Double Heart Ranch

Here’s Blazing Star, on the left,  with a few of our outstanding  young cows.  We are looking for this calf crop to be simply amazing.  Lots of horn, lots of color - about as good as it gets.  Note the red color at the base of all three of these animals indicating that horn growth is very active.

Here’s our new bull, Scorpio ET.  We just purchased half interesting in this awesome young bull from Mike Bowman.  We are focusing our breeding program on this bull and Blazing Star.

What’s so interesting is that this bull’s mother is a cow named Bojangles that we sold to Mike Bowman several years ago.  Great genetics all the way around.

We did a run to Kansas to pick him up - 1200 miles in two days.  He was not a happy camper on the trip but is now very pleased to be with an attractive herd of friendly cows!

Hardy and I checked on Blazing Star this morning and he measured 48 3/8.  That takes his projected horn to 74.9 inches.  The boy is doing good.  He’s grown almost an inch in a month.

He was 38 inches in May. Today he measures 46 5/8 inches with about a 10 inch base. Pretty amazing growth. This is one of our strongest herd sire prospects with great horn, great color and great confirmation.

Based on the Dalgood’s horn calculator this bull could top out at 74.5 inches. He has a great pedigree including Starliner, JP Grand Ritz and JBM Sunstar.

Note the special pens built for longhorns with the top rails slanted on top to allow for big horned cattle.

Some readers of this blog will remember the story of Dan Tucker, a little bull calf whose mother was accidentally gored and died. Hardy and Kathy Vaughn raised him on a bottle and as you can see he is doing fine. He always expects Gay to bring him a treat!

So the one of the biggest challenges of raising Texas Longhorns is protecting our bulls’ horns. Bulls with the longest horns are most valuable but the bulls don’t know that. So they tend to fight and push each other around which often leads to breaking off the horn tips. That can mean tens of thousand dollar differences in what they will bring act auction.

So this week we finished construction of four new pens, each separated by a 12 foot alley so the bulls will never be right up against each other. Seven strands of barbed wire, about six feet tall should hold them in.

The pens are designed for great herd sire prospects, like Blazing Star - horns growing straight out.

Saturday morning, May 2, 2008 7:30 a.m. and the cows are all lined up waiting for Hardy Vaughn to arrive with his sack of feed. If you don’t think cows can tell time - you are simply wrong.

They line up every morning at the appointed time to see what day it is - they get fed every other day - so they are right 50% of the time and wrong 50% of the time.  But they always show up anyway.

Here is Gay feeding a bull calf we named “Dan Tucker.” Dan’s mother was killed in a freak accident - gored by another cow. This is the first time anything like this has happening after all these years with Longhorns. So, we are bottle feeding “Dan” and he is coming along very well. Looks like we will have a big pet on our hands!

A big bottle in the morning and another in the afternoon.

The breeder’s association has really been through a rough spell over the past year.  Gay and Hardy and I were worried that the Horn Showcase Sale might suffer as a result.  I’m pleased to say that we were impressed with almost everything about the sale.  Overall, prices were very strong.  There was a great crowd that hung in for most of the sale.  I know how much time and effort producing a sale like this takes - and we want to say thank you to all involved.

We think this was probably a turning point in the history of the TLBAA - and we say congratulations for a job well done.

Every now and then we see a brand new calf and we know immediately that it will be one of the best in the breed. This fancy new heifer is shown with it’s mom, Chocolate Chip. Sire is Coach.

You can already see the quality in her face structure. You see a calf like this and all the work and money and hours invested all seem worthwhile.