kiblercattle said:
Thank you for the pics they look really good. I am looking for bull to use next year and can't decide between prophecy or the dover bull. Wish I had more cows and I d use both.
Both the sire of Prophecy 21P and Dover are former herd sires at Y Lazy Y! I believe Ralph still has daughters and granddaughters of both in his cow herd. As has been pointed out by a few, Prophecy himself is a lot lower birth weight and calving ease than his sire. His EPD's actually reflect how he breeds in our herd, almost always our cows have lighter birth weight calves by Prophecy than they do by the other bulls that we use. I will be interested to see how he works with some other bloodlines but I'm pretty confident he is a calving ease bull. It would appear through the wonderful world of genetics that he has inherited the genes for calving ease as well as passes them on and that was very evident when we calved our two year old Prophecy heifers this spring.
I will actually be interested to see where Glenford Captain 39X's EPDs trend as his calves have been very similar in size to Prophecy but with his EPD's before having progeny by him I did not expect that.
I consider Prophecy a maternal bull in our herd. His daughters are smaller framed in our herd. They have good udders, calve unassisted and have really good thrifty calves at side. I know Ralph has had excellent results from Dover as well and the photos of his daughters are awesome.
On the subject of EPD's, we find in our herd they pretty much reflect what we are seeing for BW, WW, YW and milk. I have to say the milk I find a bit surprising but I guess the formulas usually sort the growth from extra size from milk? We have also been able to follow some of our bloodlines through results in Britain with EPD's and in Australia and New Zealand with EBV's and we see the same trends. I know with some well known bulls there is not a lot correlation between the two systems and I am not sure why that is.
