Defining Excellence

Today is Father’s Day and it is the simple things in life Michael is enjoying today. Now that the infection in his knee is gone just to see him being able to walk without pain is a joy to behold.

Michael’s eyes lit up when Nick arrived at the back door and suggested he join him on the gator to round up the cows for the midday milking.

Then he spotted her, his favourite cow

This is Mandelyn Damion Simola. She has this fancy moniker like all our cows that is made up of three parts. The first part is the name of our stud ‘Mandelyn’ (Mike and Lynne) the second part is a reference to her father who is called ‘Erbacres Damion’ and the third part is in honour of her mother who was Parabel Broker Simola. Before we started milking 3 times daily in 2005  we used to show our cattle quite a bit and we did very well with the Simola family.

Now Damion Simola ( we call her Damion for short) is result of the technology known as Embryo Transplant which is explained rather impressively here.

In the dairy industry we have two ways of getting our cows acknowledged as setting a standard of excellence

You can take them to beauty pageants aka shows and/or you can participate in the classification system (explained here) 

Michael puts Damion Simola under microscope  

From the front

 

Comparing Damion to a herd mate “Don’t look at her, look at me I’m the best” says Damion

From the side

What do you think Lynne. “Am I the best one”

 

Damion has made Michael’s day and he climbs back in the gator and yells out to me ‘ Nick is going to ring the classifier I am positive she is going to go ‘Excellent’ (highest accolade)

I hope so Michael you deserve a few wins, things have been pretty tough lately BTW Happy Father’s Day