From bachelor farmers to world-class photographers, meet the visionaries who trusted the maternal line when nobody else did — and reshaped the breed one daughter at a time. This is the story of seven of them. And of the breeders who recognized what they had before anyone else did.
One shot. That’s all they took that day.
It was sometime in the mid-1970s at Mil-R-Mor Farm in Dundee, Illinois, and the cow standing in front of that camera was Glenridge Citation Roxy — clipped, washed, full of milk after a visit from a group of Japanese buyers. Miller’s son held the halter. His wife worked the trunk. And in that single frame, Miller captured what many consider the finest Holstein photograph ever taken.
But here’s the thing about that picture. It didn’t make Roxy famous. Roxy made the picture famous. Because behind that perfect broadside image stood a cow who would produce 16 Excellent daughters, generate 50 direct maternal lines of four-plus generations of Excellents, and earn more popular-vote titles — Queen of the Breed I, Queen of the Breed II, Top Cow of the Top Ten Cows of the Century, International Cow of the Century — than any Holstein before or since.
She wasn’t the only one. In the three decades between 1968 and 2001, a handful of Holstein cows emerged whose genetic impact was so profound and commercially transformative that calling them “great cows” doesn’t begin to do them justice. They were franchise cows — biological engines that didn’t just win shows or set records but built entire empires of daughters and sons that reshaped the breed worldwide. Good luck finding a sale catalogue without a Roxy on page three.
This is the story of seven of them. And of the three breeders — a bachelor farmer, a livestock photographer, a bankruptcy trustee’s unlikely partner — who recognized what they had before anyone else did.
I. The Photograph and the Cow Behind It
Glenridge Citation Roxy was born on April 15, 1968, on Lorne Loveridge’s farm at Grenfell, Saskatchewan — about as far from the corridors of North American Holstein power as you could get. Loveridge’s grandfather had milked Ayrshires. His father, Gordon, switched to Holsteins in the 1920s. When Lorne took over management in 1957, he changed the prefix from Norton Court to Glenridge and set about his life’s work.
Roxy’s sire was Rosafe Citation R. Her dam, Norton Court Model Vee (EX-6*), was a Star Brood cow whose own dam, Norton Court Reflection Vale (VG-4*), was a Roeland Reflection Sovereign daughter. That gave Roxy two close A.B.C. Reflection Sovereign crosses — and, possibly, the red factor that would surface generations later in one of her most celebrated descendants.
What the pedigree doesn’t tell you is what Roxy looked like in person. Andy Clawson, the classifier who scored her 96 points in 1976, said she was closer to perfection than any cow he’d ever scored. Avery Stafford, who gave her 97 two years later when she was ten, said the same thing. Between them, Clawson and Stafford had classified half a million cows.
R.F. Brown — Bob Brown, who owned Green Elms Echo Christina, a cow who ranked right up there with the best in any era — called Roxy the best he’d laid eyes on. Brown was known for fair assessments, not flattery.
And then there were Doug Blair and Lowell Lindsay. Blair owned Alta Genetics; Lindsay was the sire procurement officer for United Breeders. They’d visited the Loveridge farm a few months before Miller, seen Roxy, and been overwhelmed. They discussed buying her on a 50-50 basis. At the end of the day, they couldn’t come up with the kind of money Loveridge was asking. One has to wonder how long that decision haunted them.
The Move to Illinois
Miller, a transplanted Canadian from Brome, Quebec, worked part-time as a livestock photographer. In 1973, he was summoned to Grenfell to photograph Roxy and her dam. He’d been searching for a cow family for some time, and he had very specific requirements: type, production, and longevity. Roxy and her family met all three.
Loveridge, for his part, was beginning to realize that his farm’s remote location precluded visitors from seeing the cow. Miller’s Illinois base was better suited for promotion and merchandising. Within a year, Miller had bought Roxy and a half-interest in Vee and moved the pair to Dundee.
Even though embryo transfer was still in its infancy — this was the early 1970s, when flushing a cow was more gamble than science — Miller put Roxy on an ET program. Over the years, she produced 30 ET offspring and three natural calves. Twenty daughters. And she became the first cow in the world to have ten of those daughters classify Excellent. By the time the final tally came in, 16 daughters had earned the Excellent designation.
In Miller’s hands, Roxy made four records over 1,000 pounds of fat, reaching 26,470 pounds of 4.4% milk and 1,166 pounds of fat in her best year. Career total: 209,784 pounds of milk at 4.5% butterfat and 9,471 pounds of fat. She rounded out three generations of 200,000-pound producers — her dam and granddam had both hit that mark. At 12 years of age, she earned a 4E rating, and her show record included All-Illinois honors from 1976 through 1979, a win in the dry-aged class at the 1979 Central National Show, and membership in eight All-American, All-Canadian, or Reserve All-Canadian groups.
The Empire She Built
But the real story wasn’t what Roxy did. It was what her daughters did. And her granddaughters. And their daughters after them.
Seven of Roxy’s daughters earned Gold Medals. By 2004, according to Holstein World, 50 direct maternal lines of at least four generations of Excellents descended from Roxy, with Roxy appearing as the second Excellent dam in each. Her 16 Excellent daughters produced 34 Excellent daughters. Those 34 had 52. Those 52 had 48. That’s the kind of cow family that just keeps writing cheques your herd can cash.
