Tarentaise Poll

[Colin Chevalley]

A quick survey to further enlighten me on the use of Tarentaise.

 

[Anonymous]

Hello:
Tarentaise is a Great Mother Cow breed.
There has been a few studies about the Tarentaise breed and it is very sad that now all of the studies to test cattle breeds is running out of funding
that not that much testing and research has been done on the Tarentaise breed of cattle.

There has been one very interseting study with the tarentaise breed is they are out of all of the breeds of cattle that where tested where noted for being high climers in Mountain Areas they are will to put forth the extra effort to graise where it is high, they have been noted for raising hardy and well in desert areas and that is noted in western OR and in western WA!

There a breed that is noted for being tame and not a wild breed of cattle and the nice thing that I do like about them is there a medium sized breed of cattle and that is what I am looking for right now to add them to are operation as a breed.

My self I am looking for semen from a Polled Fullblood Tarentaise and I do not think there are any Polled Fullblood Tarentaise bulls in North America.

There is one Polled Purebred Tarentaise bull that I am thinking about using his semen for next years calves but I do not like his birth weight and that is the only reason why I have not ordered his semen.
I like there color of tan/redish because I do know they can deal with the heat of the desert and the high desert, and that is what I do need!

Over the years I have been to a few cattle shows and I have seen the different breeds of cattle from Europe come and go and one thing that I have noticed about Tarentaise cattle they do have wonderful looking uders with the size and shape that most commerical cattle people like.

Regards
Lee

 

[Anonymous]

We had a salesman come through a few years ago with a program involving Tarentaise cattle. He's been pretty prominent in the industry and I've seen more than a couple articles in cattle magazines on his program. I, and two other ranchers, bought into the program as it sounded exactly what I was looking for in a cross-bred program and the timing was such that I needed bulls. I won't say it was a complete disaster but it was pretty close. I figure it did set me back 5 years on herd improvement. The bulls were, for the most part, calm enough to be worked with on foot, and the calves they threw were very good, but that's about all. The calves were way too big and I put in a lot of long nights as every cow needed to be watched just in case. One of the bulls threw 130 lb calves (yes I have a scale) and the others threw 90-100 lb calves, I prefer the 85 lb wt (I have an Angus cows) which is what I was told these bulls would do. Luckily I was able to trade them in on Angus bulls from the same seller which we had better luck with. Naturally, the seller put all the blame on my cows saying they were obviously not purebred Angus (never said they were) and it was the other genetics that caused the problems, i.e. birthweight, tiger-striping, non-uniformity, reduction in premiums. The other ranchers? I've not seen the one in maybe 3 years and he still loved his, and the other still uses them although his hired hand hates Tarentaise with a passion. I had bad luck, yours may vary.

 

[A. delaGarza]

I have been using, for the last 2 years, Tarentaise semen with a herd of 50 cows mainly 3/4 Simmental-1/4 Nelore and never had have a calving problem, the calves all have been red with a white forehead, maybe the seller had a little of reason blaming your cows. The only thing you fixed with Angus was color uniformity and maybe birth weights and that you could fix it too with any calving ease, homozygous Black bull no matter the breed.

We had a salesman come through a few years ago with a program involving Tarentaise cattle. He's been pretty prominent in the industry and I've seen more than a couple articles in cattle magazines on his program. I, and two other ranchers, bought into the program as it sounded exactly what I was looking for in a cross-bred program and the timing was such that I needed bulls. I won't say it was a complete disaster but it was pretty close. I figure it did set me back 5 years on herd improvement. The bulls were, for the most part, calm enough to be worked with on foot, and the calves they threw were very good, but that's about all. The calves were way too big and I put in a lot of long nights as every cow needed to be watched just in case. One of the bulls threw 130 lb calves (yes I have a scale) and the others threw 90-100 lb calves, I prefer the 85 lb wt (I have an Angus cows) which is what I was told these bulls would do. Luckily I was able to trade them in on Angus bulls from the same seller which we had better luck with. Naturally, the seller put all the blame on my cows saying they were obviously not purebred Angus (never said they were) and it was the other genetics that caused the problems, i.e. birthweight, tiger-striping, non-uniformity, reduction in premiums. The other ranchers? I've not seen the one in maybe 3 years and he still loved his, and the other still uses them although his hired hand hates Tarentaise with a passion. I had bad luck, yours may vary.