Anyone raising Shorthorns?

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I used to have a bunch of beef shorthorn cows years ago. Good cattle, but the market is tuff especially if they're spotted or roans and I don't like to give the calves away at low prices.
 
I used to have a bunch of beef shorthorn cows years ago. Good cattle, but the market is tuff especially if they're spotted or roans and I don't like to give the calves away at low prices.
Will be selling beef direct to the consumer, so hide color isn't too important to me.
 
I have three. Bought all of them out of the kill pen for slaughter price. They were short bred and threw shorthorn colored calves that didn't sell worth a flip. Somebody had taken good care of them as they were all good quality, very gentle, easy keeping, good mama cows. I bred them to black angus and they threw a nice mostly solid color brownish/black calf that sold in the same group as the rest. The cows go in the kill pen around here no matter their age.
 
Used to be several around years ago but hardly see any now. When you do see them at the stockyards they get docked regardless of quality, even though the cows have always seemed to be regarded as being good calf raisers.
 
Used to be several around years ago but hardly see any now. When you do see them at the stockyards they get docked regardless of quality, even though the cows have always seemed to be regarded as being good calf raisers.
It's shameful they were good cows but the dockage is huge. I've watched a group of chromed up shorthornX calves got sold for only $1.05 per lbs and they were only 550lbs. The solids were bring $1.20-1.30 per lbs in the same weight class. There was another group but with horns only brought for $.85 per lbs....OUCH.
 
I would love to find some good beef type Shorthorns. Not these clubby hair balls that you see everywhere, but good solid soggy wide hipped calf raising machines.
If you take a Shorthorn cow and cross her to a good carcass traited angus bull the resulting F1 Shorthorn Plus steers will be some of the best feeding cattle you can raise.
 
It's shameful they were good cows but the dockage is huge. I've watched a group of chromed up shorthornX calves got sold for only $1.05 per lbs and they were only 550lbs. The solids were bring $1.20-1.30 per lbs in the same weight class. There was another group but with horns only brought for $.85 per lbs....OUCH.
That's how I got the cow I posted a picture of. Bought her at sale as a heifer, she wasn't bringing much in comparison so I thought for that price she might be worth taking a chance on.
 
I would love to find some good beef type Shorthorns. Not these clubby hair balls that you see everywhere, but good solid soggy wide hipped calf raising machines.
If you take a Shorthorn cow and cross her to a good carcass traited angus bull the resulting F1 Shorthorn Plus steers will be some of the best feeding cattle you can raise.
Up here that's a Speckle Park, a registered breed. They seem to sell well, but they always seem to be small from what I've seen.

Edit: Did some Googling and come to find that while Speckle Park did start with Shorthorn and Angus, the breed was actually developed using Teeswater Shorthorn, Aberdeen Angus and a British white
 
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The Heritage Shorthorn is growing in popularity. These animals can trace the ancestry al the way back to the Coates Herd Book in the UK.

Check out the Heritage Shorthorn Society! The Shorthorn is found in the breed makeup of many of today's breeds. Talked to one breeder today, and the demand for the Heritage Shorthorn is growing, siad if he had 20 heifers he could have them all sold by tomorrow. There is a shortage of the Heritage Shorthorn animals!
 
We bred Shorthorn sires to 3/4AN-1/4SM cows for about 10 years, from 2010-2019. Not hairball show-ring stuff, just real-world commercial and carcass/performance oriented solid red bulls. Steer calves were terrific - best we ever raised. Heifers were a mixed bag... some sires, every heifer was top-shelf; others, they just didn't pan out. But... we encountered that same sort of performance out of Angus sires over that same group of cows.
Yeah, red calves got docked; we didn't get much chrome, breeding solid red bulls - any that arose came mainly from cows carrying the Simmental 'spotting' gene.
Did a progeny-test breeding trial, one year, for Waukaru Shorthorns... steers went to the Tri-County Steer Futurity... out of ~125(mostly SH & SH-X, but there were some SimAngus and straight Angus steers in the feedout) steers on feed, our 9 halfblood Shorthorn steers were all in the top 50%, most in the top 20%; one had highest REA/cwt, highest HCW, highest % retail product, best feed conversion, and was most profitable overall; graded Choice, YG 2.
I think folks are missing the boat, not using Shorthorns in crossbreeding programs... but you've gotta use the right type. PM me; I can point you at some good programs producing Shorthorn bulls that will work for you.
 
