Marbling Murray Greys?

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Southernflinthills":1iik6xdw said:
I'm looking for the top marbling Murray Grey sire to AI to.
Who is he?
The answer might be Karakara Burleigh $50 and I think Origen's only Murray Grey sire available.

http://www.origenbeef.org/semen_detail.php?bull=834

Hopefully Backbone Ranch will chime in as they know more about Murray Greys than I could ever hope to know.
send him a private message in case he hasn't seen your question.
 
Very few Murray Grey breeders here in the US enroll their herd into the BreedPlan program, so the EPDs across the board for all traits, including marbling are extremely inaccurate and unreliable. However, I know of several breeders that genetically test for tenderness and marbling genes and use that as selection criteria in their herds.

We have had one calf from Karakara Burleigh to date. It may have been that he did not match up well with the cow that we bred him to, but we are waiting until our herd size increases by about 50% before we begin to experiment by breeding to him again. The resulting heifer calf was fine boned and I would have liked to have seen a better back end on her. We have actually tested Karakara Burleigh with Igenity for tenderness and marbling genes. He came back as a 7 out of 10 for tenderness and a 6 out of 10 for marbling. Here are two more photos of him, as well as a six month old heifer that we had out of him. And by the way, Burleigh is a frame 5 1/2 or so; the man behind him is well over six foot three. We met his owner back in the summer of 2015; both he and his wife are amazing people.
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Our current herdsire, BB Uncle Tony, has the best combined Igenity tenderness and marbling scores to date out of over 250+ head of Murray Greys that we have tested over the years. He scored a perfect 10 out of 10 for tenderness and a near perfect 8 out of 10 for marbling. We have only had three females match his scores. For the past 6 years, Tony's sons and half brothers have made up our grass-fed beef program. Most of his steers grade high Select to Choice on grass alone. We have semen available on Tony. Tony is pictured below at 20 months and again at 5 1/2 years of age, during the middle of winter.
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And this is a steak from one of Tony's half brothers that we grass-finished.
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Two other bulls that I would recommend are Fox Hill Francois and Ballee Thumbs Up. Francois has semen readily available, and he is a son of Ballee Thumbs Up. Both bulls scored 9 out of 10 for tenderness and 7 out of 10 for marbling. I do not know where to find more Ballee Thumbs Up semen, but we have only had one calf out of him, and that particular calf is in line to be our next herd bull.
Fox Hill Francois
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Ballee Thumbs Up
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Backbone, what framesize is uncle Tony?
What characterists have caused you to select Foxhill as your next herdsire and do you see him as an improvement over Uncle Tony? If so in what ways, as his genes for marbling and tenderness are not as good?
 
Southernflinthills":16jaybez said:
Backbone, what framesize is uncle Tony?
What characterists have caused you to select Foxhill as your next herdsire and do you see him as an improvement over Uncle Tony? If so in what ways, as his genes for marbling and tenderness are not as good?

Uncle Tony is right around a frame 4 and weighs over 1,900 lbs. He is consistently siring our best calves to date. We have many of his daughters and one of his sons coming on and we are needing to add a bit of genetic diversity to our program. The majority of the bulls that we are using in our AI program are older genetics, many of which date back to the 1970s and 1980s. This was a time when Murray Greys dominated carcass competitions throughout Australia and had to survive on minimal inputs; we feel that the bulls from this era match up best with our breeding goals. We have yet to have a calf out of Francois. We bred our first female to him this year, but she did not take. Francois is still above our herd average for both tenderness and marbling, so he can add to our program in that regard. He is larger framed than Tony, so we are likely going to breed him to some of our smaller females to increase frame and maintain the body capacity at the same time. Our goal for this area is a 4 to 5 frame score. This is the Ballee Thumbs Up son that we are planning to retain as one of our herdsires going forward; he is 7 months old here.
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And these are some Tony daughters in our herd. These are all pictured as bred heifers, but the Tony daughters that are in production currently are producing some very nice calves.
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Thanks for the thorough response! I am very interested in some of the older genetics that thrived in sparse conditions. What can you tell me about hem or where I could find ore info?
 
Southernflinthills":ie369tp7 said:
Thanks for the thorough response! I am very interested in some of the older genetics that thrived in sparse conditions. What can you tell me about hem or where I could find ore info?

To my knowledge, there were three books written on the Murray Grey breed. All of them were published in Australia and two of them in particular placed a lot of emphasis on the various studs that were spread across the continent. They are titled March of the Murray Greys and also Murray Greys: Australia's Own Beef Cattle. I gained a tremendous amount of knowledge from reading these books. Within them are histories of many influential studs, the role that these studs played in the development of the breed, the conditions in which the cattle were raised, and a major focus was the impact of various sires and dams in each stud's breeding program.

These were some of the pictures that I ran across. They don't show tough conditions, but they show the type of cattle that we are striving for.
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We are using many USA bred Murray Grey bulls in our program from the 1970s and 1980s that were direct offspring of some of the first live imports and semen brought over to the United States from Australia. However, we do have a very limited number of straws and ampules in our tank from the original Australian bulls that were first collected for export. We are very excited to see the results from these matings. Off hand, I do not know of anybody that is currently selling semen from these older sires, but we do AI about a dozen cows every year to these sires, so we will have bulls and heifers, out of these genetics available in the future. These are some of our oldest progeny of these older sires. We are expecting calves out of the same sire as BB Ace and BB Goldie next spring.
BB Ace at 17 months
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BB Goldie at 2 years
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BB Sapphire at 2 1/2 years
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We have a Burleigh daughter, LGR Empress and have seen several sons.

Very late maturing heifer and she looked pretty awful from weaning to 18 months. Just starting to come back around at 19-20 months but she has been bred multiple times and won't settle so she may be steaks anyways.

I won't be buying any semen from him.

Can't figure out how to post pictures of her. Here is my website: https://byrdmurraygreybeefcattle.com/gallery

I uploaded them to my gallery too.
 
Karakara Burleigh was used by one stud in NZ and has 18 progeny by AI over a couple of years. He has an all Australian pedigree.
You can look him up here if this link works! http://abri.une.edu.au/online/cgi-bin/i ... 9=51505A5A

-or go to www.murraygreys.co.nz and under EBV enquiries enter the bulls name to see his NZ born progeny.

He was OK for marbling but not so good on EMA. The guy named as Breeder and Owner was actually the importer of the semen. I don't think he kept much of the bloodline he produced.

You can also look up Ballee Thumbs Up on this web site and see that his figures from 59 NZ born progeny for EMA and IMF do not quite make it in todays breed averages! We had a daughter by him, she didn't make it past her 4th calf in our herd.
 
TwoByrdsMG said:
We have a Burleigh daughter, LGR Empress and have seen several sons.

Very late maturing heifer and she looked pretty awful from weaning to 18 months. Just starting to come back around at 19-20 months but she has been bred multiple times and won't settle so she may be steaks anyways.

I won't be buying any semen from him.

14 months:
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18 months:
[image]43[/image]
 

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