Old Shorthorn Blood

[justintime]

I agree completely with itk on this topic. There are probably more multi-purpose cattle at the major shows than I have seen at any time in my several decades in this breed. I certainly believe we have many more today than there was in the Ayatollah years with bulls like Lefty 83rd who weighed near 2900lb as a two year old. There certainly are more cattle that can make it in the real world than there was in the Rodeo Drive era. There are many more functional cattle today than there was in the Lancer years. There are many more functional cattle today than there was when the Irish cattle were the favour of the day. There are many more functional cattle than there were in the Leader 21st era as well. After saying all of this, there were good cattle in each of there eras and there were cattle of little use.  As I have said many times before in this forum, there have been good cattle in every era and it is unfair to lump all cattle today in the same group. What I am saying is that I believe there are... on average.... more multi- purpose, multi- functional cattle in today's shows than in previous decades.Remember I said... ON AVERAGE. I will agree that there are some fluff and puff fur balls making it into todays shows, that should only be considered as pets as they serve no real purpose in the beef industry than to give some kids some fun as they drag them from show to show. But there are also some cattle that have much to add to the industry.

I think we all need to take 10 deep breaths and start to look at all cattle on their own merits. Consider the animal first and then consider the pedigree it has. I think  if we started doing this, we maybe could be a little more objective and maybe we could see breed advancement at a faster pace. There will always be cattle that will not work in your herd, but they may work wonders in another herd... or in another enviroment. To me, this is a great thing. It means that we have a genetic pool from which there are options.Some other breeds would love to have the genetic options this breed has.  You have to be smart enough to pick and chose what will work in your herd.

In my opinion, coyote and his family have done exactly that. They have developed a herd of moderate framed, easy fleshing, no nonsense cattle, that have super udders and are low maintenance. Thye haven't chased show ring fads, but they bring cattle out to the shows each year to present to the public what they are trying to produce. It is working for them. It seems to be totally ridiculous that so many breeders seem to follow what a few of the so called major breeders do. I would guarantee that if I could get one of three major breeders in the US to use one of my herd bulls, no matter if they were good or not, that I would sell a pile of semen from this bull within a few months.

I get real tired of all this bashing of certain genetic lines, of certain breeders, of certain trends in the show ring, of whether an animal has an asterisk on it's registration paper or not. As I said earlier, some of the cattle I see winning won't work for me... and I won't use them in my breeding program.  When I do see something that I think will bring something to my breeding program, I certainly would not be afraid to use it.... and as I have said many times before on here.... if you don't like the cattle you see, develop your own breeding program.  You may be surprised how many people will agree with you and the cattle you are producing. 

 

[garybob]

OFS I think you are still having a bad time saying what you mean.
You say "I basically don't have a whole lot of use for "commercial" type cattle because I raise cattle for show".
Are we not all raising cattle for the same reason, BEEF, or are some of us raising pets?

Boy, Coyote, You took the words right outta my keyboard!

Jeanny doesn't have a perfect udder, You say? By looking at the picture, it looks "ok", but, what about when she's just calved?

GB

 

[knabe]

i've seen worse in the show ring today all fake filled up, and it was shorthorn's too at last year's CA state fair.

 

[garybob]

Too many people who breed those "Saturday" and "Sunday" cattle (of many breeds) in the United States have overlooked one thing: The GLOBAL Beef Industry is "ran" using "Monday thru Friday" cattle.


GB

 

[itk]

Knabe, Like I said there are Saturday and Sunday types of show cattle. I guarantee the calf you are talking about wasn't in Don Cardey's string. Because if you look at his cattle and don't feel that they can work in numerous scenarios then you are trying to find something wrong with the cattle just to be difficult. Don probally had 30 nice functional aminals there that can show with the best of them and they haven't been fed that well or probally even washed. Still at the end of the day Don did better showing then all of the fluff balls. Don raises Sunday cows they will win and look the part in the ring and when Don takes them to his mountian pastures they will wean off a big calf on a picture perfect udder.