Until 1977, Miller had never sold a Roxy daughter. He relented that year when he consigned Roxy’s Elevation daughter, Mil-R-Mor Roxette, born on Valentine’s Day the year before, to the National Convention Sale at Columbus, Ohio. Peter Heffering bought her for $25,000, the third-highest price of the sale, and took her to Hanover Hill Farms at Port Perry, Ontario.
The transaction nearly collapsed. Miller hadn’t understood his heifer would be sold on investor terms — one-third down and the balance over two years. But years later, Miller acknowledged he was glad Roxette ended up at Hanover Hill. She eventually became an Excellent Gold Medal Dam who lived into her late teens, produced over 100 pregnancies, left 13 Excellent daughters and eight Excellent sons, and added upwards of two million dollars to Hanover Hill coffers.
The Roxette daughters branched in every direction. There was Hanoverhill Star Roxy (EX-92-3E-GMD-DOM), a Starbuck daughter developed by the Conard family at Ridgedale Farm in Sharon Springs, New York, whose Leadman daughter produced a Milestone-Red granddaughter, who in turn produced Sir Ridgedal Rustler-Red (EX-95) at Trans-World Genetics. Rustler became enormously popular in Germany — so popular that grateful German breeders arranged an all-expense-paid trip for Wayne Conard and his wife in 2006.
There was Mil-R-Mor Toprox (EX-94-3E-GMD), Roxy’s highest-record daughter and one of the breed’s first 2,000-pound fat cows, who became the fountainhead of the Brigeen herd’s Roxy family. Mary Briggs of Brigeen Farms described the Roxys this way: “Healthy and fertile — the indexes around the world for somatic cell count, fertility and longevity highlight the family’s real strengths. They just go along doing their business,”
If you’ve ever bought into a cow family and watched it perform under your management the same way it did under theirs — no drama, no fuss, just daughters that score Excellent and milk like freight trains — you know exactly what that consistency feels like.
That’s the kind of cow Roxy was. And her daughters were the same. Wide through the rear end, correct in the rump, sound on their feet, and absolutely relentless at the milk pail. No drama. Just production and reproduction, generation after generation.
On July 8, 1984, Glenridge Citation Roxy died at 16 years of age. A stone monument on the Mil-R-Mor farm reads:
Glenridge Citation Roxy 4E-97-GMD. April 15, 1968 – July 8, 1984. Lifetime 209,784M-4.5%-9,471F. First cow in the world to have ten daughters classified Excellent. First cow in the world to accomplish 4E-97-GMD plus be a 3rd generation 200,000-lb. milk producer.
Read more: The Real Story Behind Glenridge Citation Roxy, Glenridge Citation Roxy: The Legendary “Queen of the Breed” and Bob Miller – Outstanding from Any Angle.
II. The Bachelor, the Sale Bill, and the Black Cow at Bob Snow’s
Here’s how different the Dellia story is from Roxy’s. No livestock photographer. No Illinois showplace. No Japanese buyers. Just a bachelor farmer sitting in a kitchen corner while his mother made lunch, thumbing through the Holstein-Friesian World.
Robert Snow — “a sober man of direct gaze and resolute jaw; not a man who moves on a whim; reflective; prudent,” as one neighbor described him; “never a man to be anybody’s fool” — started farming in 1951 on a grade herd inherited from his father in Monroe County near Sparta, Wisconsin. The county extension workers pushed him toward purebreds, and Snow liked the idea. There was more to life, he felt, than milking a bunch of grades.
He chose his prefix early. “I wanted to use my last name,” Snow explained, “but I thought just plain ‘Snow’ was too simple. So I added an ‘N’. I can’t tell you why I chose the letter ‘N’. It doesn’t stand for anything. I could just as well have chosen X, Y, or Z. I just thought it sounded nice — ‘Snow-N’.”
That last week of July 1970, what caught Snow’s eye in the magazine was a sale advertisement for the Adolph Buergi dispersal, one of Barron County’s finest groups of registered Holsteins. Buergi had been at the game for 32 years. On the first page of the ad, below a banner headline touting “A Foundation Daughter of Creator Fobes Governor,” were four photographs of the same cow: Ce-Buerg Homestead Governor Jo. Broadside view. Three udder shots — left, right, and rear.
Rice Lake was 125 miles away, and Snow was of no mind to waste time and gasoline. “I wasn’t interested in the middle or the bottom,” he confided 35 years later. “If I was going to the sale, I would buy off the top.”
He picked up an old uncle who lived near Rice Lake and took him out for the day. They bought a sandwich and coffee at the sale, sat down, and watched the cattle come through. Snow bid only on the top animals, as promised. The high seller was the “Jo” cow at $2,800 — Snow was the runner-up bidder. By day’s end, he’d bought three head: an open two-year-old at $1,500, a yearling at $800, and Ce-Buerg Creator Hartog Fobes, an inbred three-year-old right up to calving who looked like a million dollars. Snow paid $2,500 for her.
Almost three decades later, Snow wasn’t entirely sure which of those three cattle was Dellia’s direct ancestor. Turned out he’d bought both dam and daughter — Hartog Fobes and her St. Croixco Pioneer daughter, Ce-Buerg Creator Fobes Garnet — and they became the seventh and sixth dams, respectively, in the maternal line of Snow-N Denises Dellia.
