As if grandson Church didn’t have enough to do running the farm and studying for an advance degree in biology…he recently took a week to attend the Frank B. Graham Cattleman’s School in Kansas. The week-long program covered every aspect of herd fertility and calving, including artificial insemination, preg checking and delivering a calf. Church, […]
……in the previous post “Introducing TDA 35” (see below)I talked about a moment 10 years ago when I first saw the young bull’s dam. Moments after posting I recalled Wooz was handling the camera at that moment. So I dug into the archives and sure enough there it was. Ivan Rowe, my Cornish mate, pretty […]
It was 10 years ago that I walked out in a pasture Cornwall, England with a grizzled old farmer named Ivan Rowe. Ivan was introducing me to the best herd of cows I had ever seen! More than that he was offering me my pick to breed…flush the embryos…and ship back to the States. It […]
…and a picture of the result of mating our oldest American cow with a young British bull. The dam is 17 years old and still producing. But Church has decided it’s time to work in her replacement. This 16-month old heifer will be filling some mighty big hooves. Mom produced a string of outstanding bull […]
She’s just two days old but seems older. Her sire is Thistle Hill’s King David. He spent the last breeding season at Oak Hill and contributed new genetics to Cathy’s award winning herd. Meanwhile King David is back home awaiting his next assignment. David
…another pure English heifer…half sister to the two below…Ashott-Barton Tulip is the mother…and a line that stretches back as far as there have been Devon record books. The origination was in the famed Champson herd. The sire is Cutcombe Jaunty. Our current plan for Tulip is to let her calve at 3 and then decide […]
A few years ago, on an introductory trip to meet our partners in England, Church was given a wonderful gift by his grandmother: the right to select any heifer he wanted from the Ashott-Barton herd. The young cow he selected—-without any prompting from me—was from the Bribery line which I had long coveted. Because of […]
The oldest cow in our herd at 16, M180, greeted us with a bull calf. Baby is an 82 pound bull calf by an English bull, TDA Highwayman. M180 was purchased from Lakota ranch years ago and has produced a string of nice calves. She preg checked open and gave no sign she was expecting. […]
The bull calf on the left is out of a Tulip dam, a line that goes back as far as there have been herd books in Britain…about 170 years. He’s definitely a “comer”; love his head and muzzle! The heifer on the right is out of Bribery. Church spotted her dam on his first trip […]
TDA Churchill was the first bull we developed in our pure English Devon project and we now have about a dozen of his progeny in our herd. Churchill’s dam was the best Devon cow we ever saw. She was national grand champion three years running until her breeder, Gavin Hunter of Tilbrook Grange, took pity […]