Thread: Wagyu calves

Originally Posted by Micky Duck

ok i feel have to poke bit of hard earned wisdon here....hooking calf onto block and cow being towed is not ideal...the usual set up is cow in head bail and rope DOWN to ground behind her....so angle of delivery is downwards to help things go naturally.standing on rope tied firmly is often more than enough pressure....its all in the timing..... bugger going back to bull that gave issues year before....find something easier on the girls,they have hard enough time of it as it is..... more than enough heifers go gaga as it is without additional stress of traumatic calving...

We only put jersey AB to our heifers, never big beef or x bred. We only put bigger girls and older/ potential culls to beef. We were apparently the only ones having these massive wagyu calves. Everyone else using the same bulls had the stereotypical “little wagyu”

my older sis used to AI all there cows,she not a very tall lady,if she had to stretch to reach cow,they got jersey straw...over time it dropped overall height of the whole herd...amazing what 30 years of selective breeding does to a small herd...when she sold that herd...the heifers went into another herd and went to top 5% in first season...and it was a pretty good herd to begin with.

Originally Posted by Micky Duck

my older sis used to AI all there cows,she not a very tall lady,if she had to stretch to reach cow,they got jersey straw...over time it dropped overall height of the whole herd...amazing what 30 years of selective breeding does to a small herd...when she sold that herd...the heifers went into another herd and went to top 5% in first season...and it was a pretty good herd to begin with.

Yeah we try and do the same, aiming for a real nice cross herd. Our cows are somewhere up in the top % and perform really well which comes from such selective breeding.
I can’t edit my earlier statement but I went through my notebook and out of 45 wagyu calves last season we had 9 assist to different levels. And out of 180 calvings we had I think it was 6 assists of x bred.
This season was 5 wagyu assist and a handful of x bred assists of different levels.

thats still a very high percentage...good on you for making effort to make the girls life easier on them.

We did a ceasar on one of our good Hereford girls (she had started prolapsing) Irish vet said on a busy day he'd do 6 of these a day. Thats how valuable their cows are back home. He had just started to sew when he said" oh, there's another one in here"!

But anyway: here's the $$ vet call out, ceasar, consumables, three courses of Anti biotics, visit to sew up her prolapse - $1600. Just managed to break even when we sold her two calves at the March sales. In Feb her prolapse fell out again and I had to shoot her. Zero sum game.

Only had to pull two calves this year. One alive and one dead. Monster of a bloody thing for a poor heifer, and the coloring told us it was a fence jumping bastard that did the damage.

I'll take easy calving, good hooves and medium sized udders over massive weight gain any day

Originally Posted by XR500

We did a ceasar on one of our good Hereford girls (she had started prolapsing) Irish vet said on a busy day he'd do 6 of these a day. Thats how valuable their cows are back home. He had just started to sew when he said" oh, there's another one in here"!

But anyway: here's the $$ vet call out, ceasar, consumables, three courses of Anti biotics, visit to sew up her prolapse - $1600. Just managed to break even when we sold her two calves at the March sales. In Feb her prolapse fell out again and I had to shoot her. Zero sum game.

Only had to pull two calves this year. One alive and one dead. Monster of a bloody thing for a poor heifer, and the coloring told us it was a fence jumping bastard that did the damage.

I'll take easy calving, good hooves and medium sized udders over massive weight gain any day

We had the vets here this year for something unrelated and they told us that morning on one farm they had 3 ceasers and a couple calvings. Possibly one of those corporate farms but they said they often do large numbers of ceasers on single farms. We are yet to have anything that bad thankfully. Some of ours are big calves, some are just lazy girls and we had the odd back to front upside down. Only needed one vet assist calving in the last 3 years for a very early slip that was very low. Vet just happened to be there so let him take care of it

Originally Posted by Micky Duck

you fellas shoul look into stats for them ones they had in late 80s...LIC were doing it out of hamilton,ruakura think it was......always stuck in my mind just how easily the heifers handled calving,others spoken too said the same. If I remember rightly the first cross bulls were used on heifers and the older cows had pure straws to get the bulls,the heifers went over seas....

Want me to find out what they were md mum was a district manager for lic 30 years of service b4 she retired

A close neighbor was a dairy rep for a stock company. I remember him saying "the best [most profitable] dairy farmers were the ones that concentrated on putting milk in the vat, not chasing bigger calves to sell".

Great tasting beef... another vote for dexter cattle, small steaks but tasty as.

Wagyu, the home kill fella said great steaks but you end up with a small mountain of very fatty mince.

Originally Posted by sore head stoat

A close neighbor was a dairy rep for a stock company. I remember him saying "the best [most profitable] dairy farmers were the ones that concentrated on putting milk in the vat, not chasing bigger calves to sell".

Great tasting beef... another vote for dexter cattle, small steaks but tasty as.

Wagyu, the home kill fella said great steaks but you end up with a small mountain of very fatty mince.

With the right management you can have both, putting your lower index or potential culls to beef then your creating less waste. No point if breeding your no good cows for replacements.
We do extremely well production wise and have good replacements and a good number of money making calves plus we sell a number of replacements that are excess

Originally Posted by Chelsea

I would say 30% of our x bred dairy that have wagyu end up assisted calvings, all to different degreees. a little less this year but we put in extra measures that helped. Our wagyu calves were all very close size to the calf pictured earlier in the thread. We even had a horse of a jersey x calf this year that was so stunning first light took him with the wagyu. That was probably one of the most difficult calvings we had in terms of size, I actually cried while calving her!
I would have thought BB couldn’t be much worse than that surely. I suppose I just hate the waste of sending calves on the truck at the end of calving. We are using Angus straws until the SG dairy start but Angus seem to flood the market every year.

Remember that the Wagyu you are using are bred for marbling when crossed with dairy cows, NOT for their ease of calving.

SGL aren't either

Originally Posted by Ben Waimata

30% is a horrible figure, probably a good enough reason to avoid them for this farmer! I like low input farming and quiet animals.

My dad ran a herd of 600 Angus cows. No assistance. Calve or die. Majority calved. Only ever lost a couple.


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Originally Posted by Padox

Want me to find out what they were md mum was a district manager for lic 30 years of service b4 she retired

sounds like terindakiss...look like branhams...calves were beautiful red/brown/black...... Im not in dairy farming anymore but its always bugged me why folks didnt keep using these for heifers...zero calving issues just HAS to be desireable thing to pursue.

Originally Posted by Micky Duck

sounds like terindakiss...look like branhams...calves were beautiful red/brown/black...... Im not in dairy farming anymore but its always bugged me why folks didnt keep using these for heifers...zero calving issues just HAS to be desireable thing to pursue.

The species name for European type breeds (Angus, Hereford etc) is Bos taurus, Eastern breeds like Brahman are Bos indicus, that will be where the name Taurindicus for the crossbred came from.