A Breeding Strategy Built on Balance
Now, the thing about Snow’s approach — and this is what made Dellia possible — was his alternating-sire philosophy. He’d follow a strength bull with a dairy one, then back to strength, always maintaining balance and striving for a functional dairy type. Garnet got Cedardale Corporal, a calving-ease sire. That daughter, Edith, got Harborcrest Happy Crusader — strength, substance, square rumps, particularly good udders. Crusader’s daughter, Ellen, inherited Arlinda Commander’s stature and clean bone. Commander’s daughter Ella got MD-Sunset-View R A Wonder — an Elevation son who sired large frames, wide chests, and ample bone.
Snow-N Denises Dellia, the legendary Holstein matriarch, sired by Walkway Chief Mark and out of Snow-N Dorys Denise, with maternal grand sire Carlin-M Ivanhoe Bell. This EX-95 cow revolutionized dairy genetics with her exceptional balance of production and type, leaving an indelible mark on the industry. Her legacy continues to shape modern Holsteins worldwide
Then, in the winter of 1983, Snow won two units of Carlin-M Ivanhoe Bell semen at a barn meeting. He used them on his two best animals. One was Snow-N Ellas Dory, a virgin. From that mating came Snow-N Dorys Denise — a typey cow with considerably more strength than the average Bell daughter, a shapely udder, and correct feet and legs.
Peter Blodgett later explained why the combination worked so well: “There have been thousands of Marks out of Bells, but I think the thing that makes Dellia different is MD-Sunset-View R A Wonder, her granddam’s sire. Wonder was one of those extreme bulls that sired a lot of bone. It’s rare that you combine a bull like Wonder with Bell. The fact that those two bulls were combined is the work of a ‘master breeder’ for sure.”
When it came time to breed Denise, Snow’s hired man, John Steinhoff — a young man just out of high school from the Tomah area who was “up” on his bulls — picked Walkway Chief Mark. The Mark-Bell combination was already considered one of the “golden crosses,” with Mark joining width, capacity, and udders to the correct feet and legs of Bell daughters.
The resulting heifer calf, born December 20, 1986, was registered as Snow-N Denises Dellia.
“Who Is That Cow?”
At the Wisconsin Championship Show, judged by Loren Elsass, Dellia placed second in the senior two-year-old class behind Miklin Starbuck Beth in a class of 23, but won best udder. Frank Regan, one of the partners at Regancrest Farms in Waukon, Iowa, happened to be at the show. It had rained early that morning, and when Frank looked out at his recently cut hay, he decided there’d be no haying that day and bundled up his family for the drive.
They arrived about noon. As Regan walked into the arena, they were starting the two-year-old class. He saw a black cow coming through the gate and said to himself, “Wow! Who is that cow?”
That’s the moment that changed everything — for Regan, for Dellia, and, it’s no exaggeration to say, for the Holstein breed.
After the class, Regan followed her back to the barn. He approached Bob Snow and asked his price. The figure was high, so Regan thought, we’ll get a daughter instead. Snow was flushing Dellia to Blackstar and agreed to sell a Blackstar daughter.
But Regan couldn’t let go. The truth was, he was looking for a herd-building kind of cow — a franchise dam he could flush and make some money on — and he’d looked at other Chief Marks. Dixie-Lee Chief Liza, others. It kept coming back to the black cow at Bob Snow’s. The farm was only a hundred miles away, so Regan made it his business to stop often.
“I started at $10,000,” Snow said. “And every so often, I boosted it by $5,000. I got up past $50,000 pretty quick.”
A couple of weeks before the Wisconsin Spring Show of 1991, Regan paid Snow another visit. Dellia was entered and looked like she might win. They settled on a price. Regan would lead her at the show; Snow would own the cow until after, then Regan would take her home.
The day before the show, Orville Kemmink came up to Regan. “Are you the kid who bought this cow?” Regan said he was. “Don’t you think you paid too much?” Kemmink asked. Dellia had been flushed several times, and a lot of embryos had been sold. “You won’t get your money back,” he warned.
That night, over supper, Regan asked Snow to guarantee a number of embryos. “How many do you want?” Snow replied.
But that night, Dellia looked empty. She had a perfect udder but was a little shallow in the body, and they needed to fill her out. So Regan bought four bales of hay — three grassy and one alfalfa — and a bag of calf feed to mix with her grain. “She likes warm water with her beet pulp,” Snow told him.
Regan started feeding her, and by the next morning, she began to straighten out. By ten o’clock, people were filing into the barn to see her. The word had spread. Instead of looking like a racehorse, Dellia had started to look like a winner.
With Niles Wendorf judging, Dellia topped the four-year-old class, won best udder, and was named grand champion of the Wisconsin Spring Show of 1991. After the show, Bob Snow had to back his car into the arena to load all the trophies.
“There were a lot of disgruntled people,” Snow recalls. “They were upset that a ‘nobody’ could come in and clean up.”
