For the past 25 years we have been using Red Angus bulls exclusively. This year we still have 3 Red Angus bulls for our cows, but will be crossbreeding our heifers with two new bulls. The red bull with two white tags is a South Poll from Sassafras Valley Ranch in Missouri. The Black Angus behind him is from Rocky Road Farms Angus, right here in Darlington.
I’ve never been opposed to crossbreeding, but I needed to find the right bulls. These bulls are excellent for our top two traits, disposition and calving ease. I’m excited to get some hybrid vigor back into our cattle.
I plan to use them together to breed about 30 of our Red Angus heifers. I’ll have to wait until April of 2026 to get calves on the ground, but I plan to get birthweights on all the calves to compare South Poll to Black Angus. It won’t be scientifically significant, but it will be anecdotally interesting. It will be easy to determine parentage as black is a dominant color in cattle and since the Black Angus bull is homozygous black, any black calves will be sired by him. All the red calves will be sired by the South Poll bull.
Check back for results of this experiment in June or July, 2026.
UW-Platteville hosted the spring solo ensemble contest. I was one third of a terrible trumpet trio. I would love to have a recording of that performance.
What made the trip stand out was our visit to Pizza Hut after the contest. I grew up in a family of six and we didn’t eat out much. So this was a real treat and I’m thankful to Mr. Harvat, our band director, for taking us.
The early Pizza Huts really did look like a hut. This dark, squat, building was in downtown Platteville. We entered into a world of exotic sights, smells, and sounds.
My family didn’t have video games. I was fascinated by the PacMan machine. Boys fed quarters so they could eat dots with the PacMan, avoiding the ghosts. I watched.
I never had deep dish pizza before. My experience with pizza was frozen, served by the babysitter when Mom and Dad needed a night out.
The pizza came to our table in a piping hot black pan, steam rising from the cheese, which would burn the top of your mouth in an instant if you weren’t careful. I can still remember my first bite.
I was probably starving, as we didn’t snack back in those days, but its not an understatement to say that first bite of deep dish pizza was magical. My culinary world was blown wide open.
This experience initiated a campaign of begging my parents to return to Pizza Hut. My parents weren’t cruel, but they grew up in LaSalle county, Illinois.
There was a Pizza Hut in Ottawa, the county seat. The story was, the garbage man turned them in for consistently generating garbage which consisted of empty cans of dog food.
Who knows if this story was true. But the important part is, my parents believed it. They had no interest in Pizza Hut, despite my glowing recommendation. It feels like this stalemate went on for years, but time is different when you’re a kid.
My parents and I went to a cattle sale in Monroe and were driving home in our red, Ford, ton truck, the one with the tall sides. I started begging again as I saw the Pizza Hut sign. “Ok,” Mom said, “we can carryout the smallest size they have, and you can eat it in the truck on the way home.”
I sat between my parents on the bench seat with cloth cover and tucked into my pizza, keeping my knees away from the shifter as Dad worked the truck into high gear. The smell started getting to them. They were hungry as well.
“That does look good,” Mom said. “Maybe I’ll have a bite.”
It didn’t take long before we had that small pizza all ate up. More importantly, the boycott of Pizza Hut was lifted. Our family started enjoying Pizza Hut on special occasions.
My parents rented Almon and Wilma Larson’s farm. They were the older couple who lived next door and became like grandparents to us. Rent was paid spring and fall and Almon and Wilma would take our family out to eat after the rent was paid. Now I don’t believe this to be standard landlord/tenant protocol, but Almon and Wilma loved an excuse to treat us.
Early on we went to “The Norseman” in Argyle. They had an all you can eat buffet of which the only thing I can remember is the popcorn shrimp. That’s about all I ate, but I still love shrimp today.
I don’t know why, but Wilma suggested we try someplace different, maybe someplace the kids liked. We lobbied for Pizza Hut. Now back in those days, a lot of the older folks didn’t care for pizza. Almon and Wilma had never even tried pizza, but they loved to see us happy, so they were game to give it a try.
