Old Timer
December, 23 2017
Tony-I hope my comments haven't came across as "chastising" anyone. The purebred Holstein business has been my passion for over 50 years. I grew up idolizing the great herds, great cows, great cowmen. But as we are all painfully aware, times have changed the business and the breed. I fully agree that showing cattle plays a very important role in the development of our youth. When I was young, the breed badly udder improvement, better feet and legs, but we selected heavily for those traits and we made dramatic improvement to the point that breed average today for those traits is darn good. Now we are in the information age where we can assess animals genetic profiles for valuable traits like fertility, longevity, etc. and we have found that cows don't need to be extremely tall and extremely dairy to maximize lifetime production. I still love to go to the shows and see the beautiful creatures, visit with old friends but when you look at the genetic profile of the beauty contest winners they don't have what the today's dairymen want? I think for now the best thing for a dairyman who has young people involved is to take a couple cow families and breed them to make show cattle for the kids, but to stay in business, you have to concentrate the majority of your breeding program around traits that make cows milk lot and stay in the herd. Maybe someday someone will think of a way to make show cattle exemplify long lived, high producing cows, or maybe the Doorman, McCutchen genetics will push the Absolute, Atwood, Sid influence aside?