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're sharing a deep
dive into a story that stopped us in our tracks.
This is the kind of conversation that reminds
you why you got into dairy in the first place.
It really is because, you know, we always try
to picture you, the listener, right where you
are. Like maybe you're leaning on the rail at
World Dairy Expo right now with a coffee in your
hand, just watching the colored shaving. Oh,
yeah. Or sitting in the cab of the tractor. Oh.
Or even pulling tea dips in the parlor. Just
endlessly chasing those modern genomic proofs
on your phone. Right. You see the big banners,
the spotlights, the massive investor barns with
the brass nameplates. But... What we're going
to do today is strip all that completely away.
We are going way back. Back to the manure -stained
history of the ordinary, everyday farmers who
actually built the genomic era. Exactly. Specifically
between 1991 and 2010. Which is such a fascinating
20 -year window. I mean, it really serves as
the bridge between the old -school visual appraisal
of cattle and the modern era of supercomputers
and DNA testing. Yeah, it was a wild time. It
was. It was this period where the foundation
of literally every modern Holstein was poured.
And the crazy part is, it wasn't poured by billionaires
and climate -controlled show palaces. Yeah, not
at all. It was poured by people who had to pay
the feed bill at the end of the month. People
whose biggest promotion for a cow was that she
simply bred back, walked on sound feed, and milked
her absolute heart out just to pay the mortgage.
Yeah. So let's start with a moment that perfectly
captures this whole tension, right? The tension
between the elite show world and the actual commercial
reality. Okay, lay it out. Picture the early
1990s. Imagine you are an AI sire analyst. Oh
boy. High stress job right there. Extremely high
stress. In that era, before genomics, your entire
job, like your entire reputation, relied on picking
the right young bull to bring into the stud,
strictly based on his pedigree and his parents'
visual appeal. It was incredibly high stakes
gamble. You'd have these flush brothers standing
right in front of you. Actually, let's pause
and define that for a second just to make sure
we're all on the same page. Because the mechanics
of a flush are really critical here. Right. Yeah.
So embryo transfer or flushing was highly expensive
back then. A vet flushes multiple fertilized
embryos out of an elite donor cow. Right. and
then transfers them into recipient cows' surrogates.
Right, the surrogates carry the calf. Exactly.
So you end up with full genetic brothers born
at the same time. But genetically, because of
how DNA recombines, they aren't identical. Not
at all. One might inherit the mother's incredible
utter traits, while his full brother just inherits
a completely different, weaker genetic hand.
And as an analyst, you have to guess. You have
to look at these calves and guess which brother
got the winning hand. Which is terrifying. It
is. You pick one for heavy production. You look
at his frame, his legs, his testicles. I mean,
in those days, larger testicles often correlated
with earlier sexual maturity in daughters and
heavier semen production. Right. That was a big
metric. So you make your choice. The bull goes
to the stud, goes through this massive multi
-year process of having his semen collected,
distributed, and used on test herds. Yep. Then
you literally wait years for his daughters to
be born, grow up, have calves of their own, and
finally start milking. And only then does the
classification report come back. The ultimate
moment of truth. A classifier from the Breed
Association walks into a barn, looks at this
bull's daughters, and scores them against the
ideal breed standard. Which is basically the
validation of a five -year, multi -million dollar
investment by the stud. It's all on the line.
Right. So you unfold this classification report
expecting validation and it reads verbatim. I'm
not making this up. Poor 50 points, straight
legs and almost no middle. Wow. A 50 point bull.
I mean, wait, 50 points. That's failing, right?
It is almost mathematically impossible if you
are actively trying to breed good cattle. I am
struggling to even visualize what a 50 point
score looks like in an era where a good classification
actually still meant something. A 50 is the absolute
bottom of the barrel. It essentially translates
to do not even bother taking a picture of this
animal. Right. So what does it biologically mean
to have straight legs and almost no middle, like
day to day for the cow? Well, from a biomechanical
standpoint, a dairy cow needs set or a slight
angle to the hock of her back legs. That angle
acts as a shock absorber when she walks on concrete
or pasture carrying, you know, 100 pounds of
milk in her udder. OK, so a straight leg means...
It means no shock absorption every single step.
sends the impact straight up into her joints,
which leads to early lameness. Oh, that's terrible.
And no middle means she lacks the deep, sprung
ribs required to hold massive amounts of forage.
I mean, a cow is essentially a fermentation vat
on legs. Right, a walking fermentation vat. Exactly.
If the vat is small, she can't eat enough to
support high milk production without just burning
off her own body condition. So on paper... this
bull is a catastrophic failure you can just imagine
the absolute panic in the sire stud office the
sheer terror of thinking oh man we backed the
wrong flush brother oh heads would roll but and
here's the hook this classification sheet belonged
to a bull named biz may s -e -l Mountain. Yeah.
And when AI centers actually started using Mountain
Suns, the industry lost its collective mind.
I mean, the Holstein Association and Holstein
Friesian World magazine were absolutely flooded
with cranky. angry letters from elite breeders
protesting the use of a 50 -point bull as a sire
of sons. Oh, the elite breeders were deeply,
deeply offended by the aesthetics. But the commercial
cows, they didn't read his proof. They didn't
care about the letters to the editor? Not at
all. When Mountain's daughters started freshening
in typical freestall barns, they just milked.
