We arrived home yesterday afternoon after 2820 miles on the road in 4.5 days and my wife Chris and I were still talking which has to be a good sign I think. Actually I'm not even tired which seems a little weird!! I wish we could have spent a few more days and visited some more herds along the way. I really bugs me when I have to drive close by some good cattle establishments and haven't got time to stop for a visit. We did manage to stop at Cagwin's where we dropped two bulls for a breeder in Missouri. The two Canadian herd sires there have really done a great job there. Alta Cedar Top Dog has produced a great set of breeding females, and the Visa bull is most impressive out on pasture and we saw some excellent calves from him. IMO, the Byland Misson daughters in their herd, are the greatest set of breeding females I have ever seen at Cagwin's. Don and Darryl were at Duis Farms the day we were at Cagwin's so we did not get to see them, but we had a good visit with Carey and Cindy. I really wanted to get to see the Duis cattle again, but after checking out the map and planning a route home, it would have meant another 6 hours of driving and close to another day on the road. If I had not been though the Duis herd last fall, I probably would have taken the extra time.
We stopped at a herd in Minnesota to look at a set of cattle for an Australian breeder and found a very uniquely bred herd. This herd is intensely linebred, with most of the cattle linebred to the Deerpark Kildysart cow line and the Deerpark Leader lineage of sires. Some of the females in this herd are the last straight Deerpark Kildysart's on earth, so they are very unique. None are left in Ireland after the Deerpark herd was dispersed, and no others are in North America, as they have been crossed with other bloodlines. I am working on getting some of these cattle and flushing them and sending the embryos to the Australian breeder.
When we were importing Irish cattle from Ireland, I was told several times by the Irish breeders, that the Kildysart cow family was the greatest producers of herd sires. When I think of some of the good breeding sires from the Irish lines, such as Deerpark Dividend, IDS Duke of Dublin,Deerpark leader 4th, Deerpark Leader 20th, Deerpark Improver 2nd, I think they may have been right.