The Dellia Dynasty
What Regan and his partners built from that one cow defies easy summary. According to Regancrest records, Snow-N Denises Dellia produced 76 registered daughters by 21 different sires. Forty-four sons were A.I.-sampled. Three earned Gold Medals: Regancrest Elton Durham, Regancrest Dundee, and Regancrest Emory Derry. Official figures show 34 Excellent and 49 Very Good offspring. Dellia was very fertile, averaging 15 embryos per flush — she once produced 25 Melwood embryos in a single collection.
Durham, by Emprise Bell Elton, went to Select Sires. Dundee, by Mar-Crest Encore, was proven by A.B.S./St. Jacobs in Canada and eventually scored EX-95. Derry, by MJR Blackstar Emory, landed at Select Sires as well. These three bulls, alongside grandsons like Erbacres Damion (EX-94-GM) and Regancrest-HHF Mac (EX-92-GM), flooded A.I. barns across North America and beyond.
Tim Abbott while at A.B.S. Global put it this way: “Dellia and her family are all about type — just everyday nice-uddered cows that people are happy with. People consistently say their Durham daughters are trouble-free cows. They’re good-uddered young cows that don’t cause any problems and just kind of blend with the herd.”
Scott Culbertson while at Select Sires went further: “Dellia’s impact through her daughters has sent more dollars back into farmers’ pockets across the world than any other cow.”
Two months after the Regans took Dellia home from the Wisconsin Spring Show, she took a crampy spell and started kicking at her belly. The vet recommended surgery, cut her open, and removed three gallons of sand from her stomach. Snow had a sandy farm with a creek behind the barn; cows sometimes stirred up the water and drank sand. After the operation, Dellia bounced right back. She was that kind of cow.
She lived until December 8, 2001, with a lifetime record of 180,240 pounds of milk at 3.9% butterfat, 7,108 pounds of fat at 3.2% butterfat, and 5,723 pounds of protein. Even near 15 years old, she walked on a perfect set of legs and feet. The Regans’ tribute in Holstein World read: “She has influenced our lives in ways we never would have imagined. Her legacy will live on not only through her offspring but in the lesson she taught to many — that the demand for high type plus production never goes away.”
Read more: Snow-N Denises Dellia: The Holstein Legend Who Redefined Dairy Genetics, Walkway Chief Mark: The Backup Bull Behind Seven Percent of Every Holstein Cow and Bell’s Paradox: The Worst Best Bull in Holstein History
III. Born from a Bankrupt Semen Tank
Now here’s a story that couldn’t have been invented.
Nandette TT Speckle-Red was bred by Burdette Holt of Delavan, Wisconsin, born November 11, 1978, sired by Hanover-Hill Triple Threat. She first showed up in the magazines in November 1981 when she placed sixth in the two-year-old class at Madison. Her owner at the time was Elm Park Farms Limited, Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin — Louis Prange’s outfit.
A month later, Prange took Speckle to the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto. His string was tied beside the Browndale and Cher-Own herds of R.F. Brown and his son, David. Dave Brown took a shine to the heifer and helped get her ready. On show day, Prange got the bad news: Speckle was eight days too old for the two-year-old class. She had to show as a three-year-old and placed third.
Two months later, Dave Brown went down to Wisconsin and bought her. Prange’s price was $60,000, and Brown paid it. Title transferred to Browndale Farm.
Speckle aborted her calf and wasn’t shown in 1982, came back in 1983, placing sixth as a four-year-old at Madison, then was second at the Royal that fall behind Brookview Tony Charity, whom judge Doug Wingrove later made grand champion.
Then Jack Stookey showed up.
The Investor Era’s Wild Ride
Flush with investor money, Stookey bought Speckle from the Browns on investor terms: $275,000, one-third down and the balance in two annual payments. He paid the deposit and took her home.
What followed was textbook investor-era madness. Stookey went on a buying rampage, picking up top cows on similar contracts. Before long, he was taking home Premier Exhibitor banners at major shows, including Madison. Under Stookey’s ownership, Speckle showed as a five-year-old at the 1984 Wisconsin Spring Show, where judge David Houck made her grand champion, calling this red-and-white cow “a happy combination of strength, breed character, and sufficient angularity with plenty of chest and heart.”
But the stories were already starting. Some had truth; many were fiction. People whispered that an angry investor had dynamited the porch off Stookey’s house. That the Mafia was involved. That he was a smooth talker who couldn’t follow through.
The reality was messier but more mundane. Stookey’s books were a disaster — piles of paper two feet deep covered the office floor. He’d charge investors $750,000 for cows he’d bought for $250,000. When the returns didn’t materialize, investors stopped paying. Stookey couldn’t honor his own contracts with the breeders who’d sold him the cattle. By the late 1980s, it all collapsed. Bankruptcy. Creditors — including the Browns, who’d only ever seen the initial down payment on Speckle — received legal notices listing large debts and meager assets.
Most took one look and decided there was no point chasing it.
Prange’s Rescue
And this is where the story takes its most improbable turn. Louis Prange — the same man who’d originally owned Speckle before selling her to Brown — received an order for embryos from a Brazilian buyer who wanted the best. Prange knew Stookey’s cattle were now under the control of a bankruptcy trustee. So he went to Leesburg, Indiana, to talk.
He leased a dozen of the Stookey cows, took them home, and flushed them. After filling the Brazil order, he realized what a nucleus he had. He negotiated a longer-term arrangement: Prange would pay all expenses and take full ownership of male calves; all females had to be sold before age two, with sale proceeds divided half to Prange, a quarter to the bank, and a quarter to Stookey.