A majority of Sunday cattle are Monday-Friday cattle most of the time you just got to look nice when you go to church on Sundays(NAILE or NWSS). But they can fit in when "dressiing down" for the rest of the week.

 

[Davis Shorthorns]

Kinda off subject, but I was wondering if anyone would know where to find info on OLD breeders and their cattle.  My folks and I are looking for some info on my Grandparents and Great Grandparents heard.  They would have been around Leon KS, Butler County around the 20's to the 60's if anyone has any info on a place to start that would be great.  Thanks

 

[justintime]

I recently saw a book on eBay called a history of Kansas Shorthorns or something like that. From what I read about it, it tells the story of Kansas Shorthorn breeders and their cattle in the early days up until the mid 50s or so. I am not sure who wrote it, but maybe check on eBay under " Shorthorn" or "Shorthorns" and you may find it there again. I have seen it offered more than once in the last 2 years.

 

[itk]

Kinda off subject, but I was wondering if anyone would know where to find info on OLD breeders and their cattle.  My folks and I are looking for some info on my Grandparents and Great Grandparents heard.  They would have been around Leon KS, Butler County around the 20's to the 60's if anyone has any info on a place to start that would be great.  Thanks

There is a book called "The History of Shorthorns in Kansas" or something to that extent by GA Laude that should be fairly easy to find for sale on the internet it has alot of information about breeders in that time period. Also Barbra Roux had a paplet celebrating 100 years of shorthorns in Kansas from 1957 at the annual meeting call her and I'm sure she will mail you a copy. Other wise talk to the older breeders like JC, Keith Lauer and the such they are always very informative.

 

[itk]

  Kansas Shorthorns: The History of the Breed in the State from 1857 to 1920
Author: Laude, G. A. , Illustrated by: B&W Photos & Drawings
Publisher: The Laude Printing Company Iola Kansas 1920

Purple cloth hardcover with gilt stamped titles. 647 pages with B&W photo illustrations. A superb history of shorthorns in Kansas from the time of the cattle drives until the commercialized ranching of 1920. Interesting photos, one of Pried's Bessie 206445, 'the first Scotch cow to be admitted to the advanced registry for milking shorthorns.' Man, what a great long body and level topline she had! (Quite rough-quoted as expected.) Serious breeding in Kansas was impeded by the American Civil War and the ugliness that followed. The book gives a very brief history of the breed. The first serious breeder was S.S. Tipton of Anderson County, herein is an account of his personal history and breeding success, and on through the entire herd history of the State through 1920. CONDITION: A resonable volume to add to a collection. Cover color is bright with slight spine fade, gilt on front cover is bright but a bit dulled on spine. Edgewear is mostly color rub-off, which could be easily touched up with dye. A manufacturing flaw left a wrinkle in lower front cover cloth, and there are a few very small and faint stains. Internally the book is completely sound and clean with very faint toning but good for another 100 years. And quite fascinating...the bane of the bookseller - no time to read 'em all! LIVESTOCK 3904 First Edition Hard Cover Very Good Condition Small 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" Tall Livestock

Here is the book me and JIT are talking about

 

[knabe]

Knabe, Like I said there are Saturday and Sunday types of show cattle. I guarantee the calf you are talking about wasn't in Don Cardey's string. Because if you look at his cattle and don't feel that they can work in numerous scenarios then you are trying to find something wrong with the cattle just to be difficult. Don probally had 30 nice functional aminals there that can show with the best of them and they haven't been fed that well or probally even washed. Still at the end of the day Don did better showing then all of the fluff balls. Don raises Sunday cows they will win and look the part in the ring and when Don takes them to his mountian pastures they will wean off a big calf on a picture perfect udder.

A majority of Sunday cattle are Monday-Friday cattle most of the time you just got to look nice when you go to church on Sundays(NAILE or NWSS). But they can fit in when "dressiing down" for the rest of the week.

don cardey is basically a legend in CA.  i noticed him there.

