Holstein World: There were several animals at this year’s World Dairy Expo that carried the Luck-E prefix. Share with our readers how you plan successful matings that result in so many national caliber cow families and show cows. What is the one trait that you feel the Holstein breed needs to improve today?

Joe Engel: We try to use bulls that come from proven families. The bulls we are using now- Dundee, Talent, Advent, Goldwyn, and Affirmed all come from great maternal lines. It also helps to see daughters of a bull if possible and take into account what other breeders have to say about the daughters they have seen. We also do a very large amount of flushing so most of our calves are from high scoring dams. This also helps us build on maternal lines that have proven themselves in our herd.

The one trait I feel that the Holstein breed needs to improve is dairy strength. The breed has done a good job of putting a lot of emphasis on udders and feet and legs, but I feel a cow needs adequate width to have enough power to eat and make milk in large volumes. It also takes a strong cow to stay healthy and be low maintenance while producing heavily and calving back fast year after year.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 17th, 2006 at 9:19 am by sschmidt and is filed under Guest Blogger Series. Hits for this post:18 You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.