This series will celebrate the bulls and boars that shaped their breeds and the ag industry at large.
Duroc boar set record with sale to Japan
Nearly 50 years ago, in September 1973, Everett Forkner sold a Duroc boar that made history, bringing a record $38,000 in the sale at the National Barrow Show in Austin, Minnesota. The buyer was Soga-No-Yo Swine Farms out of Japan, and the boar would have an impact in both countries.
Photo courtesy National Swine Registry
The boar was eventually named CC Soga Powerful, a nod to the new owner but also the CC prefix Forkner’s pigs had at the time for Christian Creek Farms. Forkner still remembers the feeling when the bidding for the boar went up and up.
MASON CITY, Ill. — There he is in all his glory. A photograph of the famous bull who traveled the country by boxcar in his heyday, from show to show collecting championships, hangs on the dining room wall of a family farm in Mason City, Illinois.
Photographed in knee-high hay, so he looks shorter, Leveldale Basis was a big, curly-haired Shorthorn bull.
Mention the name Choctaw Chief 373 to Bob Hough, and there is a sense of reverence in his reply.
“He was the most important bull in the Red Angus breed, and that’s by a lot,” says Hough, a cattle industry author and historian who also served in leadership roles with the Red Angus and North American Limousin associations.
HAMILTON, Mo. — Seventy years ago this spring, in 1951, Harold Henry and a few other workers hand dug a grave for J.C. Penney’s enormous Eileenmere 487 bull, providing an honored final resting place for the prolific, nationally renowned bull who helped put the farm on the map and grow the popularity of the Angus breed.
Today, the stone marker of the bull’s grave still stands on the Caldwell County farm, which Henry now owns.
A headstone marks the final resting place for Eileenmere 487, a bull owned by J.C. Penney, on a farm in Caldwell County, Mo. Harold Henry helped take care of the Eileenmere 487 bull. Harold and his grandson, Will Henry, run the farm now.
