Our cows
The new suckled beef enterprise
As we convert to being a beef suckler herd, we still have the same dairy breed cows – Ayrshires (brown and white), British Friesians (black and white), a few Brown Swiss and the odd Jersey cross. The cows successfully rear beef calves by suckling them and they don’t seem to miss the milking routine at all. They are just as happy sitting peacefully in the fields and not walking in, twice a day, to the parlour.
We prefer smaller cows because we are steep and wet and lighter cows don’t cause so much damage to the fields. But eventually the classic dairy cows will be replaced by beef cross cows and then finally after 4 – 6 years, the beef cows will no longer bear any resemblance to a dairy cow.
Cows are called heifers before they calve. When the heifers are about 20 months old they are put ‘into calf’. For their first pregnancy, we carefully select a bull that will produce a petite calf to allow the cow to calve easily. Often we use a Limousin bull as the sire because Limousins have a lighter frame than many other beef bulls.
For the older cows, we now use beef bulls: Simmentals on the Ayrshires, which gives a lovely strong reddish brown and white calf; Belgian Blues or Aberdeen Angus on the Friesians which gives a marled black and white calf or a completely black calf (often with a touch of white), respectively.
A cow has a calf every year and she suckles her calf for about 6-8 months. Then she has a rest (the ‘dry’ period) for two months before she calves again. On Portnellan we believe in keeping our cows for as long as possible so our oldest cow is 14 years old, which means that she has had about 10 milking seasons and has had 1 or 2 suckled calves.
(Click here to read
more about calving).
The cows and the young beef animals live on our farm, feeding from our lush pastures. The beef animals are kept for up to 30 months – they mature slowly and are gently handled so that they are easy to handle and enjoy human company. This is very important when they are sent to the abattoir – they don’t become stressed on their final journey and this too contributes to the quality of the meat.
A Friesian dairy cow with her Friesian-Aberdeen
Angus beef calf |
A brown & white Ayrshire dairy cow
A black & white Friesian dairy cow
A Jersey cross
An Ayrshire-Simmental beef calf
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