Blog

Kathy Palladini did not set out to breed colorful cattle.

She’ll tell you that conformation came first. A rectangle shape, deep in the body, strong topline, clean underline. Feminine females with slender faces and long necks. Large-framed animals, her cows run 1,200 pounds and up, some pushing 1,400, and she’ll point out that’s not condition, that’s bone structure. Color, she’ll say, wasn’t really the goal.

Then you visit the Double K Longhorns website and you see the herd.

“It just happened purely by mistake,” Kathy says. “But I do love it.”

DBL-K

Kathy operates out of the Texas Hill Country, where the light is good in the first two hours of morning and difficult the rest of the day. She has been registered under the prefix DBL-K for long enough that she’s watched it take hold in the breed. It didn’t catch on immediately. The “DBL” for “Double” wasn’t as obvious to the rest of the world as it was to her, and it took some time, and some help from Chase Vasut reading the name aloud at consignment sales, before it became recognizable.

“It probably wasn’t the smartest thing to go with,” she says. “But it’s definitely unique.”

Today the prefix holds. Anyone who has spent time in the TLBAA world knows what a DBL-K animal is and roughly what to expect from one.

The Rectangle

What they expect comes from a breeding philosophy Kathy arrived at slowly.

She started with some Butler-line cows. Smaller-framed animals, some with cool twisty horns, but not the body type she wanted. She kept going to futurities, kept watching animals move through the ring, kept pulling up websites and studying what she liked. She couldn’t always trace back how she got to where she is now.

“I just kind of ducked and weaved my way until I got here,” she says.

What she landed on is an animal that reads almost geometric. The rectangle body: deep-ribbed and levelheaded, with a strong topline and a clean underline. Slender face. Long neck. Large frame. These aren’t just aesthetic preferences. She believes the larger-bodied cow is more durable, easier fleshing, and better suited to the demands of a breeding program in the Texas Hill Country. She’ll note that few breeders around her are selecting for the same body size.

The color followed naturally, almost as a byproduct. When she began testing for the color gene, she found several animals carrying the wild gene, which predisposes a line toward brindle and parker brown patterning. Now she uses the results practically: when selecting bulls, when making breeding decisions, when a solid-red purchase arrives and she pulls a DNA sample the first day and discovers she has a wild-gene carrier under a plain coat.

“Sure enough, she carries the wild gene,” Kathy says of a recent acquisition. “She’s young. There’s a chance she’s gonna brindle, but even more so, there’s a chance she’s gonna pass that on.”

The Test

Kathy has been DNA testing for four or five years, and she came to it through Kevin Bryant, who pointed her toward beef trait testing alongside the parent verification and color testing she was already doing. The Neogen process is straightforward: an ear punch at weaning, a submission, results back in about a month. She uses Neogen directly and also works through the TLBAA.

The color panel shapes her bull selection. The beef trait results, ribeye area, marbling, tenderness, tell her what to do with her feeder steers. The maternal trait panel hasn’t required much intervention because she’s already culled the problem animals over the years, but she has the data.

Her advice to breeders who haven’t started: it’s easier than it sounds. You need an ear punch and the supplies from Neogen. From there, you send it in and wait.

She doesn’t look for the testing when she’s buying, because not many people in the Longhorn world have done it yet. But the first thing she does when a new animal arrives is pull a sample.

The Futurity Ring

Kathy’s relationship with futurities was shaped in part by the time she spent with Nancy Dunn of Rolling D Ranch before she ever competed herself. She watched, went to sales, studied what animals Nancy selected and what happened to them in the ring. She attended at least ten futurities before she entered her first one.

When she finally did compete, she took a variety of animals. Some did well. Some did not. And twice, an animal landed at the bottom of the class.

“Somebody has to end up there,” she says. “And it was me a couple of times. And that’s okay.”

What she learned from one of those last-place finishes eventually changed how she thinks about the whole enterprise. The heifer who came in dead last in the ring, the one that was devastating to her at the time, has become one of her strongest producers. She has given Kathy herd sires and daughters and granddaughters. Her value had nothing to do with how she stood in front of a judge on one particular afternoon.

“Not all animals are futurity winners,” Kathy says. “They may still have a ton of value in your herd. Just not necessarily in the futurity ring.”

She still gets nervous before her animals enter the ring. She calls her friends beforehand. She sends pictures, asks whether she should take this one to town. She does it partly to gut-check herself against what she calls “barn blind,” and partly because even now, after years of competing and watching, you never really know what an animal is going to do in an unfamiliar environment.

