farmerjan":kib2vdwm said:
Do you make any of your bull calves into steers or do people prefer them to be bulls for beef? Your cattle have real nice builds, very nice butts and the muscling is very obvious. Do you see any problems with the BB crosses as far as calving? What about dispositions? Your pictures are great and it seems that the cattle don't mind so most all must be pretty quiet dispositioned. How old were the bulls on average in these pictures? Do you mostly sell dire4ct to individuals?
Like your pictures and your animals.
Thank you.
All are bulls, never had any steers. You wouldn't get bigger price for steers here. We sell them to the meat factory.
The youngest one is May born, the eldest is 18mo, mostly born in March-April.
BB cross cows are really good commercial cows for producing meaty calves. The highest % of BB in a cow we'd 50%, but the other half was dairy, so that improved calving. Have some cows with 1/4BB, some even less. Not much of difference in calving compared to other cows. However, they sometimes can have some quite extreme muscled calves at birth, but with a good bull selection for them, not overfeeding and breeding them not too small, they usually calve without assistance. Their daughters have good milking ability, have great calves.
Never used BB bull on any beef breed cross cow. Probably gonna search for a purebred BB bull for some cows next year. Would like to get some replacements. Would use him only for fully matured easy calving cows.
Yeah, bulls are pretty quiet. We feed them twice a day since weaning, so they got used to us walking around them and they don't mind us. Not all want to have close contact with us, but most are friendly.
Some videos taken just after turning the bigger bulls herd out on grass this spring. They are pretty friendly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2N-UkELrqE&t=138s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQFSoSUMUPs&t=1s