AN open day to showcase Stabiliser cattle has been hailed a success.

The event was held at John Lind's Overton of Keithfield, at Methlick, last week, with talks from the Stabiliser Cattle Companies business manager, Seth Waring, and senior nutritionist at Harbro, Jill Hunter.

The day saw attendees from all over the country, with farm tours showcasing what the Lind family do.

The Lind's work with the Stabiliser Cattle Company as a Multiplier and sell breeding cattle annually. A recent comment from a customer who purchased thirty-six cows, was that they are saving 25% in feed costs compared to when feeding their previous continental cows. They are also seeing a reduction in barley being fed to youngstock as the Stabilisers thrive on a forage diet.

The cows in the herd will soon build up to 100% homebred as the policy is to cull cows after five calves to also take advantage of current high cull cow prices but more importantly benefit from the constantly improving genetics of the Stabiliser breed.

“The younger the cow, the fewer problems you have managing the herd and with ever improving genetics, each generation of heifers coming into the herd should be better than the last,” said farm manager Stephen Allan.

"The aim is a cow of around 650kg, which is considerably smaller than the traditional suckler cow in Scotland, and therefore easier and cheaper to keep. Calves are relatively small at birth which makes for easy calving but doesn’t prevent them from growing quickly, with bulls ready for work at under a year-old and heifers big enough for bulling at fourteen months to calve at two years."

Mr Allan continued: "The cows are spring calved and we had only four this year which required assistance at calving which is not bad out of 250 cows,” says Stephen. “We’ve got our calving period down to 12 weeks but the target is 10 weeks and we hope to achieve this in time by taking the bulls out earlier when running with the cows.

“Calves are weaned in the autumn at six-to-seven months and wintered on silage and a kg of barley per day to get them up to bulling weight in the spring. Heifers are selected for breeding at 14 months provided they have reached 400kg and after pelvic scoring, which is another important factor in achieving easy calving, and a backfat scan to create an Estimated Breeding Value (EBV). We find 80% are fit to take the bull and the rest are fed on for beef.”