And not just volume. They were pumping out protein
at a rate that shocked the industry. They were
just resilient. Exactly. Despite their sire's
visual flaws, the daughters actually ended up
having better than average type and they just
worked. So if you are listening right now and
you've ever found yourself judging a bull strictly
by a glossy center spread photo instead of his
actual proof and, you know, the reality of a
paid off feed bill, this deep dive is going to
change how you look at your own herd. Absolutely.
We are going to unpack exactly how a 50 -point
anti -hero like Mountain and this ragged band
of farmer -bred sires completely defeated the
brass nameplate investor Barnes. Yeah. To understand
the mechanics of how a supposedly poor bull could
revolutionize the commercial dairy industry,
we really have to look at the underlying math.
The math of it all. Right. And to look at that
math, we have to travel back long before Mountain
was even born. We need to go back to a Vermont
hillside in 19... 1946. Let's set that scene.
Let's paint the physical reality of that era.
1946, Bizmay Farm. It's sitting in the rolling
hills around Moortown, Vermont, about 17 miles
west of Montpelier. Beautiful country, but tough
farming. Very tough. Picture the brutal Vermont
winters. This is not a heated show barn with
automatic scrapers. This is Everett Maynard and
his father, Ralph. Just working guys. Exactly.
They have a grade herd, meaning unregistered,
unpedigreed cattle in a traditional tie stall
barn. Let's talk about the economics of a tie
stall in the 1940s, because it dictates everything
about their breeding philosophy. It dictates
everything. In a tie stall, you have a fixed
number of stalls. Let's say 40 stalls. That means
your maximum revenue capacity is capped at exactly
40 cows. Right. If a cow doesn't breed back,
or if she goes lame and stops producing, that
empty stanchion is a massive, immediate financial
blow. Because you still have the overhead. Exactly.
You still have the overhead of the barn, but
zero income from that spot. There is absolutely
no room for a freeloader. Every cow has to earn
her keep, pay her feed bill, and somehow leave
a margin for the family to actually live on.
So in the middle of this grueling daily reality,
Everett has this absolute obsession. He's this
young guy pouring over the pages of Holstein
Friesian World. Thumbing through these black
and white pictures of the legendary Mount Victoria
rag apple cattle. The rag apples. Yeah. Now,
the famous Mount Victoria dispersal had already
happened back in 1942. The great herd was scattered,
but Everett couldn't let it go. What was it about
the Mount Victoria bloodlines that had this Vermont
grade cow farmer so captivated? Well, the Mount
Victoria herd. developed by T .B. Macaulay up
in Quebec, was revolutionary because Macaulay
didn't just breed for looks. He bred for intense
butterfat production and rugged, debodied frames.
He used intense, line -breeding mating, closely
related animals to lock in those specific traits.
So Everett looked at his own hard -working, unregistered
cows and realized that to take his herd to the
next level of production, he needed to inject
that specific Concentrated Mount Victoria Genetic
Code. Which is a massive leap of faith. He's
working a great herd, but he starts saving his
money to buy purebred Canadian cows. Yeah, taking
a big risk. Huge risk. In 1950, they buy Kearsarge
Governor Jean. A few years later, Everett's obsession
pushes him to buy nine Canadian cows rich in
that rag apple blood. Cows like Marie Pabst Lockenbar.
Incredible names. Right. He's bringing elite
historic genetics into a very humble working
class Vermont tie stall. But he pairs this with
what we really have to call Everett's mathematics
of manure. The mathematics of manure. I love
that. It's a perfect term for it. It really is
the paradigm shift. Everett starts looking at
the sheer probability of genetics across the
whole dairy population. He realizes there are
thousands and thousands of farmer breeder herds
out there. Just regular hardworking herds milking
twice a day. Exactly. But they're only a tiny
handful of the famous elite investor barns with
endless capital. I look at this exactly like
baseball scouts. How so? Well, for years, major
league scouts might only look at the elite prep
schools or the big Division I colleges for the
next great pitcher, right? Because that's where
the coaching and the money are. Sure. But statistically,
if you have hundreds of thousands of kids playing
in dirt lot beer leagues across the country,
the laws of probability dictate that there is
a generational Hall of Fame arm out there just
throwing absolute heat in the dust. You just
have to be willing to look past the dirt. That
is a perfect analogy. And Everett applied that
exact statistical logic to dairy cattle. He knew
they were out there. Right. If great sires come
from good cows, and there are vastly more good
cows standing in ordinary maneuver street barns
than there are in a few famous show palaces,
then the real untapped genetic power of the Holstein
breed isn't in the elite pavilions. It's hiding
in plain sight in the commercial herds. Exactly.
Hold on, though. If he believes this, how does
he actually access that genetics in the 1950s?
I mean, AI was in its absolute infancy. It wasn't
like today where you just order a straw of semen
online and it shows up in a nitrogen tank. That's
a great point. Early AI was heavily localized.
Semen was often stored in glass ampoules, not
plastic straws, and transported locally. Glass
ampoules, wow. Yeah, it was a totally different
world. So Everett became the chairman of his
little local Central Vermont Breeding Association.
At the time, they only had Jersey bulls in their
battery. Oh, really? Yep, but Everett forced
the issue. He pushed them to buy a Holstein.
