Robin loves to download podcasts to listen to while she takes her yearly milk-cation off the farm and it often instigates some ponderings. In late 2023/early 2024, she started pondering bringing in a buck closely related to J&R Spirit’s Dakota Playboy. Playboy is in a lot of our genetics– Lishan, Vici, and Hero to name a few—and in trying to keep our lines closely intertwined, it seemed reasonable to look at a relative. Of course, Playboy has been gone a few years now so finding that new buck could be a challenge. Research came up with a few herds with him pretty close in the pedigree. One herd that we perused had a granddaughter being bred to a great-grandson who also had J&R Spirit’s HT-K Kaitai, our buck Wingwood Farm Leo Abundance’s grandsire in his near pedigree. We had another local breeder with a doe from this herd, so we knew that we liked the looks of this herd in person as well. So, in February 2024, we reached out to Kim Puzio and requested to be put on that Playboy granddaughter’s waiting list. Added bonus that she was also SGCH *My-Enchanted-Acres LM CandyMan’s full sister! Kim let us know in April, however, that there was not a buck for us. Did we want to be left on the list for 2025? Ah, the dilemma. The goal was to bring those Playboy genetics closer—without knowing who the sire would be, should we stay on the list or keep looking? But we really liked RNBO Friends (Lily) and trusted that Kim would pick the best buck to breed her to when the time came so we asked her to keep us on this list. Wow—did that “risk” pay off! Kim had some amazing AI success in the fall of 2024 and successfully AIed Lily to the well-known Alize Kharm Personified making this potential buck kid a paternal sibling to Kim’s beautiful SGCH My-Enchanted-Acres KW Kharisma 5*M, the 2019 reserve national champion. AND Kharm and Playboy were half siblings. We were astonished and thrilled. Was it even possible that we would get that lucky? Well, perhaps we “wished on the morning star” often as we were out at dawn milking in the fall of 2024 because “every wish would be heard and answered.” We could barely believe it when Kim let us know that RNBO CNXSHN had been born and that she was letting him come home with us!

CNXSHN is a big boy with some lovely dairy strength. We’re very certain that he is going to provide added depth of body and spring of rib along with that dairy strength in our herd.