Looking for old Shorthorn bull pics

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Willow Springs

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Would appreciate pics if someone has them handy on their computer or knows where to find them.

Seven T's Greg
SRS Instant Replay
Homedale Equity
Matlock Torpedo
Deer Trail Goliath
Homedale Equity
Belmore Ultra-Bright
CF High Rise
Red Max Prince
Butterfield Krakatoa
Kenbar White Expansion
Minn Duke Darius (DP)
Green Row Everlasting (DP)
 

Willow Springs

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Well I'll add some that were sent to me

 

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oakview

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That is one interesting mixture of bulls.  I am somewhat familiar with all of them except Red Max Prince.  Most of them were decent bulls in their day, don't know if that day is today, though.
 

Shorthorn-Fed

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It would be nice if there was someone standing in the photo of Red Max Prince to gauge his size/frame. I would take a guess that he would be 4.5 ish and not any where close to hunting geese with a rake like the other two.



Russ
 

Willow Springs

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I prefer the look of Red Max Prince, but he was born in 1964 so chances are he was fairly small? Picture just not taken in 2 feet of straw, but I can sure appreciate the type he displays in the picture. Goliath looks fairly useful too - again picture taking/clip jobs probably make him look more extreme than he is. Gregs structure and type are just not good - but again just a picture so who knows.
 

knabe

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Middle 80’s was a waste of time.

More good cattle were sidelined probably than the 50’s

I remember showing  and judging thinking what the heck is wrong with these people.
 

oakview

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You need to remember who it was that told us those "Greg" type cattle were good.  The educated, smarter than us, college professors.  These were the same folks that told us we needed belt buckle cattle 20 years before.  Every calf in the late 70's and 80's needed to look like Friggio.  Every breed was the same.  I still have the old AI catalog describing Dollar II as "a comfortable 6 feet tall at the shoulder."  Clark was advertised as the Shorthorn bull that got the breed out of the mud.  There were ton junior yearling "Angus" heifers in Denver.  There was a rumor that some Herefords were actually Simmental crosses.  No kidding.  How much was Signal semen 30 years ago?  I'll wager it's not that expensive today.  Times change.  It's interesting and fun to use a little hindsight. 
 

GM

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Was 1984 Denver the peak of Shorthorn interest in modern times?  I recall the sale being incredible with a bull selling for 100k - not much heard from him after that (2416).  From what I recall reading the stands were full of bidders, there was huge buzz, and the high seller sold for part interest to a breeder in South America.  Goliath was a monster and I don’t think he won, or came close.  I think it was the first big wave of Ayatollah offspring at that show.  Curious what the historians recall.  Many amazing <7 frame cattle were pushed aside or lost in the chase.
 

Willow Springs

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You need to remember who it was that told us those "Greg" type cattle were good.  The educated, smarter than us, college professors.  These were the same folks that told us we needed belt buckle cattle 20 years before.  Every calf in the late 70's and 80's needed to look like Friggio.  Every breed was the same.

I think the industry blames the college professors, ag fieldman, etc too much for their own screw ups. I agree that those types were advocating more growth and yield, however I doubt they were advocating for what the cattle became. The purebred show ring hype takes something and it becomes a game of one upmanship to the point that we move right past optimum to maximum - it happens with everything people do and is repeated over and over. First too small, then too big now it is chasing the highest EPD's and as usual show ring types that are not generally functional for a commercial range based operation.
 

Willow Springs

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Some more pics
 

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justintime

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Willow Springs said:
I prefer the look of Red Max Prince, but he was born in 1964 so chances are he was fairly small? Picture just not taken in 2 feet of straw, but I can sure appreciate the type he displays in the picture. Goliath looks fairly useful too - again picture taking/clip jobs probably make him look more extreme than he is. Gregs structure and type are just not good - but again just a picture so who knows.

