Shorthorn X Continentals ?

[ken]

Shorthorns usually seem to be crossed with other British breeds in commercial cowherds?
Has anyone on the boards crossed Shorthorn to continental breeds and is willing to share the results and/or pictures?
Gelbvieh, Braunvieh and Salers are what I'm leaning towards.
Fleckvieh/Simmental, Blonde d'Aquitaine, Pinzgauer, or Charolais crosses, (or any other continental cross) would be interesting to see as well.
I can't find a whole lot of information online.
Thanks.

 

[Lucky_P]

Weve been breeding most of our high % Angus cows(anything above 75% Angus) to solid red polled Shorthorn bulls. Bred a few of the older cows with significant Simmental breeding to the same bulls - have a few photos of cows & calves born this fall, but I have no idea how to post them to this board.

 

[3waycross]

A fair amount of experience with GV X SH it's a good cross. The GV actually moderated the SH in this case and the muscling was outstanding! I will look for some pics but i doubt i have many left!

 

[Commercialfarmer]

http://www.steerplanet.com/bb/the-big-s ... horthorns/

This site may help you find some more information.

 

[Lucky_P]

ken,
There are some good Shorthorn operations in your part of the world - check out Saskvalley, Alta Cedar and Muridale, for starters, and I'm sure there are others as well. They may be able to direct you to customers who are using SH bulls on Continental breed cattle in your area.
Seems that the Canadian 'commercial' market doesn't exhibit as much discrimination against red & roans that we see in many areas here in the USA. We are using solid red SH bulls on black cows - trying to keep most of the calves 'black', because the market mindset here prefers that color.
We're only 2-3 years into our little breeding trial of using SH sires on Angus/SimAngus cows, but I've been pleased, thus far. The SHxAN daughters, bred to Simmental sires, are just beginning to calve out, so...time will tell.

 

[turning grass into beef]

We have used Simmental, Charolais, and Gelbvieh on shorthorn cows in the past. We no longer use any of them. IMHO it depends on what your goals are. If I was looking for a terminal sire I would be happy using any one the previously mentioned breeds. We keep our own replacements and also sell bred heifers. Thus we have decided to use horned hereford bulls on shorthorn cows, and shorthorn bulls on our shorthorn/hereford cows.
We used Simmental bull 30 years ago and were not happy with the vigor of the calves at birth. I assume that problem has been corrected in the Simmental breed. We used Gelbvieh bulls 15 years ago but found the Gelbvieh/shorthorn cows milked to heavily. Their udders broke down to early in life, and on average the cows came in to thin and did not re breed well enough for us. The main problem we found with all of them is that the mature cow size of any of these crosses was to big for our management practices. As terminal sires they were all very good. The steer calves were excellent. If I had to choose one of the three I would try to find smaller framed, thick, deep, Charolais bulls to use on shorthorn cows. Just my opinion and it was free, so take it for what it is worth.