Get to Know
Our Cattle
Cows
Our herd is small - 10 to 15 breeding cows at any one time. Usually the breeding cows calve in May or June as grass growth is slow in spring in Scotland and the weather in March / April can still be very cold. Calves stay with their mothers until about 9 months old, through the winter, and no creep feed is used.
Our cows are descended from our original purchases Shefford Model 9th (see below), Shefford Julia 11th, Shefford Curly 10th, Shefford Gaymaid 9th and Shefford Silver 1st. Traditional Hereford cows are long lived and fertile into old age.
In general they have good udders and feet, which is very important to us and have plenty of milk.
Modern farming practice is to mate heifers to calve at two years old. Traditional cattle were always mated to calve at three, however we prefer to assess our heifers on an individual basis for maturity and on weight (around 400 kgs) - the ideal age for ours to calve is probably about 30 months, which may not be convenient for some people, although we do not mind a few autumn calves.
Bulls
Our bulls are homebred apart from the use of frozen semen purchased from other breeders or from stocks held by RBST. These are from bulls born in the 1960s and 70s which belonged to the Milk Marketing Board. Many of these bulls were of exceptional quality but they had few pedigree offspring as they were used mainly on dairy cows. Most have no photos but some have weight gain and calving ease records.
Our homebred bull calves are assessed at weaning and those not considered of sufficient quality are castrated and provide us with beef. Breeding decisions also depend on the bloodlines and we sometimes keep 2 or 3 a year for our own use.
Our oldest stock bull Kileekie Frank (see below) was born in September 2011 and is still fit and fertile at 13 years old.
Currently we have two young bulls Kileekie Benromach (Kileekie Jura x Kileekie Snow Model 2) and Kileekie Atlas AI (Tern Atlas MMB x Kileekie Gaymaid 4)
