While the Hoard’s Dairyman Bull List will be available in the April 25 issue, we are making it available to readers here as well. It can be downloaded by clicking this link.

There were 3,775 bulls declared active by A.I. marketing organizations. That was up over 150 head from the same time last year. Of those sires, 2,989 were Holsteins, which was up 225 head. An additional 566 were Jerseys, which was down 26. Of the remaining breeds, 220 bulls were declared active. That was down 60 head from just four months ago.

To make heads or tails of all those bulls, we sorted through the top bulls and ranked them on nine different traits or indexes in the Holstein breed. 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, 71.6 percent of the bulls were ranked on DNA evaluations without direct daughter data. This represents a new watermark and was up from last April’s 68.5 percent.

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(c) Hoard's Dairyman Intel 2017
April 10, 2017