 

[coyote]

JIT how are your leader 21st calves look? Do you have any pictures?

 

[coyote]

Just thought I would mention, since we are talking "Old Shorthorn Blood", that the Grand Champion bull at the Canadian Western Agribition was
Alta Cedar First Blood 5R, his mother is by TPS Cornet Leader 21st.

 

[justintime]

I have been meaning to take some pictures of the Leader 21st calves but haven't got to it yet. It seems like I have been busier than a toilet seat at a mixed party lately with calves coming. magazine to publish, bulls to picture, scan and weigh, and the occasional note on here. I will be some pictures in the next few days.
So far, I am pretty impressed with my Leader 21st calves. I used my Leader 21 semen on my Shadybrook Presto 73G donor who is a big framed tremendously thick and deep sided female. The reason I picked her was I wanted to ensure that my Leader 21 calves had enough size to compete. I was afraid that 40 year old genetics may not be as big as I remembered them to be. It appears to have worked but we will see how they continue to develop. Right now both are super thick, and really seem to have some capacity as well as style. I flushed Presto back the same way a couple weeks ago and got 10 grade 1 embryos so I can hopefully get some more next year. It is interesting that these calves are about 3 weeks old and I have already had several inquiries about them. Stay tuned.... pictures are coming.

 

[sjcattleco]

its your right to disagree .Just be aware that a good Gizmo daughter is not freakishly scued enough in her type to be a competitor at a breed show.  Some yo yo judge will fault her for her lack of neck length not knowing that if her neck gets longer her shoulders will get narrower and her thickness and fleshing ability will disapper with her muscle.So you have just ruined her!!!! and folks who are not experienced enough to have an opinion will hear that and not know any better...... But if you are expecting to raise functional / profitable cattle bulls like Mission and tonic are slowing your progress... Mission is NOT a commercial bull!! His entire existance was pampered from day 1..Infact the day McDonald found him at Hobbs he was standing in a feed bunk!! ..You mentioned Lauers cattle... the ones we saw on the SU tour were way to big! Big flat muscled not at all what I expected to see..Tim Ohlde is on the right track... and I think his cattle are too small!!! .IMO a the best commercial "show" bull in the last 15 yrs is RED CLOUD... Moderate , balanced , not too extreme... solid red.... big footed.. Masculine enough...... I Look at all these bulls in these spring catalogs... THEY ARE TOO TALL!!! they lack balance and masculinity  NONE look like Gizmo...or Image or AM or JPJ..... and why is that? its because people have an idea that a bull should be frame big and not necessarily pounds big.... Elbee Gizmo's Image.... Frame 4.9 wt at 3 yrs old June 1st on grass  1 ton  and guys had the nerve to call him small... I asked them just how big do they need to be? My point is that if these "show cattle" weighed up like the others it would be common to have frame 6 3000# bulls and if I recall that was Smallflower leader the 2nds wt at the stud on limited diet!!! I just feel that this is the message serious breeders need to hear I don't care if you have 5 or 500.... herd size does not determine seriousness.... so many of these people are breeding cattle on the premise that they can sell them for a huge premium in order to make money... I raise them on the premise that we won't sell a dang thing and the entire calf crop must be profitable at market price!

American Muscle is doing well!! weighing about 1800# in a pretty neat package.....  The vast majority of AM calves will be at Leveldale farms... I had to make a choice last year... use AM who is young or use my oldest Elbee bull for the last time.... I picked the Elbee bull..This 2008 calf crop will give me about 40 eligible females that he will breed next year.... He will get 25 -30 for sure this year!!! It takes a while to prove a bull... just about the time you get solid data and know what he is he dies!!! .. I bred AM to a couple but Leveldale should have 12 -15 I think.. I have not talked to Les in a while....and I am sure I will be getting some feed back on the other smaller lots of semen that were sold...
[/quote]

