kenny thomas
Well-known member
two questions. what is the animal status declaration and what does a stock agent do?
kenny thomas":2fltniuq said:two questions. what is the animal status declaration and what does a stock agent do?
Yeah know what you mean has been a hard year for most dairy farmers in Australia, & now with the price cuts it going to be tougher for some more than others."Ah: Loch Valley Fold - yes, it's the twins that caused that. Hard year with drought last year and the herd weren't as fat as I'd have liked going into calving, but anything else that light would have been sick.
Nope they were like the first calf under the twins & the lighter brown one that is laying down. He gets good money for those types of calves too."I hope the 'exactly like' photos is *only* the one of the AI-sired calves? I've seen some odd supposedly-Angus calves before, but nothing like these creatures.
Bulls from Angus breeders throwing what amounts of white and where? Horns or scurs? Scurs are common out of horned dairy stock, in my experience. Did you (or they) go back to the breeders in regard to those problems? Were they registered breeders, or people just breeding bulls to sell into dairy clean-up?regolith":ht66iq2m said:...Asking him to buy bulls for me - it's a busy time of year, it's also probably a stupid risk considering what I've seen on previous farms that were direct buying from Angus breeders and *still* getting large calves with white markings and horns. But at least it gives you a better idea what you're getting, if you can go and see the cows and talk to the breeder. Going through the stock agent there's no contact between buyer and seller.
Here many holstein milking heavly, at their top production, milked three times a day, are culled by the time they are 6-7 years old.
Bulls from Angus breeders throwing what amounts of white and where? Horns or scurs? Scurs are common out of horned dairy stock, in my experience. Did you (or they) go back to the breeders in regard to those problems? Were they registered breeders, or people just breeding bulls to sell into dairy clean-up?
If your only using Jerseys to lower bw than you really need to look at some of the lower bw holsteins that are currently on the market.
If an "Angus cross" has horns, its sire wasn't an straight Angus bull. However, I've seen some very large scurs, definitely identified them as such (wobbly on the skull when the calf was young) and then watched them grow out to the tips of his ears and look exactly like horns.regolith":fkgwam2z said:Bulls from Angus breeders throwing what amounts of white and where? Horns or scurs? Scurs are common out of horned dairy stock, in my experience. Did you (or they) go back to the breeders in regard to those problems? Were they registered breeders, or people just breeding bulls to sell into dairy clean-up?
One bull, I suspect. Don't know the details of where it was bought, but we had a few calves with white feet, white tail tips. Then a black heifer with the whole collection - forehead star, white feet, white tail tip, might have had white on the underside as well. I don't recall if any of these had horns, but I don't think so. My boss did go back to the breeder, the breeder said something about his son must have lied/been mistaken about whether or not a certain cow was on heat when a Friesian bull jumped the fence... (it's *hard* not to remember an excuse like that).
A few years later on another farm we ran three Angus bulls, one the boss had bred himself (he had Angus cows alongside the dairy), the other two bought from a breeder. I asked him some pretty hard questions about his own bull when I started to put two and two together, but by then it was too late - he'd run with one group of heifers, one of the Angus with another, the third, meanest bull I've ever had to handle, with the dairy herd. I knew which bull had been where, and the following season we hauled calves out of heifers from both groups. The horned ones and the Friesian-type markings were from his own bull - it was 3/4 Holstein Friesian.
But I heard him later tell other people 'must have been Friesian in those bulls he bought'. I don't think he got any more bulls from that breeder - fair enough; one of those bulls certainly caused a lot of calving issues. But if he said they were throwing Friesian calves (and I heard him say it), it was wrong.
I believe the first was a registered breeder, the second wan't claiming they were pure Angus.
I think I might have encountered my first set of scurs this year, from Te Mania over a crossbred cow. Never heard of them till seeing them mentioned in these forums, and most Angus crosses I've handled either have horns or they don't - seen several with proper horns, never believed they were 50% Angus.
I reared a bull calf for IHC, and checked his head and painted a cross on his back when he was eight weeks old so that the vet wouldn't de-horn him. Vet claimed he found horns. I'd checked the day before and whatever he had wasn't horns, the skull felt a bit bony but no points.
So had argument with vet over whether or not Angus crosses could have horns.
Do you know anything about how LIC sources their beef bulls? I find it a bit rough that there's no information given about them and no choice in which bull you get, but I've never asked for details on these bulls either.