Winnin' Streak

The most important cow in the Double K herd right now is not the kind of animal you’d necessarily pick out at a glance.

Winnin' Streak came to Kathy almost accidentally, at the side of a cow she purchased for not very much money. She doesn’t crack 75" TTT of horn. She doesn’t look like the obvious star of the program.

“If you were to see her in my herd, you would say, What is she doing there?”

But she outproduces herself no matter which bull Kathy puts her with. She has given Kathy herd sires and daughters that have become serious animals in their own right. Her first daughter, DBL-K Winnin' Highness, is out of Dunn Aces High, Kathy’s first bull, a Fifty-Fifty BCB son she bought from Nancy Dunn and still holds a partnership on today. Winnin' Highness is running at 95" TTT of twisty horn. She is, by Kathy’s description, absolutely beautiful.

Winnin' Streak is Kathy’s favorite cow in the pasture. She says it plainly.

What the Camera Teaches You

Keith bought Kathy a camera a year or two before they purchased their ranch. She spent the early days photographing whatever was accessible, which was mostly whatever moved through her backyard. When she got into Longhorns and started studying other breeders’ websites, she realized quickly that the quality of the photography on those pages mattered. She started bringing the camera with her into the pasture.

She uses a Nikon D610, on the recommendation of Brett Krause of Circle K Longhorns, whose work she had admired enough to reach out to him directly. She has a telephoto lens. She could not tell you much else about the technical specifications. She just knows what the equipment can do.

Her rules are simple and consistent: get the photo in the first two hours of the morning, because the harsh midday light will ruin it. Shoot eye-level, not down at the animal. Keep the background clean. A power line in the distance, an old gate leaning against the fence, another animal’s head in the frame; all of it draws the eye away from the subject. For sale catalog photos, she’ll go out for days in a row taking hundreds of shots until she gets the one.

What the lens taught her, which she did not expect, is that it shows her things she misses when she’s standing in the pasture. She’ll be framing an animal and realize she’s struggling to get a flattering shot, and then understand why.

“It wasn’t until I had the camera,” she says. “And I’m like, yeah, she does have that, doesn’t she?”

She photographs the artistic shots and the website shots completely differently. The website photos are broadside, all four legs visible, head turned toward the camera. Everything the buyer needs to evaluate an animal. The artistic shots are something else: early morning stillness, a mother and calf in the quiet before the day starts, the feeling of the Hill Country at sunrise. She does not go out specifically to get those. She goes out and sits with her cattle, and then she notices something.

The Canvas Page

The canvas art side of the business started without a plan.

People started asking for high-resolution copies of her photos to print on canvas. Then people on Instagram outside the livestock world found her work and asked. She started getting requests she hadn't expected. She added a page to her website and made the photography available for print.

Artists have reached out to ask whether they can paint or sketch from her images. A woman in Friendswood, Texas paints them onto furniture: wooden benches, wooden doors. Kathy says she will flip through Instagram and find a photograph she took rendered onto a piece of home decor, and it is one of the more rewarding things she's experienced with the camera.

When she's talking about the site itself, she'll tell you the feature she relies on and doesn't hear discussed enough isn't the canvas page, it's the cross-website search. "I use that a whole lot," she says, "especially when I'm searching for a bull or something. I just don't hear people talk about that nearly enough. It's a great tool."

Still in the Pasture

Kathy would like to keep producing females that other breeders want to add to their herds for as long as she's physically capable of doing it.

She'll tell you she didn't come by the most efficient route. That's okay with her. She's sold animals she wishes she hadn't, and she's bought some of them back, and she'll buy back at least one more in a few years when the price comes back down. She has original cows in the pasture that trace to the genetics Stockton/Burton Ranches helped her build her foundation on, back when Cathy Hawke of Sky Ranch Longhorns first made that introduction. Those genetics are still there, still showing up.

She goes out early on May mornings, when the light comes in clean and the Hill Country is at its best, and she sits with her cattle. Sometimes she picks up the camera. Sometimes she just watches.

"There's just something about cows first thing in the morning," she says. "I don't know that it makes sense, but that's what I try to capture."

Find Double K Longhorns at www.doubleklonghorns.com.

This article was written based on a podcast interview on From the Pasture with Hired Hand. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or learn more about breeder websites at hiredhandsoftware.com.