Today is a lawn mowing day so you get a short post.
 |
| Ducks. Hmmmm! Black ones and white ones. No knockout games here. |
 |
| Three mama cows and three calves. Daddy is a Shorthorn. White mama is mostly Charolais, the red mama with the black calf is mostly Shorthorn and the black mama has a goodly dose of Angus in her. Eaton Rapids is what you call "diverse". |
 |
| Volunteer Kale seedlings. By the look of them, one of the parents was Red Russian and the other was Improved Dwarf Siberian. A riot of leaf shapes but otherwise civil behavior by all concerned. |
 |
| Red Oak seedling just popped out of the ground, maybe two inches tall. The seed was collected from a precocious lass near a big-box store. |
From Lucky in Kentucky
ReplyDelete"Joe…
Looking at the photos of the cows in today’s post…
IF indeed, the ‘daddy’ is a shorthorn, the red calf must belong to the red cow, and the two black calves belong to the black and ‘white’ cow(who may be, in actuality, a ‘black’ cow, with the Charolais color-inhibitor gene exerting its effect).
I’ve got a few ‘white’ (and quite a few ‘brown’) cows in the herd, recipients of either the Charolais gene, coming down from a little yellow linebacked cow I bought back in ’86, or the Simmental color-inhibitor gene from some traditional yellow & white Simmental sires I used back in the late ‘80s.
This spring, two ‘white’ cows calved – one is 7/8 Angus, and birthed a white Angus-sired calf. The other is ¾ AN ¼ SM, and delivered a black Shorthorn-sired calf. Both cows are genetically ‘black’(though the one that had the white calf this year, had a nice red heifer last year, by a SH bull), but the inhibitor/diluter genes don’t always play nice.
We’ve been using some solid-red Shorthorn AI sires for the past 5 or 6 years, over AngusxSimAngus cows – and the SH-sired calves are blowing the doors off everything we’ve ever raised! Loving those halfblood SH steers; still early in the game to see how the SH-sired heifers are gonna pan out as mamas.
We made the move to Shorthorn to bring in some good maternal traits… but I’m thinking Shorthorn is a really good TERMINAL breed, too!"