Red Max Prince was a bigger bull than most in that era. He was raised by George Zelonka, Redvers, SK and we went down to try to buy him when he was about 6 years old. George did not have a scale on his farm, so he loaded him in his grain truck and took him to the grain elevator to weigh him. He told us he weighed just over 2400 lbs and my dad and I both thought that was fairly accurate. He had a massive body and was taller than most bulls in that era. George had him priced at $5000 and we did not buy him. That was a bunch of money back then, especially for a 6 year old bull. I remember my dad saying that he would have paid that for him, if he has seen some better calves from him. That day, we didn't see any calves that we thought would be as good as Red Max Prince was himself. He was very thick, and deep with exceptional softness, as well as smooth as an apple.  He looked like he was very easy fleshing.
There were some cattle in the 60s that were larger framed, especially here in Canada. They were the exception rather than the rule though. I remember Scotsmorr Fascinator being a massive bull, and he was a bull that bred very well. He was a 2500 lb bull that weighed that year round. Four Point Major was also a massive bull who weighed over 2600 lbs. Nupar Cherrio was another of the massive bulls I remember from the 60s and early 70s. We found him in a commercial herd near Yorkton, Saskatchewan when he was 8 years old. He was probably one of the biggest bulls I have seen.  There were several others that I remember, and almost all of them were bred by breeders who lived off the beaten track and didn't use much Scottish breeding from that era.
 

idalee

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Minn Duke Darius from the cover of the 1973 Milking Shorthorn Journal (Herd Sire Issue)  Darius weighed over 3000 pounds and sired a lot of growth and milk in Milking Shorthorns at that time. 
 

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idalee

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Green Row Everlasting from the Western Ontario Breeders advertisement in the September 1975 Milking Shorthorn Journal.  Harley Headings of Kansas bred a bull from him named Double H GR Defender 4051361
 

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oakview

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In my 55 years of showing cattle, I would bet at least 90% of the judges I've shown under were college folks.  Nothing wrong with that, it's just the way it was.  I was on the ISU livestock judging team until my wife made me retire after we were gone for over 2 weeks on a judging trip.  You would have a hard time proving to me that college livestock judging was not controlled by college people.  It's just a fact that they controlled type.  If you wanted to do well in the show or in the judging contest, you tried to show and pick the kind those in control liked.  You adjust your breeding program accordingly.  There's no reason to debate whether it's practical, good or bad.  That's just the way it is.
 

Shorthorn-Fed

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justintime said:
He was very thick, and deep with exceptional softness, as well as smooth as an apple.  He looked like he was very easy fleshing.
There were some cattle in the 60s that were larger framed, especially here in Canada. They were the exception rather than the rule though. I remember Scotsmorr Fascinator being a massive bull, and he was a bull that bred very well. He was a 2500 lb bull that weighed that year round. Four Point Major was also a massive bull who weighed over 2600 lbs. Nupar Cherrio was another of the massive bulls I remember from the 60s and early 70s. We found him in a commercial herd near Yorkton, Saskatchewan when he was 8 years old. He was probably one of the biggest bulls I have seen.  There were several others that I remember, and almost all of them were bred by breeders who lived off the beaten track and didn't use much Scottish breeding from that era.

What would you say Red Max Prince was frame score wise Grant? Was I undershooting at my guess of 4.5?

Russ
 

RyanChandler

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Zero chance he was a 4 1/2 frame if he indeed weighed 2400.  Though take into consideration  the embellishments that typically follow this particular storyteller. 

And $6000, in 1969, Mercy.  I was curious so had to look it up: the average annual income in both Canada and the US in ‘69 was between $5,800 and $6,000. With the average price of Saskatchewan farmland at the time being $60 an acre, where would a Western Canadian farmer have acquired that kind of disposable income to drop 100 times that on a bull ?
 

justintime

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Shorthorn-Fed said:
justintime said:
He was very thick, and deep with exceptional softness, as well as smooth as an apple.  He looked like he was very easy fleshing.
There were some cattle in the 60s that were larger framed, especially here in Canada. They were the exception rather than the rule though. I remember Scotsmorr Fascinator being a massive bull, and he was a bull that bred very well. He was a 2500 lb bull that weighed that year round. Four Point Major was also a massive bull who weighed over 2600 lbs. Nupar Cherrio was another of the massive bulls I remember from the 60s and early 70s. We found him in a commercial herd near Yorkton, Saskatchewan when he was 8 years old. He was probably one of the biggest bulls I have seen.  There were several others that I remember, and almost all of them were bred by breeders who lived off the beaten track and didn't use much Scottish breeding from that era.

What would you say Red Max Prince was frame score wise Grant? Was I undershooting at my guess of 4.5?

