These two lovely little girls, named UM Robust Radish and UM Robust Rutabaga, were the daughters of the lovely Witter lady, Miss UM Shot Roslyn. Even though these girls are twins, they don’t look much alike. Rutabaga looks a lot like her mother while Radish is mostly black. Twins are always an excitement, whether they’re a heifer and a bull, two bulls or two heifers!
It is not really common knowledge, but when there is a heifer and a bull born as twins, the heifer is not really a ‘heifer’ per say. The heifer has only a 7% chance of being reproductively fertile and producing milk. In the dairy world we call this ‘heifer’ a freemartin. At Witter farm, the freemartins get sold with the bulls, usually to be raised for beef.
Anyways, back to our new twin heifers. Earlier I said that we hadn’t had twin heifers in seven years. Our last twins were UM Lou Rocky and UM Lou Rambo. What’s really cool about Rocky and Rambo is that they were in the same family as Roslyn, Radish and Rutabaga! Rocky was actually Roslyn’s grandmother which means that twins run in the family. Very cool!
We can’t wait to see how these cute little girls grow up and become part of our dairy herd.