We had the deep dish pan Badger Special, sausage, mushrooms, two kinds of cheese. Almon ordered a pitcher of beer. They loved it! Pizza Hut became our go to restaurant, spring and fall, to celebrate rent being paid.
Our family still visits Pizza Hut once in a while, but its changed. I know I’ve changed. There is a magic experienced in youth that is difficult to find as we age. I love seeing Romeo embrace new things. May we all keep a little of the passion that is found so easily by the young.
Here’s another photo of the piglets with their mothers on a windy 24 Fahrenheit degree day. Cows in the background are on their second to last pasture before starting to feed hay.
Had a couple of nice litters in November before it turned quite cold. The hardiness of the piglets is still amazing to me. In this photo the piglets are a week old. The temperature is below freezing.
The red sow was bound and determined to join her litter up with her friend. I walked her back to her shelter, but that only lasted a couple days before she took her litter over to be with her friend and litter. It’s better if they can stay in their own shelter, which, thankfully, they farrowed each in their own shelter.
In the bottom photo you can see the white sow with her litter in the back of the shelter. They have 20 piglets between them at 10 days. We’ll see how many they can finish with.
I’m officially going on record and saying Landrace are more intelligent than the other breeds I’ve worked with. I’ve long suspected it, but this latest group of half Landrace hogs confirms my suspicions.
First example is the way they deal with electric fence. Most hogs, once trained to electric fence, respect it like you respect a beloved mentor. But these trained Landrace hogs respect electric fence like you respect a younger sibling. Definitely some testing of limits and boundary pushing!
Second example is when I moved them to a new pasture. After only a day of exploring, I fed them grain in their new pasture and some of them were stuck in their old pasture. They had to move away from me and go around a corner in order to get to their new pasture. This would’ve been impossible for most of my hogs to figure out, but it took these guys about five seconds to figure it out.
I’m really impressed with this group of half Landrace hogs produced by artificial insemination and plan to keep two or three gilts out of the group. I was so happy to find another Boar stud, North Iowa Boar Stud. I used Swine Genetics International for nearly thirty years, but the last time I called I was informed they had sold all their maternal boars and only had showpig sires.
I was in shock. It’s like hearing Hershey no longer makes chocolate bars. But times change. I guess they no longer have the demand. Thankfully, North, Iowa Boar Stud has a lot of maternal and meat quality boars for me to choose from. I hope they stay in business for a long time.
Happy spring everyone. I have one black calf this year. Calving is going well. We’ve lost two, but with two sets of twins saved we’re still at 100%.
I wanted to ask the farmers where they keep their cows in the winter time. The last two winters have been the warmest ever for Wisconsin.
We dealt with a lot of mud and compacted the soil where we had the cows. In the background of the top photo, you can see where I replanted part of the pasture and the field above it.
We are used to dealing with frozen ground, which kept the cows from doing much damage, but it appears I can’t count on that anymore. So if you have some thoughts about winter and mud and cows I’d appreciate if you left a comment. Thank you.
The photo below shows where I frost seeded red clover in a pasture damaged last winter, so perhaps there’s a way to turn a negative situation into a positive.
I don’t know if you can get most farmers to admit it, but loading and spreading manure is one of the most enjoyable jobs we do. Especially if you can work with solid or semisolid manure like this load is.
There’s an art to loading it well, not that difficult if you’re working on concrete. More skill is involved when working with a dirt floor like in my hoop barns.
And then if you can spread it evenly over a field, the thought of all that wonderful fertility benefiting your soil is magical.
This week’s story is about my time in 4H showing hogs and trying to improve them with Dad. Just like any youth activity, there are a lot of ways kids can learn the wrong lessons. But with my parents’ help, I can’t imagine my 4H experience being any better of a life lesson.
