> > Bulls that
> > if you could go back in time you would just about mate your whole
herd to
> > them!!! �(They can be from any country).
>
> Pabst Roamer
> Pabst Burke Tritomia Don
> Wis Burke Ideal
The third one down is Wis Burke Ideal.
Let me tell you how that happened. I got that semen when I was about seven or
eight years old as the first frozen semen from NOBA. I got it for services
that I rendered to NOBA (stud code 1) in the mid 1950's.
I was at the NOBA Young Sire Committee meeting with my father. I was about 8
years old. Max Drake was NOBA General Manager.
As you remember, Max Drake, was previously the manager at Louis Bromfield's
Malabar Farm, when it was the best known farm in the World.
Max was the boss at NOBA and a great man by any measure. He is the father of
practical Artifical Insemination. Or at least him and Dr Kagy who was stud
code #1's first employee.
During that young sire committee meeting, Max was talking about what we could
do to encourage farmers to adapt artifical insemination. He was discouraged
about the slow adaption in northern Ohio. Frozen semen was to go online in a
few days throughout NOBA land and we could hardly even sell the fresh. It
was gloomy.
We were going to burn our bridges, so to speak, on fresh semen. If the frozen
didn't work we were probably permanently sunk or at least sunk until Max
Drake could think of something else.
I piped up, like little kids do, and told about getting the Pabst Roamer semen
by airplane from Pabst Farms in Wisconsin. I was excited about it, and I
thought flying the semen to the other farmers would get them excited too.
The upshot of that was that I volunteered to catch the frozen semen if Max
would throw it out of an airplane over our farm.
That's how we got our first frozen semen on this farm.
Max hired an open cockpit airplane and flew the semen from Tiffin (60 miles)
to Homerville. The pilot threw it out of the open cockpit and it came down
across the road from here on a little parachute. I ran across the road the
road and got it.
In the meantime, Max Drake was at our farm with a couple car loads of
newspaper reporters and photographers. It was a agricultural publicity
opportunity like none other...ever.
It worked, the publicity and the frozen semen.
I got paid in Wis Burke Ideal frozen semen. At that time, there were no
existing semen tanks. For that first day, and at least another year the
local NOBA inseminator had to come to our farm 3 or 4 times a day to get
frozen semen.
We had a big, very, very cold horizontal freezer in the house. We kept the
community's frozen semen in that freezer inside of a cardboard box full of
dry ice. That cardboard box, we kept inside a well in the freezer bricked up
out of packets of bull hamburger. That last was also my own idea.
I guess that doesn't tell you much about Wis Burke Ideal but we had 4 of them
and they were four of the best cows I ever worked with. One of them had a
daughter that paid for 4 years at Ohio State University.
--
Kindest regards,
========================
F. W. Owen
Owenlea Holsteins
9430 Spencer Road
Homerville, Ohio 44235
e-mail fwo@bright.net
home page http://www.bright.net/~fwo
voice & fax 330.625.2369
cell 330.635.2287
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