One of the questions we sometimes get from our customers is what cattle breeds do we raise.
At Clover Meadows Beef, we’re an Angus-based farm and we have a cow-calf farm (also known as a “cow-calf operation”). Since, “Angus-based” and “cow-calf” are agriculture industry terms, let’s explain them a little more.
Our farm is known as a cow-calf farm, and that’s extremely common in the U.S. In fact, most beef farms are cow-calf operations. We’ve gone into great detail about raising grass fed beef and our cow-calf farm before, so we’ll only summarize it here.
In short, we have a large herd of cattle — bulls (the Dads) and cows (the Moms) — that stay on our farm throughout their life. The cows (females) are bred every year, and we then sell the calves. The key to any cow-calf farm is conception. In a perfect world, we would like our cows to have a calf every year that we can then sell for income. Even though that’s the ideal situation, there are lots of different circumstances that play into that.
Something we haven’t talked about on this blog before is the cattle breeds we raise and what “Angus-based” means. On our farm, that means that our bulls are 100% pure-bred Angus. The female cows that they’re bred to are usually Angus, but they may also be a different breed such as Charolais, Hereford or Simmentals. We use different breeds because decades of university research has repeatedly shown that there are many advantages to having a crossbred herd — such as higher calf survival rate.
We know what we’ve just shared is a lot of farm-speak. If you’ve found it remotely interesting, you may also like a few of our past posts about buying a bull; the difference between a cow, heifer, steer and bull; how we raise our grass fed beef; and 5 little known facts about angus beef and if angus beef is really better and healthier.
Do you have a question about our beef or how we raise our cattle? Let us know!
