While the Hoard's Dairyman Bull List will be available in the August 25 issue, we are making it available to readers here as well. It can be downloaded by clicking this link.
There were 3,825 bulls declared active by A.I. marketing organizations this August. That was up over 200 head from the April sire summary. Of those sires, 2,978 were Holsteins, which was also up 200 head. An additional 566 were Jerseys, and when combined, Holstein and Jersey numbers exploded by 500 head since last December. Of the remaining breeds, 281 bulls were declared active, which has been stable.
To makes heads or tail of all those bulls, the editors sorted through the top Holstein bulls and ranked them on nine different traits or indexes. In Jerseys, we ranked bulls on two traits and all other breeds on one trait.
Genomics continue to garner a larger portion of the bull rankings. Overall, 70 percent of the bulls were ranked on DNA evaluations without direct daughter data. This represents a new watermark and was up from April's 68.5 percent.
(c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2016
August 15, 2016
