Thirteen years old and still shipping. RAGER-RED just cleared a million units — the first Red & White sire in North America to do it — and more than 500,000 of them went to roughly 50 countries.
The Short Version
- 7HO12344 Ri-Val-Re RAGER-RED-ET (EX-90) is the first Red & White sire in North American history to pass one million units sold, and Select Sires’ newest Millionaire Club member .
- More than half those units left the United States, reaching about 50 countries through World Wide Sires.
- He was Select’s top-selling dairy sire in 2018 and 2019 — and he’s still in the lineup at 13, which almost no genomic-era bull manages.
- The draw isn’t index. It’s balance, strength, depth, and one of the lowest EFI figures in the breed.
- The tradeoff is honest: he won’t win a top-of-sheet TPI or NM$ fight, and herds ranking strictly on index will keep passing.
About half a million units of RAGER-RED semen never saw a U.S. barn. That’s the number worth sitting with in Select Sires’ announcement that 7HO12344 Ri-Val-Re RAGER-RED-ET (EX-90) has cleared one million units sold — the first Red & White sire in North American history to get there, and the newest name in the co-op’s Millionaire Club .
Millionaire status at Select is a short list. MILLION cracked it as the seventh sire in company history in 2022, and DOC joined in 2025 as the first Showcase sire to make the mark . RAGER-RED is the first to do it wearing red.
The Pedigree Nobody Would Have Drawn Up
Born March 24, 2013 at Ri-Val-Re Farms in Webberville, Michigan, RAGER-RED came out of a stack that didn’t look like anything else in the barn: Pine-Tree Relief P on a Very Good-88 OBSERVER dam, Ri-Val-Re Obsrvr Salsa-ET, backed by an Excellent-90 ADVENT-RED grandam .
Look harder at the sire side, because it’s the part everyone skips. Relief P is a polled bull — a Dudoc Toubib P son — and he’s a low-type sire himself, sitting at PTAT -0.86 with UDC -1.60 . A short, negative-type polled sire producing the strength-and-depth phenotype that ended up shipping to 50 countries is not a mating anyone would have predicted on paper.
“He had such an outcross pedigree,” said Kevin Jorgensen, Senior Holstein Sire Analyst at Select Sires. “Even today, he’s one of the lowest Expected Future Inbreeding (EFI) bulls in the breed.”
Balance Beat Hype
Three U.S. genetic base changes have come and gone since RAGER-RED entered the lineup. Genomic young-sire slates turned over again and again behind him. He kept selling — positive production, strong components, functional type, daughters that work.
“He was, and continues to be, a customer satisfaction specialist that people lean on as an alternative for overall balance,” Jorgensen said. “He sires cows that have no serious flaws and met the needs of multiple customers across multiple countries.”
The receipts: he sat among Select’s leading unit-sellers for years running and was the organization’s top-selling dairy sire in both 2018 and 2019. He also did what most red bulls never manage — crossed the color line into heavy black-and-white usage, which Holstein International flagged back in 2023 as the thing separating him from every other red sire of his era .
Half the Million Left the Country
More than 50% of those one million units shipped outside the United States, reaching roughly 50 countries through World Wide Sires. His daughters built the reputation in confinement, on grass, in heat, in cold — durability that travels.
“International breeders consistently cite longevity, power, depth and mobility as defining characteristics of RAGER-RED daughters,” said Brian Albertoni, Business Development Director, World Wide Sires Ltd. “When you see fifth- and sixth-lactation daughters still performing at high levels — that’s what helps farmers remain profitable.”
His linear reads exactly like the cows look: +0.71 Stature, +1.36 Strength, +1.68 Body Depth, +0.77 Dairy Form . Big, deep, powerful females that mature into something.
Who Should Still Be Using Him
A million units doesn’t prove performance. It proves a million separate decisions that the color penalty wasn’t real enough to matter — and that’s a different, more interesting claim than the one Red & White breeding has been arguing about for forty years.
So where does he still fit in 2026?
- Herds fighting inbreeding creep on a narrow Chief-Shottle-Planet base, where a genuinely low-EFI proven sire is worth more than a few points of index.
- Herds that have chased extreme dairy form for three generations and need strength and depth back in the freestall.
- Registered and Red & White breeders who want a red option with a real daughter record instead of genomic projection — and a proven history of maturing daughters, not just fresh two-year-olds.
- Anyone building heifer-safe, low-risk matings on cows they can’t afford to miss on.
Who should skip him: herds selecting strictly on top-of-sheet genomic gain. He won’t win that comparison and never did.
He’s also not finished. At 13, he’s still in the lineup, still shipping, still one of the lowest-EFI options available to breeders trying to outrun a narrowing gene pool.
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