He pointed them to a bull named Walker Homestead
Dawn. Okay, Walker Homestead Dawn. This bull
was proven locally at Howickers in Vermont. He
had high butterfat test, good type, nothing flashy
on a global scale, but he was a working man's
bull. And Everett just hammers this bull into
his herd. He uses Walker Homestead Dawn so heavily
that when the bull finally dies, Everett goes
out, buys 100 extra doses of his semen, and just
keeps right on breeding Dawn daughters. stacking
this genetics hard. Stacking it. Out of this
mix of grade cows, Canadian rag apple immigrants,
and Walker homestead don come three bulls that
absolutely nobody would have picked out of a
show catalog. Bismay astrojupiter, Bismay tradition
clatus, and the 50 -point antihero we mentioned
earlier, Bismay SEL mountain. The impact of these
three bulls is staggering. Because they were
bred for function over form. Yeah. Take Jupiter,
born in 1972. He ended up doing the heavy lifting
at Eastern AI in New York. Okay. His daughters
didn't look like runway models. They were medium
for stature, which the show ring hated because
the trend was for increasingly tall, sharp, dairy
-like frames. But those Jupiter daughters had
something else entirely. They had these massive,
capacious rear udders that could hold incredible
volumes of milk. They were wide. Wide in the
muzzle, wide in the chest. Deep in the rib. Yes.
Width is everything. Explain the biological advantage
of that width to a farmer listening right now.
Well, width equals capacity and capacity equals
intake. A cow with a wide muzzle can physically
take in more mouthfuls of grass or TMR per minute.
Just eating faster and more efficiently. Exactly.
And a wide chest floor means a larger heart and
lung capacity to pump massive amounts of blood
through the circulatory system. You have to remember,
it takes about 400 to 500 gallons of blood flowing
through the udder to produce just one gallon
of milk. Wait, 400 to 500 gallons of blood for
one gallon of milk? Yep. So cardiovascular capacity
is everything. This is the ultimate farmer's
wish list cow. She eats a mountain of cheap forage
and converts it effortlessly into milk in the
bulk tank. That brings us to a cow named Welcome
Jupiter Gala. She makes a New York State record
of 31 ,360 pounds of milk. Unbelievable production.
And when they asked her breeder Bill Peck what
he wanted in a cow, his answer is just legendary.
He said, Wide in the muzzle, wide in the chest,
and wide in the udder. That was his entire breeding
philosophy encapsulated in one sentence. If we
trace that philosophy forward, if we follow the
bloodline of Welcome Jupiter Gala, it is mind
-blowing. Her line produces a bull named Mark
C .J. Gilbert Grand. Grand, yep. And Grand becomes
the double grandsire of a bull named Braydale
Goldwyn. Wait. Goldwyn, the absolute legend of
the modern show ring. The very same. Goldwyn
Sire and maternal Grandam were both sired by
Grand. So, if you are sitting at Madison, watching
a beautiful Goldwyn daughter step out onto the
colored shavings and take your breath away with
her style and dariness, what you are actually
seeing, hidden deep in the fine print of her
DNA, is a strand of Bismay Astro Jupiter, Walker
Homestead Dawn, and the manure -stained math
of a Vermont tie -stall farmer. That is incredible
to me. The elite show ring is literally built
on the back of the dirt lot beer league. It really
is. But wait, if these Vermont bulls were pumping
all this extreme milk into these cows, biology
dictates that something has to give. You can't
just exponentially increase milk volume without
the cow's frame breaking down under the physical
weight. Where did the industry find the skeletal
structure to hold all that Vermont milk? That
was the looming crisis. The bismay bowls flooded
the Holstein breed with production, protein,
and sheer volume. But all that milk has to go
somewhere. It has to be carried by a physical
frame. Right. If you breed for extreme milk without
paying attention to the architecture of the cow,
the strength of her suspensory ligaments, the
angle of her foot, the depth of her heel, she's
going to break down. She just can't hold up.
Exactly. Her udder will drop below her hocks,
making her prone to mastitis and difficult to
milk. Her feet will give out. She literally won't
last long enough to pay off the cost of raising
her from a calf. So the industry had this massive
volume of milk, but desperately needed a stronger
chassis to carry it. Which brings us out of the
Vermont hills and into a creek bottom in Wisconsin.
Let's talk about Wisconsin. I want to dive into
the physical reality of a cow named Snowin Denise's
Delia. She lives on Bob Snow's farm. She is not
a pampered show cow standing in a deeply bedded
box stall with fans blowing on her. Tell me about
her daily commute, because it completely redefines
what structural integrity means. Delia's daily
reality was brutal by show cow standards. To
get from the barn to the pasture, she had to
travel down a steep hill, physically cross a
creek, and then walk back up to the barn. Every
day. And she had to do this every single day,
twice a day for milking. And she is producing
so much milk and her udder is so massive that
there are nights she walks into the parlor carrying
literally three gallons of wet sand in her udder
from crossing that creek. Consider the physics
of that. Three gallons of wet sand weighs roughly
40 to 50 pounds. Add that to the 50 or 60 pounds
of milk she is carrying before an evening milking.
That's 100 pounds. You have nearly 100 pounds
of dead weight pulling straight down on the medial
suspensory ligament, the main band of tissue
that divides the udder and attaches it to the
pelvic bone. For a cow to carry that kind of
weight, cross a muddy creek, climb a hill, and
not have her udder blow out, requires a level
of structural integrity you simply cannot fake.
You just can't. Frank Regan from Regan Crest
in Iowa sees this cow. And he cannot get her
out of his head. He recognizes that she possesses
the exact chassis the high -producing Holstein
breed desperately needs. He sees the future.
