Some of Our Best Longhorns

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.

More Measurements

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.

Measuring Blazing Star

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.

Bull Pens

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.