Angus Myostatin

Chev54

Member
Anyone any experience, good or bad with Angus bulls with Myostatin NT821 gene . Society allows one copy, saw couple of bulls for sale this weekend with single copies, nice looking bulls, but don’t want to risk it if I’m just going to buy myself problems as well as a bit more shape.
 
No experience of any Angus with Myostatin but we keep away from bulls with it just in case of harder calvings. Also I think there are other breeds that can provide the extra shape etc
 

Optimus

Member
Livestock Farmer
Location
North of Perth
Not sure if our first AA bull had it or not but some of the calves did have some shape managed 2 E grades.

If you have good suckler cows you'll easily get U grades out of a bull that doesn't have it.doesn't mean you won't get the odd hard calving though.
 

Angus77

Member
Location
N.Ireland
The Angus myostatin is the version that produces the heavier calves at birth, unlike the limousine F94L that produces lighter calves that develop muscle after they are born.
 
We had a bull that carried it, and he did leave fantastic calfs, that I found to be very easy calving, but I found when keeping heifer replacements, they were very unpredictable, some made brilliant cows, some of my best! And some were terrible completely useless. If I wanted to just sell store calfs I definitely would not worry about myostatin.
 

Nearly

Member
Location
North of York
It killed 4 calves and 2 cows in one year for us, out of 30 cows.
Cows are all blue x from a dairy herd.
Breeder of bull didn't acknowledge it as any kind of problem.
Bull is dead now.
Breeder is dead to us.

25% of the calves that lived were double muscled and made more money as stores but not enough to make up for the dead uns.
 

CiderJan

Member
Location
Sunny Cornwall
Even with one myostatin gene, we found harder calvings. Maybe OK if using on big suckler cows wanting well muscled calves for sale and used to calving blues etc. For us, we've bred it out from our herd as I think easy calving is key for the bulls we sell.
 

Chev54

Member
It killed 4 calves and 2 cows in one year for us, out of 30 cows.
Cows are all blue x from a dairy herd.
Breeder of bull didn't acknowledge it as any kind of problem.
Bull is dead now.
Breeder is dead to us.

25% of the calves that lived were double muscled and made more money as stores but not enough to make up for the dead uns.
This was my worry , would be used on angus and lim cross cows .
 

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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