Stookey insisted on one thing: all calves had to carry the Stookey prefix. He still dreamed of someday returning and winning Premier Breeder banners.
He got his way.
Nandette TT Speckle was one of the cows in the Prange-Stookey ET program. Prange had visited To-Mar Farm in Iowa and been impressed with To-Mar Wayne Hay, dam of To-Mar Blackstar. He thought Blackstar would suit Speckle perfectly. Stookey’s preferred sires were Rosafe Citation R and Browndale Commissioner, and he pushed hard for them. Prange told him to send the semen.
A day or two later, Stookey called back: “Can’t send you the semen, Louie. My semen tank ran dry.”
So Speckle was flushed to Blackstar instead.
Stookey Elm Park Blackrose was born on March 24, 1990 — a cow who never would have existed if Jack Stookey had managed to keep his semen tank topped up.
From $5,400 to Show Ring Royalty
In December 1991, fitter and breeder Mark Rueth of Oxford, Wisconsin, was working the Elm Park Red Futures Sale. His friend Mark VanMersbergen of Lynden, Washington — a Guernsey man switching to Holsteins — was looking for brood cows. Rueth pointed him to an 18-month-old Blackstar heifer: deep-ribbed, wide-rumped, the kind that catches a cattleman’s eye.
They bought her for $5,400 — Rueth, VanMersbergen, and later Bob and Karyn Schauf of Indianhead Holsteins in Barron, Wisconsin, who took a one-third interest in exchange for housing her. The Schaufs were known for big-framed, deep-pedigreed cows and a low opinion of pure index breeding.
What happened next was extraordinary. Blackrose was voted All-American and All-Canadian junior two-year-old in 1992. All-American and All-Canadian junior three-year-old in 1993. In 1995, she became one of the few U.S.-bred cows to win grand champion at the Royal Winter Fair — and was named Reserve All-American and Reserve All-Canadian five-year-old. She came back in 1997 as a Reserve All-American and Reserve All-Canadian aged cow.
Even though she was a Blackstar daughter with two records over 40,000 pounds of milk, Blackrose was never really treated as an “index cow.” Her type credentials told a different story: +3.77 PTAT with udder and feet-and-leg composites of +2.78 and +2.87, making her the No. 1 type cow in the breed at that time.
A Brood Cow Without Equal
By 2004, Blackrose had 30 Excellent sons and daughters. Her sons included Markwell Kite (Skychief), marketed by St. Jacobs and A.B.S., who sired KHW Kite Advent-Red; Indianhead Red-Marker (Stardust), a former No. 1 type sire; Rosedale Reflection (Starbuck) at Foundation Sires; and Rosedale Big Sky (Skychief) at Semex. They were promoted under a line that summed it up: “At a time when our breed most needed an infusion of substance and strength, Blackrose and her sons were there.”
The most remarkable branch came through Kinglea Leader, a red-factor son of Ca-Lill Standout Cavalier from a Conductor dam. Leader to Blackrose produced five Excellent daughters, two of whom — Rosedale Lea-Ann and Markwell Leader Rose — founded the family’s strongest branches. Leader Rose produced the Storm son Ladino Park Talent (EX-ST), a rump and udder specialist at Semex Australia who became one of the most popular red-factor sires of his era. And from Lea-Ann, through a Rudolph daughter named Northrose-I Lavender, came Lavender Ruby Redrose-Red (EX-95) — All-Breed Supreme Champion at World Dairy Expo in 2006.
Speckle herself lived to 18, dying at TransOva in 1996. All nine of her daughters owned by Prange were eventually classified as Excellent. Stookey Elm Park Blackrose died at Alta Genetics in 2004, with seven Excellent daughters, 17 Very Good daughters, and offspring registered in Holland, England, Germany, and Japan.
Jack Stookey never did come back to win those Premier Breeder banners. After leaving the cattle business, he worked as a hospital administrator. His wife, Darla, studied for the ministry at Oral Roberts University and later served as a minister. Jack Stookey died in 2007. But those calves still carry his prefix — and the greatest of them was born because his semen tank ran dry.
Read more: When Financial Disaster Breeds Genetic Gold: The Blackrose Story That Changed Everything, The Room Went Quiet. Everyone Left. Then an $8,100 Phone Call Changed Holstein History Forever and The Investor Era: How Section 46 Revolutionized Dairy Cattle Breeding
IV. The Supporting Cast: Faith, Kaye, Pala, and the Hiawathas
Roxy, Dellia, and Blackrose were the headliners. But they weren’t the only franchise cows rewriting the Holstein playbook in those years. A handful of others — less celebrated, perhaps, but no less consequential — were building their own dynasties in their own quiet corners of the dairy world.
The Cow Charlie Plushanski Wouldn’t Sell
Charlie Backus tried to get her consigned to the National Convention Sale. Pete Heffering, assembling the first cows for Hanover Hill, tried to buy her outright. Neither man could get it done.
When it came to Plushanski Chief Faith, Charlie Plushanski wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t about money. It went deeper.