SJCC, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. I feel there are more multi-purpose cattle in the breed then there has ever been. I think that Gizmo is the perfect example. Think of the numerous steers sired by Gizmo that have won. I'm sure someone else on here has seen Gregg Stewart and Robert Carlson's Gizzy donor so they could probally back me up on the fact that she is one of the clubbiest cows I have ever seen and actually turned me off to Gizmo until I got to see more of his functional daughters. At the same time he shows up in the pedigree of AM as well. JPJ is another example of bulls that seem to be able to do it all. He can sire calves like Shortdawg's white steer and still go up to Dereck Jungles and produce commercial bulls. As I have said recently on other posts look at the success that cattle coming from Marty Loving and Keith Lauer are having in the showring now. TM Gus, ARSULU Osage, Mission, Tonic, and the list goes on and on of bulls that can sire commercial oriented bulls and females that can excel in the ring. I may be wrong but I can't think of a single NAILE or NWSS champion female that has had Double Stuff or a descendant in her pedigree. To me there are two types of show cattle, I classify them by Saturday and Sunday cattle. Saturday cattle are the heifers with to much hair to much set to their legs and win every little jackpot judged by some kid who just got done judging in college. These cattle have little to no genetic value other then producing a market steer or heifer. Saturday cattle show up to Sunday shows and usually stand at the bottom of the class. Sunday cattle are feminine angular cattle that get rolled at Saturday shows because they aren't stout enough. Fat and hair is fed and worked into cattle. Even without fat and hair a good percentage of Sunday cattle are still good cattle. I will agree with you that there is a correlation between masculine bulls and their more feminine daughters. What is the point of having cake if you can't eat it. Cake is espically good with a scoop of ice cream on the side. I've said this before but we raised a All-American bull out of a $1,400 cow from Marty Loving and a Eagle 148 son. That is the kind of cake you eat until your tummy hurts. ;D By the way are there any AM calves yet and how are they looking.
[/quote]

 

[shortyisqueen]

What is slowing the progess of this breed is not the kind of cattle breeders are choosing to use or the kind of cattle judges are choosing to use. Its the constant squabbling between 'show ring' people and 'commercial' people. If breeders put as much effort into promotion as they put in squabbling among each other as to the right type, the Shorthorn breed would be on top of the world.

People should be able to breed and use what they want from both camps without someone telling them what works in their own breeding program is wrong. I refuse to be a 'show ring' breeder or a 'commercial breeder'. I'm a SHORTHORN breeder.

 

[Davis Shorthorns]

Thank you all very much I greatly appriciate it.  I will be looking in our Ag library monday when I go back to school.  Again thank you all very much.

 

[justintime]

Shortyisqueen... you have hit the nail on the head... again. I could not agree more. The Shorthorn breed has lots of different types and lots of genetic choses. Select what you think will work for you and set out to build a better Shorthorn. If you are right with your choices, you will find that many more breeders will like what you are doing, and they will buy your product. And again.... if you dislike what is happening in the show ring, don't bother following it.

sjcc... I am sorry but I am going to have to disagree with some of yoru comments in your last post. In my opinion this breed could use a few hundred more bulls like Byland Mission. I could care less if he was standing in a feed bunk when Gene found him. Sometimes bulls are put into pens that have feed bunks in them. Don Cagwin has told me that Mission is the easiest fleshing bull he has ever had. He has run on pasture year round ever since Don purchased him and he was still out there at over 12 years of age. The last time I was at Cagwins, it was late December, a few years ago, and he was on pasture a few miles away on the farm that Cindy and Cary live on. He looked amazing! On Tuesday of this week, I received a phone call from a leading breeder in Australia. We call each other on a fairly regular basis. He has two bulls sales a year and they usually average over $8000 on about 80 to 100 bulls with over 80 % going to commercial producers. His sales average like this even in the drought years. In this conversation he said that Mission is one of the best American bulls to ever be used in Australia. Mission offspring have won more than one interbreed carcass competitions in Australia in his first calf crop. There is no place on earth where carcass data, structural soundness and easy fleshing ability are more important. I have travelled a couple of times in the US with this breeder and toured many herds. In my opinion, he has one of the best eyes for good cattle, so when he tells me that Mission cattle are working extremely well in their commercial industry, I listen to him....and I believe he knows what he is talking about.

