Fertility is king!
By placing such high regard on this trait in our females, we test at around 95% pregnancy across our entire herd year in, year out.
Females enter our program at 8-10 months of age and are yearling mated either by joining to bulls or by artificial insemination. They will remain in our program until ten years of age unless they fail to produce and raise a calf.
We run an A.I. program most years, season permitting with either a hand-picked group of mature age cows, our maiden heifers, or sometimes both. We believe A.I. is a valuable tool that can fast-track top level genetics into our herd that we could not afford to introduce through natural service.
When selecting our keep heifers each year, Jeremy looks for a number of traits:
In 2018, the challenging seasonal conditions resulted in a scale down of our planned A.I. program, but we did use MM Kingdom K35 over a mob of 100 4-6 year old females.
At this stage our plan for the 2019 A.I. program is to do around 120 maiden heifers.