Plushanski had come home from World War II — where he’d been a Marine Corps boxer who once had a ringside match stopped by none other than Jack Dempsey, who put on the gloves himself and knocked out the winner — and settled on a farm in Berks County, Pennsylvania, at a place called Kutztown. In the fall of 1965, his brother Henry, who worked for what would become Sire Power, told him about a dozen Kingpin daughters on Allen Yoder’s farm in Selinsgrove. Charlie bought the lot. One of them — Ady Whirlhill Frona, exactly one year old that day — became Faith’s dam.
Faith, born in November 1968, scored EX-94 with a 4E rating and piled up lifetime totals of 242,863 pounds of milk and 11,353 pounds of fat. Her early adulthood came just ahead of widespread ET use, so her first calves were natural — and that was fitting, because the Plushanski philosophy was never about show ring flash. The sires they used were heavy-duty production bulls. None of them would ever be accused of siring a show ring champion. They fathered solid type — dairy character, deep barrels, functional legs, and mammary systems — but they weren’t bulls who’d ever threaten to win Premier Sire at Madison.
The four main branches — through Astronaut Frolic (EX-DOM), Valiant Fran (EX-35*), Nugget Fobes (VG-88-GMD), and Job Fancy (VG-87-GMD) — spread across North America. When Plushanski sold Valiant Fran to Paul Ekstein of Quality Holsteins in Woodbridge, Ontario, it was to acquaint Canadians with what this family could do. Fran’s 35 Star Brood Cow points made her the highest-numbered Canadian brood cow, and her descendant Quality B C Frantisco was twice grand champion at the Royal Winter Fair, five times All-Canadian, and International Cow of the Year in 2005.
By 1996, four of the top 20 animals on the national Locator List were from the Chief Faith family. When Charles Plushanski died in 1991, his obituary noted that more Plushanski-bred bulls had gone to Japan between 1985 and 1991 than from any other herd.
The Protein Queen from Chambersburg
Fred Rice found the source of his family’s future contentment the old-fashioned way: he offered to do chores for an ailing neighbor.
Jay Knepper, down the road, called his place Terracelane. While Knepper recovered from surgery, Fred milked his cows. The first day, he noticed something. One bunch of cows, about five head, seemed to milk way better than the others. Milked their heads off, in fact. Fred checked them out. They were all related.
When Knepper later sold off his heifers, Fred and his brother Dale bought one: Terracelane Ideal Star. She scored 76 points as a two-year-old — nothing to write home about — but climbed to VG-88 at eight and piled up 207,000 pounds of milk lifetime. She was creating a family.
Several generations later, through Ricecrest Elevation Ella and Ricecrest Ned Boy Noreen, came Ricecrest Southwind Kaye — and the protein floodgates opened. Three dozen Kaye sons entered A.I. service. In September 1999, three of them — Ricecrest Lantz, Ricecrest Brett, and Ricecrest Marshall — all placed on the Top 100 TPI list simultaneously, with Lantz at number one. No other Holstein cow had ever accomplished that.
Holstein International dubbed it “The Ricecrest Phenomenon.” The herd had placed 10 bulls on the TPI list. Detractors pointed to the family’s modest type scores. Elite sale selectors often walked right past them. “Just good milk bulls, that’s all,” said several anonymous insiders. But through Kaye’s full sister Ricecrest Southwind Amy’s descendants, and through Ricecrest Bwood Brianne at the Bauer brothers’ Sandy-Valley herd, came Sandy-Valley Bolton (EX-GM) — the Luke Hershel son who ranked No. 1 on TPI lists in 2006 and 2007, standing alongside Shottle and Goldwyn as one of the defining bulls of the 2000s.
Next time someone tells you type doesn’t matter, ask them who Bolton’s great-granddam was.
Kaye’s critics don’t have much to say about Bolton.
Read more: When Good Neighbors Make Great Genetics: The Ricecrest Southwind Kaye’s Genetic Revolution
Pala: 21 Generations Deep
Jim and Nina Burdette started dairy farming in 1974 on a rented farm with 19 Ayrshires and four Holsteins. They bought cows other men didn’t want — animals with minor defects, maybe slow milking — as long as they had compensating features: strong frames, broad rumps, chest width. Burdette’s quick fix for subpar udders was Round Oak Rag Apple Elevation. On this type of animal, Elevation worked particularly well.
When Quality Ultimate’s daughters swept the four-year-old class at World Dairy Expo in 1983, Burdette rushed home and used Ultimate on two of his cows. One was Windy-Knoll-View Creek Pauline (VG-88). On March 14, 1985, she produced Windy-Knoll-View Ultimate Pala.
It dawned on Burdette how powerful Pala was when she produced Melvin twins, one of whom — Windy-Knoll-View Priss-Twin — was All-American summer yearling of 1990 and later scored EX-93. At the 1991 Pennsylvania Spring Show at Harrisburg, Pala accomplished something that had never been done before: she furnished four class-winning daughters by four different bulls. The five females — Pala and her daughters — won the produce of dam, dam-daughter, and best three females classes.
Over time, Pala produced 18 Excellent offspring and 33 Very Good. By 2007, she was dam, granddam, or great-granddam of 23 All-American or Junior All-American nominations. But the A.I. industry, deep in an index binge, wanted nothing to do with her sons because of Quality Ultimate so close in the pedigree.
