It was quite an interesting day yesterday as I eagerly agreed to travel with Mitch Hockett to their other Kingsmill Farm in Randleman, North Carolina. A little over an hour southwest of Raleigh, the Randleman farm is home to 900 head of cattle, and will eventually house a milking herd of about 200 head. We traveled there with veterinarian Richard Doak of the Mid Maryland Dairy Vets group located in Hagerstown. Dr. Doak had flown in Wednesday morning to do some ultrasound work on a group of heifers that were carrying embryos made by Recipient Solutions. Our conversation on the 80 mile drive included such topics as Doak’s new ultrasound machine and improvements coming in the future, Twitter, apps on the iPhone, genomics and dairying in the west (Richard grew up in New Mexico and spent many years working in Arizona). We also learned about a fairly new venture that Mitch, and farm manager Eddie Patrick, have gotten involved in – owning bucking bulls and bucking bull mothers. Mitch and Eddie, along with Jerome Davis, own a few famous ones, most notably Katwoman, who is a full sister to the 7x bucking bull champion Katmandu. Mitch says there’s quite a big value put on males, but they do flush the females and the female market can be very strong as well.

It was time to get down to business, and so Eddie, Mitch and one of their great workers, Caesar, gathered up the group of 17 heifers. Dr. Doak gave me the monitor and we watched as he showed us each calf, how to check the sex and what parts were what! It was interesting to see how some calves were extremely active and moving around, while others seemed perfectly content to have the ultrasound wand check them over. Doak says the ideal time to check the sex of the calf is around 68 days. Eddie, Mitch and Caesar all do ultrasound work themselves at Kingsmill, so the stories they compared with Dr. Doak were fun to listen to. He also explained the merits of ultrasounding expense for the “commercial guys.” “It’s not an unnecessary expense for those big dairies. If I can tell a manager that a cow is carrying a bull calf, and she also happens to be a high somatic cell cow, or low producer, that just may be the information needed to make a culling decision quicker and save time and money in the long run.”

One of the interesting things about Dr. Doak was his “big picture” thinking and his experience, which Eddie quickly tapped into. Questions were fired off about nutrition, vaccination programs, dehorning (have you tried the propane burner at 2 weeks of age?) and so on. That, of course, led to stories about the neighbors, including one of a copperhead snake biting a neighbors’ horse. Seeing that I have a paralyzing fear of snakes, it was, I had hoped, a topic we could move past quickly.

The calf hutches in Randleman are super-sized! Newborn calves get the deluxe accomodations and then are moved to hutches, then group housing, then the pasture lots. Calves are weaned at three months and have been reaching the 330 pound weight by that time.

Henry, Mitch and Eddie listen to Dr. Doak explain about another form of dehorning.

My favorite calves in the pens were definitely the Durham and Shottle heifers from Astrahoe Raleigh Lee Robust (EX-92), followed closely by some very fancy Reality-Red and Redliner calves.

Stay tuned for more from Raleigh later today as I’ll be doing a photo view of the cows getting ready for Saturday’s Southern Parade of Stars Show! And be sure to check back on www.holsteinworld.com for the sale order and updates for tomorrow’s Knight at Kingsmill Sale!

Say goodnight Holyfield! (look at the ears!)

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 10th, 2010 at 7:27 am by kknutsen and is filed under Herd Visit. 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.