About Grazing Jerseys

Sustainable Farming Starts with Grazing Jerseys

Stamping your herd for solar success!

Our work is simple, exacting, and enduring: Every generation our animals become more efficient at turning sunshine into high-component milk. We’ve been selecting bulls to do this work for more than a decade, and we stand on the shoulders of those who have been breeding for these traits for decades before us by starting with foundation stock that were bred to perform without grain. The benefit of prepotent stock is that you can have in one generation what has taken many generations to build. Each of these bulls was bred to predictably and consistently stamp their progeny with these traits.

Solar-powered butter isn’t something that just happens. You work on your pastures, and together we up the quality of the stock that can convert those plants into an exceptional product that distinguishes itself in a marketplace that no longer values just fluids.

 

Our prediction is that in the next decade even conventional markets will pay for things that the big guys are just starting to pay attention to: cheese-yield, beta-casein and fatty acids. We will not sell a bull or a straw of semen that isn’t A2A2. Too much is riding on it, including the health of our children.

We are testing and selecting bulls that only transmit “B’s” in kappa casein and beta lactoglobulin, which correspond with increased cheese yield. Like beta casein, these two milk proteins are inherited co-dominantly and take many years to breed into a herd. (Kappa casein is the most important for cheese yield.) Start now, so when the market develops into milk-protein premiums, your herd is ready.

 

The fatty-acid profile in milk is directly related to the percentage of the diet that comes from cow-harvested forage, so we breed for all the attributes that make cows good at their Creator-endowed job: room in the ribs for rumen, heart and lung capacity; solid feet and good legs; wide muzzles; intelligent heads with good vision; will and desire to eat and milk; and maternal traits — cows that are good mothers are good milk cows.