It took Jim Burdette’s friend Jeff Resner and a marketing pitch called “My Three Grandsons” — brought to Dick Witter at Taurus Service in Mehoopany, Pennsylvania — to break through. Witter, who’d known the Burdettes for years and shared their conviction that the industry put too much emphasis on production indexes, liked the idea. Popular, Promote, and Powerhouse — all Outside grandsons — entered the Taurus lineup.
“The sire analysts focus on the sire stack,” Witter said, “which resulted in the overlooking of the Palas because of the presence of Quality Ultimate. At Taurus Service, we have always selected from a complementary mating sire standpoint and put extra weight on the maternal side of the pedigree.”
Pala’s maternal line goes back 21 generations to Xanthe 8793 H.H.B., imported from Holland in 1884. Sometimes the long view is the only view that matters.
The Hiawathas: A Half-Million-Dollar Heifer and the Kitchen-Table Breeder Who Made Her Possible
The Hiawatha family didn’t begin in the investor-era frenzy that made it famous. It began at a kitchen table in Hoosick Falls, New York, where Sherman Herrington sat with Bill Weeks, the developer of the aAa system, and hammered out a breeding philosophy. Herrington liked Weeks’ way of thinking, but he pushed it further. “I focused on longevity,” he explained. “In my view, a cow was at her best when she was 10 years of age.”
From Herrington’s Sher-Mar Farm came Sher-Mar Lee Mitzi (EX), top Honor List cow for 1979, and her daughter by the Marquis son Puget-Sound Highmark: Sher-Mar Highmark Hiawatha (EX-94-2E), the cow who gave the family its name. In 1981, Hiawatha claimed second position on the Honor List by producing 34,970 pounds of milk, 5.0% fat, and 1,763 pounds of fat as a six-year-old. The June 25, 1980, Holstein World even put a four-generation Hiawatha group on its cover — “these cows had everything,” one observer wrote, “production and pulchritude, both.”
That was when George Morgan of Dreamstreet Holsteins in Walton, New York, stepped in. When news broke that Morgan was buying into the Hiawathas, people were strangely relieved. “This is good for the industry!” they said. “They’re bringing together some great cattle!” — the same people who, not long before, had muttered darkly about the whole investor craze.
Later in 1981, Dreamstreet sold Sher-Mar Highmark Hiawatha privately to Mansion-Valley Farm in South Kortright, New York, for $280,000, where Dave Rama was manager. At Mansion-Valley, Hiawatha produced Mansion-Valley Niagara, a daughter of Ocean-View Sexation born in September 1982. Niagara went through the Designer Fashion Sale of 1983 at the exact same $280,000 price her mother had brought. Hilltop-Hanover Farms, Yorktown Heights, New York, signed the cheque. At 95 points, Niagara became the highest-classified Sexation daughter in the breed and, later in life, completed an eleven-year-old record of 48,910 pounds of 4.0%, 3.0% milk — the highest record for age in North Carolina history under her then-owner Edgar Miller of Winston-Salem.
Back at Sher-Mar, Hiawatha had left more than one mark. She birthed six Excellent daughters, among them Mansion-Valley Precious (EX-94) by Mars Tony. Precious, in turn, was dam of the Blackstar daughter Clover-Mist Black Peach (EX-92), who left Excellent daughters in Ireland and the Netherlands. But it was Precious’s Elevation daughter, Dreamstreet Rorae Pocohontis (EX-93), who lit the biggest fire.
Pocohontis first went through the Designer Fashion Sale in 1981, selling at ten months of age for $225,000 to the Pocohontis Syndicate of Turner, Maine. Two years later, in the 1983 Designer Fashion Sale, she came back as a milking two-year-old and hammered down for $530,000. The buyer was William Ogden, a banker from Stamford, Connecticut. At the time, that price put her in the same rarefied air as the highest-valued cattle in Holstein history.
Ogden boarded Pocohontis at Golden Oaks Farm in Wauconda, Illinois. Golden Oaks’ owner, John Crown, was so impressed by the cow that he wanted a piece of the action himself. Rather than trying to buy her outright, he concentrated on her daughters. He bought Sexation and Valiant daughters from Pocohontis, and each one he took home eventually made an Excellent daughter for him.
One of those branches ran straight into Japan. Ogden Hanover Sexy Prudence (EX), a Sexation daughter from Pocohontis, was sold young to Japanese buyers. Before she left, though, Sexy Prudence dropped a Chief Mark daughter: Golden-Oaks Mark Prudence. As her dam was being exported, Prudence stood in the Golden Oaks heifer pen looking every inch the brood cow. They decided to flush Sexy Prudence to Chief Mark one more time. The flush resulted in four full sisters, among them Golden-Oaks Mark Marion (EX-92) and Golden-Oaks Mark Merle (EX), both of whom found their way to Don Mayer’s Mayerlane Farm in Bloomer, Wisconsin, while another sister went to California and became the dam of four Excellent Prelude daughters.
Mayer later bought Golden-Oaks Mark Prudence herself in the Golden Oaks Top 10 Sale. She’d already been flushed to Prelude and had left two daughters: Golden-Oaks Prelude Pru (EX), who went to Rolling Lawns Farms in Illinois, and Golden-Oaks Prelude Pie (EX), who stayed at Mayerlane. Then, under Mayer’s ownership, Mark Prudence set the world’s highest 3X milk record in December 1996: 62,981 pounds of milk in 365 days — just shy of the 2X record but a world record for three-times-a-day milking.
