Cotton1, Yes, the bull is the daughter of Caddy, not a small cow, but seems to stay in good condition without being a pig, and raises a good calf while doing it... exceptional calving ease (several calves were born in the blink of an eye.. from feet/nose showing to licking the calf was less than 3 minutes... She also has an exceptional udder.. balanced, good teats.. her mother and great grandmother lived to 18 and 14 years old and still had perfect teats.. good hooves too. The bull has 2 full sisters Chroma and Prada, Chroma was a 'slow starter'.. her first (heifer) calf was well built but nothing to write home about, the second was average in size and beautiful (Tifa) and she's going to have her first calf this spring (bred to that bull). Chroma's 3rd calf (steer) wasn't as pretty, he kinda had 'bug eyes'.. but he was the biggest steer of all.. ~640 lbs at 170 days.
Prada, the other full sister... well.. she's got a strike against her... She got bred late her first time and calved in August, I've always had more important things to cull, so I made a deal with her... she catches up by a month each year and raises a good calf, and I'll keep her around a while longer.. She's not a very full bodied cow, but she's always had to milk through the winter on less-than-ideal feed, so her hips and ribs show a little more, but her calves are thick and wide.. If she keeps breeding back on the first try I'll chalk the lateness on the first one to a slipped calf early in first trimester and just plain bad luck.
I have 2 other cows closely related to the bull, Cenci and Kama have the same sire, and their dam is his mothers dam as well... Cenci is expecting her 4th calf, she's only had steers so far, all of them 'picture perfect'.. the last one in particular was probably the nicest all-around steer I've ever raised, great muscle, length and conformation (He was the 4H hopeful I posted a thread about here
http://www.cattletoday.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=99959). *REALLY* hoping she has a heifer that looks like that steer this time around.
Kama is expecting her 2nd calf, she did pretty well on the first at expense to body condition, I think hers was around 500 lbs @ 180 days, and now she's regained her condition and then some, and grown in size a lot.. Kama and Cenci don't have the perfect udders that Caddy's line has.. some extra/bigger teats, but I don't think they'll get worse with age. I think this coming year I'll shake the tree and be breeding the whole bunch of is 1/2+ sisters to him and see what falls out of it.
Walnut crest, I have 2 'mini' cows.. One (shown) is linebred father/daughter out of Mega, the second is 3/4 sister to Mega (different grandmother, same sire, same grandsire).. she's darker but the same size and build. I don't plan on keeping any bulls from Mega's line because of high birthweights anyhow, you are right that I think her genetic size is bigger than her phenotypical size.. probably by about 1 frame score.
Uplandnut, yes, I feed small squares all winter.. All said and done right now I'm feeding about 12-13 x 70 lb per day
Kingfisher.. We had 2 greenhouse frames, one fall the wind blew the plastic off one of them, and that winter we had a record snowfall and it smashed the other... We were too busy clearing snow off all the other roofs around here to bother with it.. we kinda totally forgot.. otherwise we'd have sliced the plastic to save the frame... Oh well