Welkom's calf has been weaned and sold as a pet lawnmower steer to a place only a few kilometres away. Now we have a whole new crop of calves on the ground. We have had nine calves this season eight of which are here in Herron. It is good fun to see the eight running around and playing together. They are all black this year except the last bull calf, a stunning calf that is red. All girls as well except the red one and one other . Not bad 7 girls out of 9 they were all from Damolock Firestone who we sold last December. We were sad to see him go but we have kept so many of his daughters we no longer had any work for him. From the looks of this lot of calves we will be keeping a few more daughters again some black ones this time but as Firestone is red they will all be carrying red and possibly dun as well.
We have just run some genetic testing on the 2014/2015 calves which some of these are the mothers of our most recent calves. We were hoping it would help us identify which ones didn't have the features we wanted in our herd going into the future. The results were so good that it did not make it clear at all who should be up for sale. The percentage of our herd that is now known to be Homozygous polled (double) has actually doubled with the results! The bad news is it requires more testing of the recent calves to decide which are for sale as nine or ten Dexters must go to keep numbers manageable on this small acreage. We do find them so hard to part with but we do have lots of enquiries from nice people wanting Dexters and try to match them with ones suitable for their purpose.
As soon as we get a nice sunny day I will get some photos of our herd of active little calves to post on here. It is so much fun watching them run and play together but hard to get them to hold still for a photo.
Cheers Gillian