By the late 2000s, Don Mayer was working with members of several famous maternal lines — Roxy, Dellia’s tribe, and the Hiawathas, among them. Asked to compare them, he didn’t hesitate. “We work with cows from several top families,” he said, “but the Hiawatha family is my absolute favorite. They have a lot in common with the Roxys, and we have a few of those in production here. Both families consistently produce cows with lots of frame and lots of milk.”
It was a neat kind of symmetry: a kitchen-table breeder obsessed with ten-year-old cows, an investor-era banker willing to write a half-million-dollar cheque, a Midwestern dairyman pushing cows to world records — all of them orbiting a family that, like Roxy’s, turned frame and longevity into a global brand.
V. The Long Shadow
What ties all these cows together isn’t just Excellent scores or Gold Medal dams or A.I. contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars — though there’s plenty of all that. Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: the conviction, held by a handful of breeders against the prevailing wisdom of their eras, that the maternal line matters.
Bob Snow spent 35 years building toward Dellia — alternating strength sires with dairy sires, generation after generation, never rushing. Bob Miller searched for years before he found a cow family that met his requirements for type, production, and longevity. The Plushanskis used heavy-duty production bulls that would never win a show, but built a family that dominated TPI lists and shipped bulls to Japan. Fred Rice noticed five head that milked their heads off in a neighbor’s barn and had the sense to buy their relative. Jim and Nina Burdette bought cows that other men didn’t want and saw past Quality Ultimate when the rest of the industry couldn’t. Sherman Herrington bred ten-year-old cows while the world chased short-term numbers.
These weren’t accidents. These were philosophies, held with patience and executed over decades.
The Bottom Line
Today, you can’t pick up a sale catalogue without finding a Roxy descendant tracing back to her in the direct maternal line. You can’t look at a TPI list without seeing Dellia’s influence through Durham and Dundee and their sons. Blackrose’s type credentials echo in every Talent or Advent-Red daughter walking into a show ring. Bolton — Kaye’s great-grandson — helped define what a modern sire proof looks like. In Pennsylvania, Pala’s grandsons and great-grandsons are still siring the kind of udders that make a dairyman stop and stare in the milking parlor. And scattered from Illinois to Japan, the Hiawatha daughters and granddaughters carry forward that big-frame, big-milk profile that made them investor darlings in the first place.
Bob Miller took one photograph that afternoon at Mil-R-Mor. One shot, one cow, one moment caught in silver gelatin. But the cows in this story — Roxy, Dellia, Blackrose, Faith, Kaye, Pala, the Hiawathas — they weren’t one-shot wonders. They were the biological engines of a breed, the franchise mothers whose influence would outlast every index revision, every genomic recalculation, every shift in breeding fashion.
They go along doing their business. And the breed is better for it.
So the next time a sire analyst tells you a cow family doesn’t matter because the genomic index says otherwise, ask them one question: where do they think those indexes came from?”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The maternal line is the most overlooked profit center in your herd. Every franchise cow here was built by breeders who invested decades in dam lines while the industry chased sire stacks. Roxy’s family is still producing Excellents 40 years after her death. Your current genomic rankings won’t be.
- The best brood cows don’t announce themselves. Terracelane Ideal Star scored GP-76 as a two-year-old. Blackrose cost $5,400 from a bankruptcy sale. Bolton’s great-granddam was a cow elite sale selectors walked right past. Look harder at what’s already in your barn.
- Bob Snow bred strength-dairy-strength-dairy for 35 years. The result was Dellia. One cow. Three Gold Medal A.I. sons. Seventy-six registered daughters. A family that, according to Select Sires’ Scott Culbertson, “sent more dollars back into farmers’ pockets across the world than any other cow.”
- The type-vs.-production debate was settled by the cows themselves. Roxy: 97 points, 209,784 lbs lifetime milk. Dellia: EX-95, three Gold Medal sons. Kaye: modest type, three sons on Top 100 TPI at once. The answer was never either/or — it was knowing what your cow family does best and breeding to it.
- When the hot sire of 2024 is forgotten by 2027, the brood cow who throws Excellents regardless of the bull she’s mated to is the one asset that holds its value. These seven families prove it. Cow families aren’t nostalgia. They’re the genetic insurance policy genomics can’t replace.
Continue the Story
- The 10 Greatest North American Holstein Breeders of All Time – While Miller and Snow were carving out legacies with Roxy and Dellia, these masters were operating in that same high-stakes world. Discover the other visionaries who defined the golden age of pedigree breeding alongside them.
- The 10 Most Influential Holstein Sires of All-Time – These franchise mothers didn’t work in a vacuum; they were mated to the giants. Deepen your understanding of the sire side of the era, exploring the genetic forces like Elevation and Starbuck that shaped these dynasties.
- Snow-N Denises Dellia – The Empress of the Breed – Follow the thread from a single barn-meeting semen prize to the global dominance of Durham and Dundee. This feature traces how one cow’s influence carried forward to build the very foundation modern Holstein breeders stand upon today.
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