CALVING

Even as pedigree breeders we have long understood the commercial realities of producing suckler cow beef.  It is commercially imperative to strive for the target of every cow producing an active calf without intervention every year.  We record our calves birth weights and over the years we have only selected as stock bulls animals with average birth weights and rejected “good” but over weight calves as breeding bulls.  In the autumn of 2009 we calved twenty cows and produced twenty live and active calves, one died inexplicably in the first twenty four hours and we are currently rearing nineteen out of twenty calves on their mothers.