Breeding cattle in a rapidly changing world

Since then, rams went out with ewes with the usual trials and tribulations. Now we have moved into preparing Angus and Shorthorn bulls and heifers for sale.

I never dreamed 40 years ago when I started breeding pedigree Aberdeen-Angus that it would one day become the biggest sire breed in the UK, as it has been in many other countries in the world for some time. Nobody wanted them then.

I recall standing in the alley at Perth Bull Sales with the late Billy Arnott, of Haymount. The sale was due to start in 20 minutes and we were the only people there. The 'most popular' tag requires some qualification, but seeing a crowded market and spirited bidding at Angus sales is gratifying.

When I started, the breed had one problem – size. My father had always kept a couple of pedigree cows to breed bulls for our suckler herd. We criss-crossed the Angus with the Shorthorn.

In 1975, we bought a Charolais bull. Our cows weighed about 450kg and crossing them with the gigantic foreigners was an efficient system of calf production and the calves were popular in the showring.

I kept using the Angus and Shorthorn on the best cows to breed replacements but, as more and more cows went to the Charolais because the calves made much more, the selection base reduced.

I bought a few pedigree Angus heifers at modest prices to cross with the Shorthorn. Even then, although our native breeds were all small, some animals were better doers than others. The best were promoted to breeding pure, the majority were crossed and the worst were culled.

As the numbers of my pure A-As increased, finding a better bull became a problem. In 1978, I visited the Wye Plantation, in the US, where I saw bulls which weighed a tonne, something we take for granted today.

Not only was I impressed by the cattle, but also by the system of recording which got them there.

In 1982, I spent three months on a Nuffield Scholarship studying beef production and performance recording in Canada and the US. Performance recording was relatively new and modern computers were now able to crunch data on a scale previously impossible.

While in Canada, I bought a bull and two heifers. One of the heifers transformed our herd. Her breeder, Frank Slezina, was an outstanding cattleman and helped me plan my tour.

Frank advised that various strains were leading the way in the drive to get bigger Angus cattle. All had been outside the fashionable circuit and had bred their bulls for local commercial beef producers who valued growth and commercial attributes.

Apart from the Wye Plantation and Western Canada, which were well known in the UK, I learned of Erdmanns, in South Dakota; the Corbins, who bred Emulous cattle in Oklahoma; the Shoshone herd, in Wyoming; and the Rito and Band cattle in the Jorgensen herd, in South Dakota.

Frank told me that the first three kinds had been ‘discovered’ by the show folk and now made huge prices. The Jorgensen cattle were probably the best commercially, but no concession had been made to eye appeal.

I noticed over the following decades these Rito and Band lines, which had concentrated above all else on performance, gave exceptional results when crossed with fashionable strains. The best example was the bull Scotch Cap. which was by a popular show bull, PS Powerplay and out of Band 105, a high performance dam bred at Jorgensen.

Without any thought of in-breeding, just that we couldn’t find anything that suited us better, we used Scotch Cap and his descendants again and again. Decades later, we used a descendant, Hoff Limited Edition, on to cows bred at Prairielane, an outstanding but undersold herd in Manitoba, which used bloodlines from Jorgensen and another high performance bred herd, Nichols, exclusively.

In 1982, on my return from my Nuffield tour, I was asked which Angus herd I thought the best. I replied, the Nichols herd, in Iowa, which neither they nor I had previously heard of.

On my recommendation, Orrin Hart used their best bull, Nichols Landmark L56, in his world famous Willabar herd, in Alberta. I bought the top-priced bull, sired by Landmark, at his sale.

When I visited Argentina 25 years later, their breeders told me that Landmark was the best North American bull ever to be used there. Our main stock bull today – although he has never left the US – is a descendant of Landmark, Nichols Expectation.

In my lifetime, the obvious change in all our native beef breeds is size and growth rate. We certainly shouldn’t boast about it, as anyone can tell a big one from a small one and growth rate is highly heritable.

Show judges have had an easy time. By placing the biggest cattle at the head of the line, they have met popular approval and at sale shows their picks made top prices.

To increase commercial acceptance in any breed, whether native or continental, and in individual herds some fine tuning will now be needed. Eye appeal and structural correctness will always remain important, but we must move on.

Reduced numbers of beef cows in the country indicate a squeeze on profitability. A challenge already exists from environmentalists who claim beef cattle are wrecking the world and the pending ingress of overseas meat, produced cheaply in ways which are illegal here, threatens us in the future.

Traits such as easy calving, better fertility, improved feed conversion and better eatability – none of which can be identified by the naked eye in a living beast – must be bred into our pedigree cattle.

Today’s breeding tools are the computer, better reproductive technology and an increasing knowledge of the bovine genome in a world where in every industry science fiction becomes science fact.