Russ

I'm not totally sure what frame he would have been. I am thinking he would have been a 5 to 5.5. He certainly wasn't small but he had a massive amount of body on his frame. Most people think that all the cattle back in the 60s were small framed. Most were, but there was some big framed cattle as well. Most of the bigger framed cattle were bred in herds that did not follow the fads of the day. Doug Morris who owned Scotsmorr at Saskatoon, told me that his dad went and found the biggest bull he could find to breed his cows, and this was the sire of Scotsmorr Fascinator and was a bull named Rock Rally. Doug showed me a dug out place near his barn where his dad would back the cow into so the bull could breed her. He thought this was ridiculous so he wanted to find a big bull. I remember the first time Gene McDonald from Shorthorn Country saw Scotsmorr Fascinator he stood behind the bull and the peak of his cowboy hat rested on Fascinators tail head. ( Gene wasn't super tall but he wasn't super short either!)  He said he was the biggest bull he had ever seen. Not only was he a big bull, he was also a very good bull. I have often wished there had been semen collected on Fascinator or even a son of his.
 

justintime

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-XBAR- said:
Zero chance he was a 4 1/2 frame if he indeed weighed 2400.  Though take into consideration  the embellishments that typically follow this particular storyteller. 

And $6000, in 1969, Mercy.  I was curious so had to look it up: the average annual income in both Canada and the US in ‘69 was between $5,800 and $6,000. With the average price of Saskatchewan farmland at the time being $60 an acre, where would a Western Canadian farmer have acquired that kind of disposable income to drop 100 times that on a bull ?

Ryan, I really don't care if you believe what I say or not.  Despite what you think, there was some pretty good prices paid back in this era for breeding stock. I have spent my entire life in this business and I do remember a few things yet. So I plead guilty to being a bit of a storyteller, even if I don't consider myself to be one. Actually, I feel very fortunate to have been able to do the only thing I ever wanted to do( and contrary to what you think, I did have to buy my farm and I paid dearly for it). I have been able to make my living from raising cattle and have never actually had another job ( other than helping others at a few sales over the years)
I remember my parents going to the Louada sale in Ontario in 1965 and they bought a son of Bapton Constructor at $5000. Another Saskatchewan breeder also went to this sale and he bought a bull at $12,500. He also bought 3 females between $2800 and $8000. The high selling bull in this sale was $30,000, and sold to Argentina.  The high selling Shorthorn bull at the 1968 Regina Bull Sale was $8000. I still have marked catalogs for almost all of the Regina Bull Sales from the early 50s through to when the sale ended just a few years ago. For many years this was the biggest bull sale in the world, and they sold bulls for 5 days from morning to night. I remember there was over 1000 Polled Hereford bulls there one year in the 70s,  and there was 14 bulls that sold at  $10,000 or more.I think the high price that year was $45,000 and very few bulls passed in the sale. In 1976, Crestdale Super Flag 14G sold in the Shorthorn sale at Regina Bull Sale for $41,500. And just like now, many breeders would place a higher price on an animal when someone was interested in it, and they did not want to sell it too bad. This was probably the case, when we asked for a price for Red Max Prince. He priced him and my dad decided he didn't want to pay that much for him. I don't think that is such a strange thing to happen. When I look back at some of the prices back 40-50 years ago ( or more) I really don't think prices for breeding stock have kept up with how costs have increased. Even in the 1990s when we also had a Charolais herd, we sold them privately out of the yard at your pick at $3000. We  sold 12-15 Charolais bulls for several years at this price. When I think of how much our costs have risen in the last 20 years, we are not keeping up with the prices we get for breeding stock today. For several years, we sold our Charolais bulls at $3000 and did not drop our price for the last few to sell. According to a inflation conversion table, $3000 in 1990 would be $5736 in 2019 dollars. We oftentimes sold 2-3 bulls at this price to some ranchers, and I remember one Montana rancher coming and taking 6 bulls at $3000 one year. Most of us don't think of this and still think $3000 is a good price today. My dad is 94 now, and still tries to keep up with what is happening in the cattle business. He attended our bull sale in March, and we averaged $4222 on the bulls. After the winter we had, I was pleased that we were able to sell them and was pleased with the sale average, My dad came to me after the sale was over, and said that compared to what we used to get, we were not keeping up with what our costs were. At first, I was a but upset that he was putting a damper on what I considered to be a good sale, but after thinking about this for awhile, I thought that he was probably closer to right than he was wrong. You can scratch your head on lots of things today, when you consider the price of grain, price of land, price of fertilizer and spray, and price of machinery. I don't understand this either. My neighbor just bought a new JD tractor on tracks and the largest air seeder they make ( I heard it was 76 feet wide). The cost of these two pieces of machinery was $1.7 million ( Canadian dollars) Another neighbor told me the interest alone on this purchase was $500 per day. He said that the guy who bought this machinery had told him this. Now how does anyone figure this makes any sense at any price you want to put on grain crops?
 
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