Females, the foundation of any herd
Starting off on the right foot is important
As you most likely realized by now your females are the foundation of your herd. We feel they should be beautiful, calm, sound, correctly marked and POLLED. Yes, we focus on POLLED mini Herefords. Our complete herd is DNA tested for both parentage verification and horn/poll status with the American Hereford Association. All of our calves are processed the same way with guarantees of fertility, bet you don't see that much. Yes, all of our calves are fertile and represented to be exactly what they are and by the parents stated on their papers. We don't sell our mini Herefords without papers or with pending registration. We take care of our end of that process so that you can know exactly what you are getting. Not only do mini Hereford heifers/cows need registration papers to show but you will be weighed, measured and possibly DNA sampled.
We are bringing in females to the herd that have traits we like and think the mini breed needs to stay healthy into the future. This is done by careful selection of both cattle and pedigrees. In the horse world the saying goes, "You can't ride a pedigree," meaning they could be really fancy bred but that won't make them good. We believe that you should only own cattle that you like to look at, you can't just go off the pedigrees.
Seeing the animals at the perfect moment in the ring, on full feed with amazing hair does not give you an indication of the realistic quality of the animal over time. I encourage people to see how those fancy show cattle look once they have to live like cattle, often they fall apart. If you are developing a breeding herd know that chasing trends in the show ring will lead to frustrations. Just because a heifer wins does not mean she'll produce a calf every year or ever. We track production traits on all our females and anything we consider adding to our herd.
Having a quality, sound, reproductive and maternal herd of cows will be the most important part of your program. We still own a large percentage of the original cow lines with which we started. We lucked out with some great females to start our herd and it's hard to find cows that can pass "the bar" and join them. Once every few years we let one of these amazing cows go to a new home and help another breeder start their herd.
This is an exciting, flashy and polled 2017 mini heifer we recently acquired from a local breeder, Mauldin Herefords. We will post better pictures once "Diamond" is weaned. We also purchased another heifer out of the same herd and by the outstanding show bull WW Prince William. We are looking forward to using our polled bull to fold these new bloodlines into our herd.
MAU Classic Diamond
Here is an updated picture on our newest polled heifer, Diamond. If they look this good in the pasture the sky is the limit! May 15, 2017
Diamond can be found on our show picture page.
The most unique female the breed has ever seen...comments from the 2018 NWSS judge when he placed her first in her class.