Royal Highland Show

Supreme Champion of the show, and champion Shorthorn owned by the Porter's of NIreland, sired by Chapelton Touchstone an embyro produced by me for Mr. Biggar of Scotland. Touchstone also sired Porte'ss 2nd in class female, he is by CF Varsity out of a Hess, Lazy HJ female.

(clapping) Congrats! What an honor.

Our local livestock judging team was over there judging during the show. They placed in the top at Nationals (I think third), so they went to go judge. I can't wait to hear their stories!

irishshorthorns said:

Touchstone? Is he one of the bulls with TH that they culled after they got all their embryo cattle tested? I thought quite a few of the embryo cattle you created had 'dirty pedigrees' and a number showed up as TH carriers. I think Chapelton Transatlantic and Chapelton Toronto were carriers too. Didn't Toronto go to Croxtonpark?

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To be fair, no one knew much about the TH defect, in the Shorthorn breed, when scotland did  these flushes for James Biggar.  There were some excellent animals produced that turned out to be TH carriers when they were eventually tested, and some of  these had some excellent progeny on the ground by this time. Like almost everyone else in the Shorthorn breed, they had to test all these cattle, and there were some very good cattle eliminated because of their being carriers but there were also some that turned out to be TH free and they have become great breeding pieces in many herds in Britain. Even though there were some TH carriers produced from the embryos scotland shipped to James Biggar, there were also many excellent TH free animals produced. You can find many excellent Shorthorns in Britain today that trace to these ET progeny from Canada, and they come from both TH free and TH carrier animals. This is the same thing that happened in many other countries where some of these same genetics were used. I'm quite sure if scotland had been asked, a few short years later,  to genetically design a large quantity of embryos to establish a herd, like he was asked to do for James Biggar, he would have used some different genetics in a few cases.  CF Varsity turned out to be a TH carrier and he was the main sire that produced some of the great cattle that turned out to be carriers themselves.