I would love to find some good beef type Shorthorns. Not these clubby hair balls that you see everywhere, but good solid soggy wide hipped calf raising machines.
If you take a Shorthorn cow and cross her to a good carcass traited angus bull the resulting F1 Shorthorn Plus steers will be some of the best feeding cattle you can raise.
That IF they're black. If they're chromed up....they're cheapest feeders. Best way to not get docked by the feedlot buyers...would be retained ownership on then all way to the slaughter.
 
That IF they're black. If they're chromed up....they're cheapest feeders. Best way to not get docked by the feedlot buyers...would be retained ownership on then all way to the slaughter.
Besides my own cow herd, for the last 20years I've been Herdsmen for a neighbor. We used to feed our around 400 hd a yr. When we were buying feeder cattle my first choice was red and roan (red or blue) Shorthorn crosses, second choice was black nosed Charolais. The packers want good cutting cattle, they can bend the rules to make hide color work the way they want.
But... Here in the heart of the corn belt the sale barns and order buyers have beat it in to everyone that black hides rule.
The last two years my char cross strs have brought $0.15 less than their black half sibs. It makes me sick, but I just don't have room to feed them out.
 
Up here that's a Speckle Park, a registered breed. They seem to sell well, but they always seem to be small from what I've seen.

Edit: Did some Googling and come to find that while Speckle Park did start with Shorthorn and Angus, the breed was actually developed using Teeswater Shorthorn, Aberdeen Angus and a British white
I talked to a breeder in Michigan how told me that they were shipping embryos from Argentina. Supposedly they still have some real good Shorthorns down there.
I looked into shipping semen from Great Britain, but that gets kind of expensive when I'm just trying to build commercial cows.
 
SBMF, and any interested others,
You don't have to go to across the ocean to get good Shorthorn genetics.

If you're looking at producing SH-cross calves that'll perform in the feedlot...it'd be hard to beat Waukaru genetics - they've concentrated on solid red, polled, calving ease and growth, with good carcass traits. They probably have more performance data on their cattle than any other SH breeder - and more than you'd find in most other breeds, if you get right down to it. They were even doing genomic testing for tenderness, marbling, etc., early on, back in the GeneStar days.
Waukaru GoldMine 2109 daughters here were terrific - don't think we ever had a bad one - and he was safe to use on heifers of any breed; W. Coppertop 464 daughters were quite good, W .GoldCard 5042 daughters were good, but HUGE... the W. Orion 2047 and W. Patent 8161 daughters were big, hard keepers that didn't really do a good job with their calves... just too much 'growth' and inputs required for the Orion and Patent daughters do do well for us.

For good moderate-framed, working-clothes type commercial cows, it'd be hard to beat Rob Sneed or Gary Kaper's Shorthorn genetics. We used Rob Sneed's '034' bull quite a bit( RS DV729 01 034 04; I still have a couple canes of semen in the tank, that I'd sell reasonable, if anyone would be interested...) and really liked the 034 daughters. Always wanted to use some Kaper 4508 and Dover DRC 101VM, but we shifted back to the baldy Simmental side in our breeding program, and I never got around to those two good Shorthorn bulls.

I've not looked at CattleVisions' Shorthorn offerings in a couple of years, but they'll have some that would work for a commercial cattle operation. Some of the bulls in the Waukaru sire battery are available from Origen.
 
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Besides my own cow herd, for the last 20years I've been Herdsmen for a neighbor. We used to feed our around 400 hd a yr. When we were buying feeder cattle my first choice was red and roan (red or blue) Shorthorn crosses, second choice was black nosed Charolais. The packers want good cutting cattle, they can bend the rules to make hide color work the way they want.
But... Here in the heart of the corn belt the sale barns and order buyers have beat it in to everyone that black hides rule.
The last two years my char cross strs have brought $0.15 less than their black half sibs. It makes me sick, but I just don't have room to feed them out.
I watched the charX feeder prices getting worse over years and I do not know why. It's a shame that shorthorns and Charolais are good cattle for crossbreeding programs. Not mentioned that club calf industry pretty ruined the shorthorn breed much....it's hard to find commercial type shorthorns nowadays.
 

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