You also mention Smallflower Leader 2nd. I hesitate to even mention this bull in the same thread as Mission. Smallflower Leader 2 was bred here in Saskatchewan by close family friends of mine. We used him in our herd because of this. In one  of my posts a few days ago, I was saying that if you want to use some older genetics, make sure you study your lessons. Smallflower Leader 2 was one of the bulls that crossed my mind when I wrote that. We were feeding cattle at the time, and his calves were some of the ones that had 8 inch ribeye measurements along with too much fat cover. We got discounted big time for these cattle, His daughters were not hardy enough for our enviroment and they melted like butter once they calved, and most were shipped when they came in open. Smallflower Leader 2 was born in 1968 and was sired by a Leader 21st son.... who was not one of the most impressive Leader 21st sires I have seen.I can still remember his dam. She was a good sized cow but she was flat topped, patchy and had teats that would not fit in a coffee cup. I have no idea how her calves learned to nurse.

In 1973, I saw Smallflower Leader 2nd at KABSU, Manhattan, Kansas. I was travelling with 5 other Shorthorn breeders and we had gone to KABSU to see Deerpark Dividend and Deerpark Improver for the first time. We have talked about this day many times over the years and all 6 of us agreed that we saw the best Shorthorn bull we had seen to that time ( Dividend) as well as the worst bull up to that time ( Smallflower Leader 2nd). The sign on his pen said he weighed 2670, but none of us could see that much weight there. He was probably the worst proportioned bull I have ever seen ( and believe me, I believe in beef bulls being masculine). I would guess that he had as much weight from the point of his shoulder forward as he had from there back. I have seen Buffalo with more hind quarter. When we returned home, the breeder of Leader 2 asked us if we had seen him as he had not seen him since he was a yearling. We could not lie to him and told him what we thought. This bothered him so bad that he drove down to Kansas to see him a couple of months later. When he returned, he said that if he could have shot Leader 2 and not got caught doing it, he would have considered it. He even wrote to the owners and told them that he did not feel this bull was representative of his cattle or the breed, and he asked them to consider sending him to market.

I am only giving you my opinion here, which usually isn't worth much. All I know is that I could never ever sell any bulls to any commercial man if I had a pen full that looked like this bull. I find it interesting as well that you say that most of the bulls you see selling in sales are too big. I don't like real big cattle either, but personally believe there is an optimum size that we should be striving for. I also feel that if we start getting our cattle too small again, we are starting to put a few more nails in this breeds coffin. I remember the days of the small cattle, and these cattle almost put this breed into extinction. It was these cattle that caused the beef Shorthorn to be put on the list of endangered breeds in Scotland and England.. the homelands of the breed. This is why there are no cattle of these lines left in Great Britain. All I am saying here is ... just be careful when you start thinking about using some genetics from the past. As I have said before, some will work... there are others that no one needs to ever see again.

 

[OH Breeder]

JIT would you consider writing your own book? Or maybe just a collection of thoughts for us?

 

[Jill]

What is slowing the progess of this breed is not the kind of cattle breeders are choosing to use or the kind of cattle judges are choosing to use. Its the constant squabbling between 'show ring' people and 'commercial' people. If breeders put as much effort into promotion as they put in squabbling among each other as to the right type, the Shorthorn breed would be on top of the world.

People should be able to breed and use what they want from both camps without someone telling them what works in their own breeding program is wrong. I refuse to be a 'show ring' breeder or a 'commercial breeder'. I'm a SHORTHORN breeder.

(clapping) (clapping) (clapping) (clapping) (clapping) Finally, an answer that makes sense!

 

[coyote]

You maybe right shortyisqueen, but I see no use in a popular bull with a BW epd of +9.6. Responsible breeders have to be aware of the BIG picture.
I "Salute" all the responsible breeders out there.