I grabbed a bale of hay and set it at the back of our truck. It was about a three foot drop from the back of our ton truck to the ground. We didn’t want our new Hampshire boars hurting themselves jumping out of the truck.
Mom came outside to see the two young boars Dad and I picked from the Waldrige Farms herd, Williamsburg, Iowa. It was an eight hour roundtrip in our old Ford truck with the tall sides on the back, good for hauling corn or hogs. But Dad and I weren’t tired, we were too excited for the genetic progress these boars promised.
I had been showing hogs at the Lafayette County Fair for the past three years and I was disappointed with my hogs’ placing, white and red ribbons, never pink, the bottom of the class, but never breaking through to a blue ribbon either.
I was always interested in genetics of livestock, possibly because Dad was interested and he dabbled with purebred Shorthorn cattle and he subscribed to various breed magazines which I found fascinating. Fascinating, because while every breeder touted their animals as great and worthy of purchase, I could see, even at a young age, that many were not.
My favorite breed was the Hampshire, black with a white belt around their shoulders and front legs, their slogan, “Mark of a Meat Hog.” And its true, Hampshires are known as the leanest and most muscular of the major breeds.
But when I was a boy, breeders of all the swine breeds had been selecting away from muscling and leanness as a response to the “stress gene”. The stress gene, a simple recessive, had been identified, but a test to identify carriers was yet to be developed.
This gene, when two copies are present in an animal results in extremely lean and muscular animals. The downside is these animals are fragile and likely to start shaking and die in any kind of stressful situation.
Breeders succeeded in reducing the incidence of the stress gene, but hogs were getting fatter and lighter muscled. This trend hit bottom at our Lafayette County Fair when the worst market hog had about two inches of backfat and a smaller chop than the biggest lamb chop at the carcass show.
Dr. Dewey Walcholz, a UW River Falls Animal Science Professor, judged many county, state, and even national livestock shows. He was our swine and sheep show judge that year, along with the carcass judge. He made sure to point out this low in the quality of swine at our fair.
We were all just farmers trying to make a profit and improve, so I don’t think anyone was offended by Dr. Walcholz’ comments. But he also judged a national Hampshire show in Milwaukee that summer and shared the same criticisms as he placed the animals. These leading breeders of the time didn’t take the criticism as well.
So, even as a 13 year old boy, I knew what was needed to improve our hogs. I now know there is more to a quality hog than leanness and muscling, but at the time, it was clear that this was the most pressing need.
I read the breed journals cover to cover. My favorite issue was the July “Herdsire Edition”. It was about an inch thick, filled with advertisements, profile pieces, and pedigrees of the most popular boars. I pored over the pedigrees and the advertisements.
Most of the breeders stuck pretty close to the popular type of the day. Peer pressure is strong. But one breeder dared to be different. C. Eliot Driscoll, Waldridge Farms, Williamsburg, Iowa.
He knew what he liked and wasn’t afraid to go after it, even as the Hampshire breed continued to move away from his lean type of Hampshires. Every July Herdsire Edition Mr. Driscoll took out a full page ad and printed an original essay about his hogs and how they differed from where the Hampshire breed was headed.
I liked what I saw and wondered if his boars could improve our hogs. I showed it to Dad and asked if we could buy a boar. Dad said, let’s do it!
I can still remember those first two boars I picked out with Dad. One had a wide head and wide, white belt encircling his shoulders. I named him Wolfman. The other boar was an “offbelt”, mostly black, and I named him Spock.
We started using them that summer and prepared for the September breedings, as they produce January litters, which is what you want for market hogs to be ready at the July, Lafayette County Fair.
The first hogs out of Wolfman and Spock were definitely better. I started getting blue ribbons, and I even won the Carcass show one year. I never did win Grand Champion Live, but the lessons I learned about striving to improve, setting goals, and taking action, were invaluable. Thank you, Dad.
Posted by Curiousfarmer 
Curiousfarmer 