He really does. He negotiates to buy her, but
there's one massive catch. Her current owners
want to show her one last time at the 1991 Wisconsin
Spring Show. You have to understand the immense
financial risk here for Frank. Right, because
what if she looks terrible? Exactly. Frank Reagan
has just bought a cow based on her rugged creek
bottom commercial power. Now she has to go up
against fit, polished, professionally prepped
show cattle at a highly competitive state -level
show. Right. If she walks into that ring and
completely falls apart or looks incredibly raw
and unrefined compared to the show string, it
throws his entire investment into question. So
the night before the show, Delia looks rough.
She is drawn. She is stressed from the trailer
ride, the new environment, the noise of the fairgrounds.
Naturally. So the crew steps in and they don't
have some high -tech secret show ring solution.
They do what true cow people do. They feed her
four bales of hay and they bring her a massive
tub of warm beet pulp. Warm beet pulp is the
ultimate dairy farmer's secret weapon. Wait,
really? Just beet pulp? Oh yeah. From a biological
standpoint, beet pulp is highly digestible fiber.
that expands massively when soaked in warm water.
When a stressed cow eats it, it rapidly fills
the rumen, the largest compartment of her stomach.
Okay, so it fills her up. It does two things.
It hydrates her internally, and it physically
expands her rib cage, giving her that deep, sweeping,
powerful look we call spring of rib. It is just
wild to me. They're at a major show surrounded
by the best genetics in Wisconsin. And their
strategy to prep this creek bottom cow is just
to stuff her with four bales of hay and a warm
bowl of beet pulp and say, all right, girl, get
some rest. And it works. It does. The next day,
she walks into the ring. Judge Niles Wendorf
takes one look at her, pulls her out first in
the four -year -old class, gives her the best
udder award, and slaps her grand champion of
the show. Amazing. The cow with sand in her udder
just conquered the elite show ring. Because true
structural correctness cannot be hidden. And
it cannot be faked. Frank Reagan immediately
calls Charlie Will at Select Sires. He says,
I have this cow. What do I mate her to? They
decide on M Prize Belle Elton. Now, why Elton?
Out of all the bulls available in 1991, why him?
Elton daughters were building a massive reputation
for impeccable udders, excellent feet and legs,
and incredible longevity. So they were looking
to double down on that structural frame. Exactly.
They wanted to lock in Delia's suspensory ligaments
and pair it with Elton's foot and leg traits.
They decide to flush Delia to Elton, and this
is where the mechanics of embryo transfer get
deeply nerve -wracking. The flush produces four
sons. Now think about the pressure of this moment.
You have four full brothers. Four rolls of the
genetic dice. Exactly. They share the same parents,
but genetically they are a roll of the dice.
Japanese buyers are heavily involved in the global
genetics market at this time, looking for high
-type, high -production animals. They get first
choice of the bulls. Right. They examine the
pedigrees, look at the calves, and make their
pick for $20 ,000. A lot of money back then.
A ton of money. Alta Genetics, another major
AI stud, gets second choice. They take theirs.
Select Sires, who helped plan the mating, is
left with... the third choice. They get the leftovers,
essentially. Right. The calf that two other major
players looked at and decided to pass on. That's
tough. They named that third choice calf Regan
Crest Elton Durham. Wow. The bull who is the
third choice of the flesh goes on to become the
premier sire at World Dairy Expo for five straight
years. From 2003 to 2007, Durham... absolutely
ruled Madison. How does a third choice bull become
the undisputed king of the breed's architecture?
It speaks to the utter unpredictability of genetic
recombination before the genomic era. It really
does. The Japanese buyers and Alta likely picked
the calves that look slightly sharper or perhaps
grew a little faster. But Durham inherited the
absolute perfect combination of Delia's rugged
creek bottom strength and Elton's refined udder
attachments. It was just magic. If the Japanese
buyers had picked Durham, the trajectory of the
U .S. Holstein breed would look completely different
today. When you talk to farmers who actually
milked Durham daughters in commercial settings,
what did they actually say about them? What was
the day -to -day reality in the parlor? They
will tell you straight up that The Durham's weren't
always the absolute highest milkers on the monthly
test sheet. They weren't setting state volume
records as two -year -olds. Right. But they were,
hands down, the most trouble -free cows in the
barn. Trouble -free is what you want. Exactly.
They had these incredibly long bodies, wide rumps
and udders that looked like they were hung with
a carpenter's level. Yeah. Perfect teat placement,
which became crucial as robotic milkers started
to enter the industry. Oh, that's a huge point.
Yeah. They walked beautifully on concrete. And
most importantly, they look their absolute best
at four and five years old. Which is when the
milk check really starts to count. I mean, we
have to remember the economics of raising a dairy
replacement. Break it down. You feed a heifer
for two solid years before she ever gives a drop
of milk. She usually has to milk through her
entire first lactation and part of her second
just to break even on what it costs you to raise
her. So a cow that peaks at four or five years
old is pure profit. Yep. Durham gave the industry
a structural blueprint just as we were entering
a really dark period, what we often refer to
as the fitness wars. I want to spend some time
on the fitness wars because we've talked about
how Everett Maynard fixed the milk volume and
how Delia and Durham fixed the structural frame.
But the industry was facing a massive invisible
crisis right around the early 2000s. What exactly
went wrong? It was a crisis of our own making,
honestly, driven by antagonistic genetic traits.
In biology, certain traits are negatively correlated.
