Adding a new breed to a suckler herd
- Thread starter Grahamc94
- Start date
How do you find they sell in comparison to continental breeds?
Just to add you can get south devons carrying the n821 and f94l genes for more shape the bull in the photo has one copy of the muscle gene
Only sell the sd steers pure as all heifers are retained at the moment as building numbers, the crosses are on par and people even comment that they look like pure lims but without the attitude. The pure steers would be behind a lim cross sd but are normally above the Angus and Herefordshire in this area as they normally weigh more. We have repeat buyers for our weaned calves every year and they normally top the trade in every section.
How do you find the ones with the muscle gene calve? Due to expansion we’ll be running more heifers over the next couple of years (70 this year, looking at 90 next year) so easy calving is a massive thing for us
How much Limousin has been put into the South Devon?
muleman
Member
Not enough yet by the looks of it!
- Location
- North Somerset.
The bought in dairy types explains your problems with feet which won’t be down to the Stabiliser. I have used Stabiliser by AI for 20 years and never lifted a foot.
The ones with foot issues are bought in and not off dairy types
In fact the dairy types have the best feet in the herd
Woolless
Member
- Location
- Berwickshire, Scottish Borders
No, not enough to turn them into outlandishly-arsed headbangers!
Woolless
Member
- Location
- Berwickshire, Scottish Borders
What about criss-crossing AA and Hereford and rely on the Lim for extra shape as the terminal sire?
British blue, cross well with any of them, males sell well as stores and females milk well.
Weasel
Member
- Location
- in the hills
Beef shorthorn, easy calving low cost, quiet temperament, self replacing! Just sold Limmy bullocks off mine, straight off cow out the field, £900! Cows live out on brassica an second quality hay an straw, lim x heifers make nice cows, what’s not to like
Shorthorns have lack of milk.
MJT
Member
After college I worked on farm calving 100 south Devon cows, some of them obviously carried 1 muscle gene and so did the bulls as had 8-10 calves that came out with double copy with more muscle than a blue ,knocked a few cows about with prolapses , and think we lost one calf through a hard calving . Had a couple born with the big muscley tongues too which took a week to suck cow properly. The calves looked unbelievable at 4-5 months, but weren’t much bigger at 12 months and never grew to much at all .
- Location
- Montgomeryshire
All the South Devons I’ve seen have been huge cows, if that’s what you want?
Never had a problem myself, maybe you had a bad experience with the wrong type of cow! I had a bad girlfriend once but I found a much better one an married her
Maybe in the future that will be an option, but at the moment we’re looking to increase numbers and use more home bred heifers doing so.
No. Don’t sell well around here
- Location
- Cheshire
Yeah, I’ve heard they are a bit keen. Mate of mine bought 10 in calf heifers out of Scotland somewhere. All due too the Simmental, all calved fine. Only gave 1 a bit of a pull. But he said he just couldn’t be doing with the way they wanted too kill everything that walked along the feed barrier. Weaned the calves and tried again the next year. Same result so he ran them barren and killed the lot. Said they weren’t worth the risk