Strange Breeding

I brought up the fact that there is some <a href="http://nowherethoughts.net/sarpysam/archives/2811-Guess.html">dairy blood in my cow herd</a> and it seemed to take quite a few people by surprise so I thought I would talk about it a little. Like I said my dad decided to try and breed some milk production into his Angus cows and used Brown Swiss bulls to do it. Whether it worked or not is debatable but I think it was an experiment that worked.<br />n<br />nIn the very late 60's my dad decided he had enough of the Hereford cattle he was using and decided to start moving to the Angus breed. He thought that there size was too small and they did not produce enough milk so he decided to cross breed some dairy into the Angus to try to increase the size and milk production into them. Now there are a lot of people out there that think my dad is not a very smart person. Barely passed high school, no advanced education of any kind, just proves to them he is not smart. To me this whole scheme shows his native intelligence that the school system was never able to elect from him. He studied which breed of dairy he wanted and decided on Brown Swiss because they have a higher butterfat content in their milk than most breeds, this is what he told me, and he figured the fat concentration would help grow larger calves.<br />n<br />nTo implement this strategy my dad went back east to Michigan or Wisconsin to get his dairy cattle. He found a whole Brown Swiss dairy herd a guy was selling and bought the whole thing, around 30 cows and 3 bulls, and brought them back to the ranch in Montana. This sure looked weird, having these dairy cows around the place, but that was the plan and dad set about making it work.<br />n<br />nMy Memories of these Dairy cows. Size!! The cows were quite a bit bigger than the beef cows around here at the time but the Bulls he bred from these cows, they were Monsters. Dad always called these Swiss bulls Ferdinand. When fully grown they were larger than any horse on the place and they were mean. The cows and bulls both were mean deep down in their bones and were very hard to work with. They did not do one thing that they didn't want to do and they weren't afraid of a human in the slightest. That made them very dangerous to be around, both their size and disposition.<br />n<br />nThis didn't make them smart though. They were about the dumbest critters around. No concept of the hazards of living on thier own or taking care of a calf. I remember you really had to watch them when they calved. They would just get up and walk away from their calf after it was born if you weren't right there to keep track of it for them. For the first couple of months of the calves life the cows had to be kept in a very small pasture or they would lose track of their calves. If they lost track of them they walked away and would never look for them again. The calves were so stupid you had to teach them how to nurse. They didn't have enough smarts to stand up and do it themselves for a while. They had to be helped. A coyote? They had no concept and didn't care. In a lot of ways though, can you blame the dairy cows for this behavior with the calves. Dairy cows usually have their calves pulled from them shortly after birth and mothering instinct is not stressed by producers. This made things really hard on my dad as a cowman who wanted the cows to take care of there own calves but he kept on for his idea.<br />n<br />nAfter getting his Swiss bulls and was breeding more Swiss bulls he got some Angus cows to start his experiment. He still ran Hereford cows for quite a few years and just ran around 100 Angus cows and bred them to his Swiss bulls and then kept Replacements from them to breed the swiss down to about 1/4 for his idea. He kept this up for quite a few years until one year a late spring snow storm, May, caused a very large number of sun burned bag in the remaining Hereford cows and he sold every last one of them that fall and bought some more Angus cows to make up the difference and we have had an Angus base ever since. He kept breeding some of the Angus cows to the Swiss bulls to keep adding replacements to the herd and all the things he was working for worked like a champ.<br />n<br />nThe cows size came up, calf weights came up and it appeared the cows milk was up. Downside to this experiment though. Some extra color in the calves, and disposition. The Angus carried their maternal instincts through very well but they picked up the mean dispositions of the Swiss with a passion. The other downside was the buyers didn't like the idea of dairy in the beef cows. To this days the buyers hate it if a guy has some dairy in his beef cows. It's really looked down upon.<br />n<br />nDon't get me wrong, any guy who ended up buying the calves turned out to like them and how they performed but getting past the idea of the Swiss in them was too much for some of them. I took some of these crosses as fat animals in 4H. I never did very well when judged because I would tell the judge about the Swiss ancestry when asked so that immediately got them downgraded but you should have seen how I did when they slaughtered them and judged them solely on the carcass quality. If mine didn't get first it was in the top fivwe every time. They did yield out well, grow good and do good for my dad and the feeders. They just didn't like the idea of what they were.<br />n<br />nMy dad finally got tired of fighting the buyers over the Swiss in the calves and got rid of the Swiss cows and bulls and let the Swiss component breed itself out of the herd. It's still there as the picture shows but you don't see it like you used to. I think the breeding helped get the herd where it is today. Good cattle that do well on grass or on feed.