When you select heavily for one, the other naturally
declines. For decades, the dairy industry selected
relentlessly for extreme milk yield and extreme,
tall, angular type. We rewarded the biggest,
sharpest cows making the most milk. But we completely
ignored the invisible traits. Things like daughter
pregnancy rate, productive life, and somatic
cell count. Precisely. Break down somatic cell
count for the listener because it's a huge economic
driver. Somatic cells are primarily white blood
cells. They are the cow's immune response to
inflammation or infection in the udder, specifically
mastitis. A high somatic cell count, or SCC,
means the cow is fighting an infection. Not only
does mastitis cause the cow pain and reduce her
milk yield, but milk processors strictly penalize
farmers for high SCC milk. Because it ruins the
cheese. Exactly. It reduces the shelf life and
cheese yielding capacity of the milk. So high
SCC directly hits the farmer's paycheck. So by
the early 2000s, cows were getting taller, fancier,
and producing more volume than ever, but their
fertility was absolutely tanking. Just falling
off a cliff. They were struggling to breed back.
Somatic cell counts were creeping up across the
national herd. Cows were washing out of the herd
at two or three years old. It's a devastating
economic model. It's unsustainable. The industry
is desperate for a fix. And out of nowhere, from
a farm in Illinois, comes a bull whose proof
lands in 2002 like a boulder in a pond. Obie
Manford Justice. Everyone just called him O -Man.
O -Man. Good old O -Man. Yeah. He was bred by
the Obert brothers. He was a Manfred son out
of a cow named Meyer Meadows L. Jezebel. When
Oman's proof was published, it was shocking because
it violated every aesthetic rule of the dairy
industry. Every single one. He had plain, almost
negative type. His daughters were not going to
win any beauty contests. They were often a bit
thick, maybe slightly steeper in the rump angle
than the show ring liked. But his numbers for
a productive life, daughter pregnancy rate, and
low somatic cell scores were mathematically off
the charts. Off the charts. Let's get down to
the practical reality of this. If I'm a farmer
standing in my parlor in 2003, what does that
trade -off actually look like? When I look at
an O -man daughter standing next to a glossy,
tall, showbred cow. Yeah, paint that picture.
It is the ultimate test of your business priorities.
Are you breeding cattle for your ego or for your
bank account? Wow. Day to day, it means you look
at this plain Jane O -man daughter. She doesn't
catch your eye when you walk the pens. But she
breeds back on the first service of AI every
single year. She never spikes a fever. She never
gets mastitis. She just quietly does her job,
produces heavily, and stays out of the hospital
pen. Meanwhile, what's happening to the show
pedigree cow standing next to her? The gorgeous,
tall, beautiful cow is suffering from the biological
cost of her extreme dairy character. She is partitioning
all her energy into milk, leaving nothing for
reproduction. so she doesn't catch in calf after
three or four breedings. Her deep udder is dragging,
so she picks up environmental mastitis. Because
she is so tall and angular, she struggles to
stand comfortably on concrete and develops a
foot ulcer. Oh, it's just a downward spiral.
Before you know it, you are loading a beautiful
three -year -old cow onto the coal trailer. Oman
dragged these invisible fitness traits onto the
front page. He forced everyone to look at it.
He forced the industry to realize that a dead
cow or an infertile cow makes exactly zero pounds
of milk, no matter how pretty her pedigree is.
It was a bitter pill for the purists to swallow,
but a necessary one. Oman was so functionally
dominant that his grandson, Snowman, became a
worldwide sensation based almost entirely on
those baked -in fitness and production traits.
Yes. But Oman wasn't fighting this fitness battle
alone. There were these quiet warriors working
alongside him in the genetic pool, bulls like
Shenval and VLM Formation. Formation is a deeply
fascinating case study in pedigree analysis.
How is that? Well, he was a leadman's son. But
if you trace his pedigree back generation by
generation, he carried 33 crosses to the legendary
1940 sire, Wisconsin Admiral Burklatt. Wait,
33 crosses? Isn't that an incredibly high level
of inbreeding? How is that an advantage? There
is a fine line between inbreeding and line breeding.
Inbreeding is... haphazardly mating close relatives,
which often exposes recessive genetic defects.
Right. Nobody wants that. But line breeding is
the meticulous, calculated stacking of an exceptional
ancestor to increase homozygosity, meaning you
lock in the specific desirable genes so the animal
breathes incredibly true to type. So you're just
concentrating the good stuff. By crossing back
to Birklab 33 times over decades, the breeders
piped this incredible balance and durability
straight into the modern gene pool. Formation
daughters weren't extreme in any one area. They
were just undeniably correct. Strong suspensory
ligaments, great muzzle width. Exactly. They
were the invisible cows that just kept coming
back through the parlor doors year after year.
Which brings us to another absolute giant of
the fitness era, Startmore Rudolph. And to really
understand Rudolph, we have to talk about the
man behind his maternal line. Earl Start. This
is a great story. This is one of the most emotional
and profound segments of this entire story for
me because it traces directly back to the Great
Depression. Earl Start's story perfectly illustrates
how human economic trauma shapes animal genetics.
Let's dive into it. Earl Start is a lifelong
dairyman from Ontario. But he didn't start in
Holsteins. He had roots deep in the Guernsey
breed. His family got their very first Guernsey
cow back in 1931. Right in the thick of it. Yeah.
And they didn't buy her at an elite auction.
They got her as payment for doing a neighbor's
fall plowing with a team of horses. That is a
level of grit. survival and dirt under the fingernails
farming that alters a person's DNA just as much
as the cattle's. It absolutely does. When you
grow up in the 1930s, knowing that the milk from
a single cow is the literal difference between
your family eating and starving through the winter,
your perspective on cattle changes forever. You
don't take it for granted. No. You don't look
at cows as hobbies. You don't look at them as
art projects for the show ring. You look at them
as economic lifelines. They have to be durable.
