Doc said:
oakview said:
Duke of Dulbin's EPDs are unavailable on the ASA website. I had heard his daughters weren't the best milkers. Is that true? How about birth EPD? I see Fastrak is almost + 8 for BEPD. I had a couple Duke calves years ago that were pretty good. KaDel Urice sold a few bull calves at the Iowa Beef Expo many years ago that were real good. I have full Irish semen in the tanks from Ultimate Type, Highler 202, Improver 3rd, High Octane, Leggs, Quane, Leader 18th, Leader 13th, Duke, Prime Time, Highler 204, and Guiness. I haven't used any other than Leader 18th for many years, though I always liked the Irish calves I had. Maybe the time is right to use them again? I just loved the Leader 18th and Ultimate Type cows I had.
The Duke dtrs I had all milked good. Duke, Prime Time, Irish Mist and Improver were my favorites. I got along pretty good with UT on heifers. Highler 202 I liked when I saw him, but his progeny did the least for me. Hazel Leap was another one that I had a couple pretty good daughters of.
My experience with Duke of Dublin was that if he was bred to a good milking cow, he would sire a good milking daughter. If the cow he was bred to was moderate milking, he would sire a moderate milking daughter. I never thought of Duke as being a bull who would add milk to any of his offspring. That said, most Shorthprn females have " adequate" milk and there are often more that milk too much than there are that milk too little.
There has been some good bulls mentioned here that I have always thought should have been used more back in the day. Hazel Leap 2nd was a very very good bull, and his best known son Lazy D HL Quane was probably even a better breeding bull. I remember seeing Hazel Leap 2nd shortly after Dick Judy, from Beef Genetics Research Inc, Mankato, KS imported him in the same shipment that included Dividend, Improver, Leader 16th and many other bulls and females. I was impressed with Hazel Leap 2nd. Another bull that I really liked was Tourand Sir Ivor. Sir Ivor was sold to a commercial herd in Kansas a few months after arriving in the US, as the ASA did not allow any Irish cattle into the ASA herd book two years in a row and Dick Judy decided he better start selling some of these Irish cattle off to recoup some of his money invested. We happened to be at Dick Judy's the day after the ASA decided not to allow any Irish cattle into their herd book. He was so upset over this decision, that I think we could have bought any of the Irish cattle he imported that day. He even priced Dividend and Improver to us that day, and it was a high price but would have still been a very good investment. We went over to see Tourant Sir Ivor in the commercial herd he was working in, and he was a real beef bull. He was probably one of the Irish bulls that slipped through the cracks and did not get used enough. I bought a son of Tourant Sir Ivor in Denver named Sandy Creek Ivor several years later. Ivor was a white bull and one of my biggest regrets is that I never collected semen from him. At the time, we also had Highfield Irish Mist, IDS Duke of Dublin, CCS Improver, and IDS Improver ( all full Irish), along with Ready Go, Waukaru Cinnabar, Four Point Major, and Ellsway Columbus as our walking herd bulls. I had collected semen from most of these and I decided there was probably not enough interest in a white horned bull to collect him. I have regretted it ever since. Ivor produced some powerful offspring. After using him a few years, I sold him to Dale Wernicke in Illinois, and shortly after he got there, Dale found him dead in the pasture after he got rolled over in a hollow in the pasture and he bloated and died.
I have often wondered if there was much semen around from Lady D HL Quane. I am thinking he is a bull that should be introduced to a few cows again. I remember some awesome females sired by him. I saw Quane at Mcfarlands in South Dakota several times, and he was very impressive, as were many of his offspring