why aren't
North American farmers using them heavily? The
catch is that neither of those bulls will ever
appear on a standard TPI top 100 list. Because
their extreme health and longevity traits are
balanced out by more moderate, sensible milk
production numbers, the TPI formula penalizes
them. So they get filtered out. They are totally
invisible to any farm manager who is just logging
into their mating software and filtering by the
highest North American indexes. But we do not
just have to look to Europe. The analysis points
to U .S. candidates hiding in the shadows right
now. Look at FB8084 adabiop. Great example. He
boasts massive longevity traits, including a
productive life score of plus 5 .3, which is
incredible. His fertility traits are elite. But
again, his peak milk production numbers are considered
mediocre. by the extreme standards of the modern
catalog. And because of that moderate production,
he would be instantly scrolled past by anyone
chasing the genetic leaderboard. But that is
exactly the point we have been making. Adebayo
Wupi fits the Amtoto profile perfectly. He is
heavily weighted toward health, functionally
bred to build a durable cow, and completely ignored
by the mainstream. The 2026 equivalent of mTOTO
is sitting in your catalog right now, just waiting
for you to stop filtering for perfection and
start filtering for survival. It really is. To
make this incredibly practical, let us break
this down into a concrete, undeniable action
plan for you, the listener. The experts in our
sources have developed a specific 30-, 90-, and
365 -day checklist to overhaul a farm's genetic
roster. Let's do it. Let's start with the immediate
future. What is the very first thing a farm manager
needs to do when they walk into the office tomorrow
morning? Day 1 to 30 is all about diagnosis.
You need to pull your EFI report. That stands
for Expected Future in Breeding. Every major
dairy mating software program generates this.
So it's easy to find. Very easy. You need to
look at your herd's average EFI. If that number
is creeping above 7%, you are officially in the
danger zone. You need to immediately alter your
breeding strategy for those high -risk animals.
Action right now. Start using a designated outcross
bull. a backup sire or even utilize beef on dairy
semen for those specific matings to break the
genetic cycle do not wait for the next proof
run to fix it the biological damage is compounding
every single time a highly inbred calf hits the
ground checking the efi gives you the baseline
what is the operational goal for the next 90
days day 30 to 90 is the audit phase you must
audit your actual sire usage this is where a
manager's intention usually collides with reality
what do you mean Most farms believe they have
a nicely diversified semen tank. But when you
pull the actual breeding records for the last
six months, you often find out that the AI technician
or the breeder got lazy, reached for the most
familiar straw, and suddenly 60 % of all matings
went to just one or two trendy bulls. Human nature.
Exactly. If your franchise bull consumed more
than 40 % of your total matings last cycle, your
roster is broken and you are actively building
a bottleneck. This is where the math regarding
genomic testing becomes absolutely undeniable.
Let's do the actual dollars and cents here, because
testing heifers feels like a massive upfront
expense. Say a farm has 200 replacement heifers.
Testing them genomically costs roughly $7 ,000
to $10 ,000, depending on the lab. It's a big
check to write. To a farmer watching their cash
flow, writing a $10 ,000 check just for data
is a hard pill to swallow. How does the research
justify that cost? You have to look at the hidden
cost of not testing. The research from Virginia
Tech breaks this down beautifully. They found
that every 1 % increase in a cow's inbreeding
coefficient costs the farm roughly $40 to $43
in lost lifetime profit, primarily due to depressed
milk components, higher vet bills, and early
culling. Let us calculate that out. If you have
a 200 -cow herd and their average inbreeding
is sitting at 10%, that accumulated lifetime
production drag across the herd is costing you
somewhere between $80 ,000 and $86 ,000. Yes.
It is a slow, silent, invisible bleed on your
balance sheet. Exactly. It is $80 ,000 of lost
potential. By spending that initial $10 ,000
to genomically test those heifers, you map their
exact genetic flaws. You can then use your mating
software to precisely select sires that will
drop that average herd EFI by just 1%. Just 1%.
That single 1 % drop instantly avoids $8 ,000
to $8 ,600 in lifetime drag. If you drop it by
2%, the test is paid for itself entirely with
a massive return on investment. The genomic test
literally pays for itself before the resulting
calf even hits the ground. It is the single best
protective investment you can make in the barn.
So we have tested the heifers, we know the exact
inbreeding levels, and we know which cow families
are at risk. How do we actually structure the
semen tank inventory to prevent this bottleneck
from creeping back in? You need to institute
what the experts call the four slot roster system.