They have to be efficient. And they absolutely
cannot fail. Exactly. So fast forward to 1976.
Earl has decided to transition his herd into
Holsteins because the market is demanding Holstein
volume. He and his neighbor, Jerry Rowe, drive
down to the reflections of Millie Sale in Henrietta,
New York. A big high -end sale. Very high -end.
They're just walking through the fairground sheds,
taking it all in, and they see this big black
cow being led to the water trough. Jim Marty
astronaut gale. And Earl is absolutely captivated.
He is a cowman to his core, and he can't stop
looking at her. Keep in mind, this is a man who
knows. dairy confirmation intrinsically but he's
new to the high stakes big money holstein world
and astronaut gail is not a hidden gem right
she is an honorable mention all -american she
is holstein royalty everyone knows who she is
right and earl assumes there is no way they can
touch her she's completely out of their league
financially but jerry rowe looks at him and says
well earl i'd like to buy half wow and right
there these two dirt farming neighbors agree
to split the risk They go into the auction tent
and buy her together for $15 ,500. That is massive.
Which in 1976, for a couple of working dairymen,
is a staggering, terrifying amount of money.
Adjusted for inflation, that's like dropping
$70 ,000 or $80 ,000 on a single cow today. It's
a bet -the -farm kind of moment. You can feel
the knot in your stomach making a bid like that.
It violates every single conservative instinct
a Depression -era farmer has. But here is where
Earl's Depression -era savvy shines through.
Later on, a group of wealthy syndicate investors
come sniffing around, wanting to buy the cow
from them. They see these two regular farmers
and figure they can flip a quick profit. They
thought they could just buy him out. Exactly.
And Earl does the mental math right there on
the spot. He understands the mechanics of embryo
transfer. He calculates what she's worth if they
can get 10 good flushes out of her, multiplying
the potential offspring. He's playing chess.
He is. And he quotes the investors a massive
astronomical number. He tells them, I'm not saying
I'd sell her for that. I'm just giving you an
idea of what she's actually worth. He knew exactly
what he possessed. He wasn't intimidated by the
money. He was entirely correct. They keep Gail.
They flush her. And she builds this family of
cows that dominate the Canadian index system.
It's incredible. And out of that exact cow family
comes... Startmore Rudolph. Startmore Rudolph,
the bull they call the brood cow fountain. Yes.
When Rudolph debuted as a young proven sire in
1996, he sat at the absolute top of the Canadian
LPI list, the Lifetime Profit Index, which balances
production, confirmation, and durability for
four consecutive years. Four years at the top.
He sold nearly 1 .5 million doses of semen globally.
He was a super millionaire sire. And what the
industry eventually realized was that his true
gift wasn't just type and milk. It was his ability
to transmit late maturity, extreme longevity,
and exceptionally low somatic cell count. Because
he had that depression -era survival fitness
built into his maternal line from the very beginning,
Earl Starr didn't tolerate fragile cows. Rudolph's
daughters became the mothers of the next generation.
They anchored everything. If you look at sale
catalogs from the mid -2000s, it's just a solid
wall of Rudolph daughters anchoring the maternal
side of the pedigrees of the most powerful bulls
in the world. This sets the stage perfectly for
the culmination of everything we've talked about.
Think about the genetic pieces we have assembled
on the table. Okay, let's lay them out. We have
the Extreme Milk production, mapped out by Everett
Maynard and the Biz May Bulls. We have the impeccable
physical frame, feet, and udder attachments provided
by Deli and Durham. Right. And we have the indestructible
fitness fertility in the low somatic cell counts,
hardwired by Old Man and Startmore Rudolph. The
puzzle pieces are scattered all over the global
industry. But the moment when all those disparate
pieces snap together, the absolute breakthrough
of what we can call the golden age of Holstein
breeding happens at the 2008 World Dairy Expo.
This is an earthquake in the history of the breed.
It is the moment where form and function finally
align. Let's set the scene for the listener.
Durham has ruled the Coliseum in Madison for
five straight years. His premier sire banners
are hanging everywhere. He is the undisputed
king of dairy architecture. Everyone expects
his dominance to continue indefinitely. But in
2008, a new bull steps up and seizes the premier
sire banner, Braydale Goldwyn. He is the youngest
sire in 25 years to win it. And Goldwyn was not
an accident of genetic recombination. He was
a masterclass in deliberate, meticulous, highly
mathematical line breeding by Canadian breeders.
He really was. Okay, we talked about line breeding
briefly with formation, but how did the Canadian
breeders use it to create Goldwyn? What was actually
happening at the DNA level in his pedigree? The
Canadian breeding philosophy for decades had
been to carefully stack old sovereign and rag
apple bloodlines, tracing right back to the Mount
Victoria cattle Everett Maynard loved. Right
back to Everett's obsession. Exactly. They were
using modern bulls like Aerostar and Chief Mark,
layering them on top of each other generation
after generation. Golden had three close crosses
to Aerostar and three to Chief Mark. That's a
lot of concentration. If you look at an extended
pedigree and go back 10 or 11 generations, you
find this incredibly tight, dense knot of genetics
tracing all the way back to an anchor Dutch import
cow named Vruca. They believe that those ancient
foundation cows still held the structural answers
to modern dairy farming. So they essentially
compressed time. They took a century of slow
genetic drift and squeezed it into a diamond.
Precisely. By continually folding those bloodlines
back on themselves, they eliminated their recessive
weaknesses and locked in the dominant strengths.
