Mich Livestock Service, Inc — "For the Best in Bulls" and "High Energy Forages" 110 N Main St (PO Box 661) Ovid, MI 48866 📞 (989) 834-2661 | ✉️ greg@michiganlivestock.com | 🌐 www.michiganlivestock.com
Mark Curry (989) 984-7027 — Route Services and Sales Sue Palen (989) 277-0480 — Office Manager, Products Manager Greg Palen (989) 277-6031 — "aAa" Approved Analyzer, Certified Seed Specialist
Forty years ago when I was breeding Jerseys, the breed had a terrific issue with reverse tilted udders and asymmetrical teat placement (too wide in front, too close in rear). The source of these problems were primarily the index world's fixation on sons and grandsons of Observer Chocolate Soldier. This basically proved that linebreeding to an "index", concentrating on a ranked sire line without regard to genetic structural differences, leads us to problems.
Today we have a similar issue in Holsteins. Udders are moving forward under the pelvis, the rear teats are only half the size/length of the fore teats, and fore teats are moving wider. The linear solution is to create "robot ready" indexes (drawing sales away from the dominance of the Genomic Observer sire line — an ironic coincidence of names!), but addressing the cause of these problems requires more thought than a sales gimmick slogan.
For most people, the biggest issue is teats too short. Linear graphs show a majority of ranked sires are "left of the average line" for teat length. Here are some favorites of ours, sourced by AI Total who bucked this trend and will keep your udders more "milkable":
Vogue A2P2 -PP (aAa 3 1 5 2 4 6) — +0.50 teat length @ 94% Rel. | Also A2A2 Beta Casein Now an Elite sire of polled sons, recently scored 97 points at seven years of age!
Aurora Blackjack -P (aAa 4 5 3 2 1 6) — +0.73 teat length | Both A2A2 Beta C and BB Kappa C Like "A2P2" he is significantly "plus" for both Butterfat% and Protein% and lower Somatic Cell
Lorita Sphinx -PP (aAa 2 4 3 1 6 5) — +0.97 teat length | Both A2A2 Beta C and BB Kappa C Another high butterfat% and protein% combination, with calving ease and +0.4 DPR to boot
Siemers Tao Prada (aAa 5 6 1 4 3 2) — +1.38 teat length | Both A2A2 Beta C and BB Kappa C Plus butterfat%, plus protein%, high +1.4 DPR, calving ease; source of wide, sturdy front ends
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