Do not just passively buy whatever the semen
salesman puts in front of you. You must dictate
the tank inventory. Ebroactive. Allocate 35 %
of your total matings to a franchise profit bull.
This is your net merit or cheese merit leader,
the reliable moneymaker. Then put 25 % toward
a component hammer, a bull, whose sole purpose
to drive up the fat and protein percentages for
the cheese market. Okay, that's 60%. Put another
25 % toward a durability and fertility fixer.
This is your modern O -Man or M -Toto equivalent,
the ugly but indestructible outcross. And finally,
dedicate the last 15 % of your mating strictly
to a genuine deep pedigree outcross bowl to continually
inject fresh bloodlines into the herd. 35, 25,
25, 15. That structure builds a genetic firewall
into the herd. It ensures you are getting the
profit of the mainstream while constantly buffering
against the bottlenecks. Finally, what is the
12 -month goal for the farm manager? Over the
next 12 months, you need to fundamentally change
how you communicate with your AI representative.
Stop asking them what the hottest new young genomic
sire is. Start asking them about repeat order
rates. The blip signal. Exactly. Which bulls
are generating the strongest repeat orders from
commercial herds that are already milking a hundred
or more of his daughters? Because when the farmer
down the road milks a heifer for a year, watches
her perform, and then immediately calls the rep
to order 50 more straws of her exact sire, that
is the truth. That's the real data. That is the
unvarnished truth of the commercial market. That
is where your next highly profitable backup bull
is hiding. The journey we have traced today in
this deep dive is just a masterclass in unintended
consequences and hidden value. We started with
Walkway Chief Mark, a literal accident purchased
only because a golden boy died, who gave the
breed incredible udders but cursed it with the
APAF1 mutation, costing the industry half a billion
dollars. What a wild ride. We explored Carroll
Prelude. Belto, a 40 -pound Italian gamble whose
unglamorous strength fixed the fragile, collapsing
bell -lined cows, eventually giving a shuttle,
the bull whose durable daughter saved countless
farms during the brutal 2008 feed crash. Zaved
their livelihoods. We saw Oman and Blitz, the
anti -type kings, who proved to the world that
a negative three udder score is completely irrelevant
if the cow never gets sick and never stops making
milk. And we traced the entire phenomenon back
to Elevation, the $1 .50 throwaway mating from
Virginia, who essentially built the infrastructure.
The historical pattern is undeniable, and it
repeats every single decade. The genetics that
ultimately save your farm are rarely the genetics
that win the show ring ribbons. They are the
quiet, unassuming, hyper -durable outsiders.
The unglamorous... Backup bulls you quietly add
to just 15 to 20 percent of your matings today
will entirely dictate whether your herd has the
biological resilience to survive the economic
pressures of tomorrow. That is the ultimate barn
math. Look past the glossy catalog covers. Ignore
the algorithms hype. Manage the inbreeding in
your herd before the inbreeding manages you right
out of business. That's another story from the
Bullvine podcast. These are the people building
the future of dairy. We hope this deep dive has
given you a completely new perspective on what
is currently sitting in your semen tank, and
more importantly, what should be sitting in your
semen tank. Thank you for joining us on this
exploration of the dairy breed's greatest, most
profitable accidents. But before we sign off,
there is a final, highly provocative thought
lingering in the research that we need to address.
Let's hear it. We know the undeniable statistics
up to 99 % of modern bulls trace back to elevation
or chief. We know the genetic base of the Holstein
breed is shrinking at a terrifying rate. And
we know that today's true durable outcrosses
are getting routinely ignored simply because
they do not fit the TPI computer algorithm. So
think about this current trend. We're seeing
a massive rise in beef on dairy breeding across
the industry, where commercial farmers are heavily
using Angus or Wagyu semen on their lowest performing...
plainest Holstein cows to generate a premium
beef calf. This is happening everywhere. But
what incredibly durable, long -lasting, invisible
Plan B maternal line is currently sitting in
a commercial dairy's cull pile simply because
a computer model said she was too plain to breed
black and white? What rough, rugged, genetic
gold mine are we actively throwing away right
now that we will desperately need to save the
breed in 10 years? Find more at www .thebullvine
.com. That is definitely something to mull over
the next time you are walking the barn aisles
at 4 a .m. Keep doing the math. Keep looking
for the durable diamonds in the rough, and we
will see you on the next deep dive. Tell the
tale, tell the tale, the Beaumont legends live
here.