And the physical result was Goldwyn. His daughters
had udders that didn't even look biologically
possible. They were high, incredibly silky, and
heavily veined, indicating massive blood flow.
The rear udders looked like they were literally
welded onto the cow's pelvis. Welded onto the
pelvis. That is such a vivid structural image.
It is, isn't it? It implies that no matter how
many thousands of pounds of milk she gives, no
matter how many times she crosses a creek or
walks a free stall alley, that suspensory ligament
is not stretching. The udder is not dropping.
Exactly. And what made 2008 so groundbreaking
was not just that Goldwyn won the premier sire
banner at Madison. It was that while he was winning
the elite show ring, he was also sitting at or
near the top of the commercial LPI lists for
confirmation and production. Right. Which was
unheard of. For the first time in decades, the
elite show ring and the commercial freestyle
industry were looking at the exact same cow.
The show ring finally shook hands with the future.
The commercial farmer and the elite breeder wanted
the same genetics. And you see this exact same
global convergence with another massive bull
of that era, Pixton Schottel. Oh, Schottel. Schottel
is a brilliant addition to this story because
he proves that these genetic principles work
across entirely different environments. His story
crosses the Atlantic Ocean. It starts at a seemingly
ordinary dispersal sale in Ontario in 1991. A
cow named Condon Inspiration Sally walks through
the auction ring with a nine -month -old Aerostar
heifer calf at her side. Just a cow and a calf.
The calf is named Condon Arrow Sharon. The calf
sells for $4 ,400 to an English buyer, and she
is loaded onto a plane and crosses the ocean
to the United Kingdom. Let's pause on the price.
A $4 ,400 calf. In 1991, that is a very solid
price, but it is not a million -dollar syndicate
animal. She isn't carrying the hype of a Durham
or a Goldman Flush. No, she is just a good, solid,
well -bred heifer. But over the UK, under the
care of the Pickford family, Sharon becomes an
absolute force of nature. The UK environmental
and economic system is heavily pasture -based,
demanding immense durability. Sharon adapts perfectly.
She thrives. She earns an astounding 60 brood
cow points, which is the Canadian and UK system
of awarding points to a mother based on the outstanding
production and classification records of her
offspring. She becomes one of the most powerful
brood cows in UK history. They mate her to a
bull named Emtoto, who brings in heavy Italian
genetics, and they get Pixton Shottle. And Shottle
just takes over the world. He was a global phenomenon.
His breeders, the Pickfords, admitted they literally
had to pinch themselves to believe the impact
a $4 ,400 calf's son was having on every continent.
It's hard to fathom. Here's what I love most
about the Shottle daughters. They were the ultimate
blue -collar workers, but they could dress up
for the weekend. That's a great way to put it.
You could take a chattel daughter, park her in
a massive, concrete -heavy, 400 -cow, freestall
barn, and she would milk her heart out, breed
back on the first service, and stay completely
healthy. Or you could take that exact same cow
out of the freestall, wash her, clip her hair,
and put her in the front row of a competitive
county fair, and she would look completely at
home. That is the ultimate test of a dairy cow's
architecture. Can she work in the dirt and win
in the shavings? Shottle daughters did both effortlessly.
They really did. They had quiet temperaments,
which is highly heritable and crucial for modern
parlors. They had correct feet and legs, and
udders that didn't need any excuses. For a stretch
in the mid -2000s, Shottle sat at the top of
the genetic lists in the U .S., Canada, and Italy
simultaneously. He was the bull you used if you
wanted a cow that could survive and thrive anywhere
on Earth. Exactly. I have to ask you a challenging
question here, looking back at this entire timeline.
When you look at all these Bulls Mountain, oh
man, Rudolph, Goldwyn, Shottle, and we look at
where they came from, Everett's tie stall, a
creek bottom, a Guernsey farmer, a $4 ,400 calf,
what would the elite brass nameplate investor
breeders have done differently during this era?
If they had controlled all the genetic decisions.
Yeah. That is the million -dollar question, and
it's a sobering one. The honest truth is the
elite investor breeders probably would have completely
ignored the needle -in -a -haystack bulls that
actually saved the breed. Why? Because they didn't
have the right marketing syndicates behind them.
Partially marketing, but mostly because they
didn't come from the right zip codes. The elite
industry had a massive bias toward famous prefixes.
Oh, interesting. Consider a bull like Marathon
B .W. Marshall. Marshall didn't come from a famous
prefix in a historic dairy hotbed like Lancaster
County or Madison. He was bred by a partnership
in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Hemingway
country? Exactly. Bitter cold, deep snow, and
dense woods. The investor syndicates were looking
for the safe bet. They heavily marketed cow family
from a recognized master breeder. They would
have walked right past a 50 -point mountain,
or an ugly o -man, or a bull from the freezing
isolation of the Upper Peninsula. But the farmer
breeders, the AI analysts who were paying attention
to the commercial reality, they didn't care about
the zip code. They just cared about the volume
of milk in the bulk tank and the cow breeding
back. Exactly. Charlie Will from Select Sires
literally called Marshall a needle found in a
stack. But those rural isolated needles were
what sewed the whole breed together. Marshall's
daughters were incredible. His daughter, Brooks
MBM Elsa. was named Global Cow of the Year. Her
family set world milk records. Right. Okay, so
we've walked through this incredible multi -decade
timeline, from Everett Maynard doing probability
math in a Vermont tie stall, to a creek -bottom
cow winning Madison on warm beet pulp, to an
ugly bull named O -Man saving the breed's fertility,
to Goldwyn welding udders onto pelvises. It's
quite the journey. Let's bring this right up
to the modern day. Let's talk about the ripple
effect and the dawn of the genomic era. This
is where the history lesson becomes incredibly
concrete for the listener today. Today, genomics
runs the industry. A calf is born, you pull a
few hairs from her tail switch, rub it on an
FTA card, send it to a lab, and they run it through
a SNP chip. Let's explain the mechanism of that
SNP chip quickly. SNP stands for single nucleotide
polymorphism. Essentially, the lab looks at tens
of thousands of specific markers across the calf's
DNA. Supercomputers compare those markers against
a massive database of millions of older cows
whose performance is already known. The algorithm
calculates exactly how much milk, fat, protein,
and fertility that day -old calf will have with
incredible accuracy before she ever eats a single
pound of grain. It's basically a genetic crystal
ball. So when you open your digital semen catalog
today or you look at the genomic headliners on
your phone, you see these modern superstars.
