It's always a wonderful feeling when your the first individual to accomplish something. At a previous job I was the first woman supervisor in Agriculture Production. May Day represents the first Star 5 Calf using Lowline/Santa Gertrudis cross. She is a very special girl. There are big plans for her. She will be bred this fall to a Lowline for her first calf. The next year we will be flushing her to a Santa Gertrudis Bull to implant embryos for the hope of producing a smaller Star 5 Santa Gertrudis Bull. One who would help to reduce the size of Santa Gertrudis in the pasture.
She has developed into a very nice example of an English/American cross animal. Nice enough she is a show calf. I look forward to seeing her in the ring at the Houston Livestock Show. May is red, most Lowlines are black. She should be a standout in the ring. Her sire is Murrumbong Bluey out of nice Santa Gertrudis. Her dam is nothing special, just nice. One of our best Santa Gertrudis gave us a really nice heifer out of Nova. So I can only imagine if she had a calf from Bluey.
I loved the Pencil Lines Sketch #122. AWESOME SKETCH! I love to Layer Lots of Paper. After taking the picture I don't like some of the things about the LO. All of a sudden there is pink and green with the Alpha Stickers. Now that I see it in a picture I should have chosen something else for the title. I love the photograph. May is nine days old in the photo. She was an absolute cutie pie. And no, May is not a sinking ship, she was born May 1st, May Day.
May weighed in at 56 lbs at birth. Over the fall calving season, we have come to realize the great part about using Lowlines on heifers is they have no problems calving. The growth rates are really good. At eight months she is just over 700 lbs and will be a pushing 900 when we breed her. Full adult weight I think will be around 1200 lbs. Perfect size for the commerical cattle herd. She is highly feed efficent. In relation to feeding the Santa Gertrudis show heifers I'm feeding only 2/3 of what the Santa Gertrudis are eating. This would equate a definite savings in harvested feed stuffs in the winter to cattle. It also means one can stock more cattle and more pounds of beef produced on a per acre basis. I truly believe we need to equate pounds per acre of beef produced in the same way we do any of the grains. At the same time we need to consider lbs of gain per day. It's the paradigm shift that is beginning to occur in the beef industry. Just in talking to beef producers around us, they are so resistant to this pyhlosophy. We just have to prove it to the beef producers of Texas.
I talked about size of the Fullblood Lowlines in my last post. I was able to get a really cute picture of Lynn's friend and roommate Natasha with Tillie. Tillie is a very nice heifer in our show string.
Kim
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