Every morning Blackrose II’s udder is emptied into a bucket to ensure that her milk doesn’t mix with milk from the other cows at Indianhead Holsteins. Theirs gets shipped to a cheese factory, but Bob Schauf, who owns the Barron, Wisconsin, breeding farm with his wife Karyn, uses Blackrose II’s milk for his family and employees. The three-year-old cow gives up to 11 and a half gallons a day, more than they can drink, so he’s forced to dump about half down the drain.
Schauf grew up on a dairy farm. He says he hated cows and escaped to college on his 18th birthday. But eventually he started studying breeding, and during an internship at a registered Holstein farm he discovered he liked the challenge of developing a bloodline. “It’s a little bit like a sport,” he says.
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He had about 250 head in the fall of 1992 when one of his employees and a partner bought a 17-month-old heifer at a sale and asked him to stable her. Stookey Elm Park Blackrose had a promising pedigree. Her sire, Blackstar, was one of the great bulls, Schauf says, and her dam, Speckles, was producing heifers that got high marks in competition. Of course not every cow takes after its parents. “A lot of good cowmen there passed her by,” he says, “but she was a big, growthy heifer.” Soon he noticed that Blackrose was developing into a cow that had everything going for her and asked the two owners if he could buy in. They formed a three-way partnership, Blackrose Futures Ltd.
Blackrose had a beautifully shaped frame, head, legs, feet, and udder–the kind of aesthetic qualities that win competitions. As a two-year-old she was undefeated in district and state competitions, and she won the top award at the Minnesota state fair, the World Dairy Expo in Madison, and the Royal Winter Fair in Alberta, Canada. As a five-year-old she was judged “excellent” by the national Holstein Association, scoring 96 points out of 100; she was just a tenth of a point away from 97, which only a handful of cows have ever achieved. Dairy people from all over the world came to visit her at Indianhead. “We had calls, calls, calls,” says Schauf. “Everybody wanted something out of her.”
In 1999 he agreed to pay $25,000 for the first clone produced, a price that would go down for subsequent copies. A tissue sample was taken from Blackrose’s left ear, and the cells were cultured in a lab at Infigen. The nuclear material from the cells was injected into unfertilized eggs whose nuclei had been removed, and through a process called electrofusion the egg material was stimulated to combine with Blackrose’s DNA.
Schauf signed a contract with a Pennsylvania firm that was having a cloning “special” for $12,000, and it began developing a second cell line. But that summer the FDA announced its milk and meat ban.
Blackrose II had her first calf as a two-year-old last April, and since then she’s been giving milk at about the same rate Blackrose did at that age–a little more than 3,200 gallons so far. “Craig drinks it,” says Schauf, indicating one of his farmhands. “See how healthy he is?”