The big names. Bulls with astronomical numbers
like Genesaurus Captain or Seymour's Lambda Paris.
Or you see news that a cow like Eastside Louisdale
Gold Missy just sold at public auction for $1
.2 million. Yeah. When you look at those animals
with their flawless genomic profiles and their
million -dollar price tags, you are not looking
at a modern technological invention. No. You
are looking at the direct, undeniable mathematical
descendants of the farmer -bred sires we've been
talking about. Look at Genesaur's captain. He
has been the most dominant bull of the genomic
era. If you trace his complex pedigree back,
he carries 11 direct crosses to start more Rudolph.
11 crosses to the Guernsey farmer's bull. 11.
And he's stacked on top of Oman, Goldwyn, Marshall,
and Schottel. So what this really means, fundamentally,
is that genomics did not invent great cows. Not
at all. Genomics is just a tool. It's a massive,
highly efficient calculator. Right. What the
genomic SNP chip did was finally put mathematical,
precise numbers to the invisible traits that
cow people in commercial parlors had already
spent three decades hardwiring into the breed
through trial, error, sweat, and sheer farmer
instinct. Everett Maynard was doing the math
in 1946 with a number two pencil in a magazine.
Today, we do it with supercomputers mapping base
pairs of DNA. But it's the exact same math. We
are just using a billion -dollar technology to
prove what the farmers already built by hand.
And that is the absolute truth of the Holstein
breed. We owe the modern, hyper -efficient genomic
dairy cow to the people who couldn't afford a
bad flush and who couldn't afford an empty stanchion.
All right, I want to bring this right down to
the ground. Someone is listening to this deep
dive on their tractor right now. They've been
out there for hours hauling manure or mixing
TMR, and they are listening to us trace these
pedigrees across decades and continents. Yeah,
what's the bottom line? What is the one thing
from this story they should sit with today? What
is the core takeaway for their own farm? The
one thing you have to take away from this is
a very simple equation. Classic equals quality
plus time. But consider how contradictory that
sounds based on what we've discussed. Are you
saying a high -quality cow is naturally fragile
or that breeders just need to balance the scale?
Break down how quality and time actually interact
on a dairy farm. Think about it like this. Bulls
like Durham and Goldwyn gave us the corality.
They gave us the perfectly attached udders, the
wide frames, the beautiful, efficient structures
we see from the stands at Expo. Right, the pretty
stuff. But if a cow only lasts one lactation,
that quality is economically worthless. Bulls
like Oman, Rudolph, and those Bismay bulls from
Vermont. They gave us the time. The staying power.
Exactly. They hardwired the fertility, the low
somatic cell scores, the sheer physical durability
that allows that high -quality cow to actually
survive in your freestall for six or seven lactations.
Without the time, the quality is useless. You
need both to create a classic, profitable herd.
The pretty cow has to pay the bills. And she
has to live long enough to make a profit. Exactly.
And the decisions you are making today, which
straw of semen you pull out of the nitrogen tank
to breed that heifer standing in your headlock,
you are literally building the genetics of tomorrow.
You are participating in the exact same process
Everett Maynard was. You are the Everett Maynard
of today. I want to leave you with one final
provocative thought. The next time you're sitting
in the pickup truck, the radio is playing low,
the windows are a little fogged up from the winter
air, and you are... endlessly swiping through
a genomic proof list on your phone. I want you
to look past the high numbers. Past the indexes,
yeah. Yeah, look past the GTPI and the net merit
indexes. Scroll down and find the names printed
in the very small print at the bottom of the
pedigree. The foundation. When you see those
names, Jupiter, Cletus, Mountain, Durham, Goldwyn,
Oman, Shottle, Rudolph, Marshall, I want you
to realize something profound. The most advanced,
highly calculated, computationally massive dairy
technology on Earth is just an echo. It is an
echo of a hard -doing cow walking through a muddy
Wisconsin creek with sand in her udder. It's
an echo of a Guernsey man risking everything
he had at a New York sale. And it's an echo of
a Vermont farmer with manure on his trousers
betting the entire future of his family on the
math. That's another story from the Bullvine
Podcast. These are the people building the future
of dairy. Find more at www .thebullvine .com.
Next time, we're talking to a breeder who accidentally
created a global phenomenon in a retrofitted
calf barn. Subscribe so you don't miss it. Never
will die. From the show ring, from the tune,
the quiet strength they knew. Hear their stories
now, coming right on through. Oh, tell the tale,
tell the tale, the Beaumont legends lived here.