Oscar-PP

Reverence Beledene Oscar-PP {4}

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Born: October 16, 2021

A2A2 - BB/BB - BBR 100

Dairy form & will to milk – Reproduction — Udders — Strength

Oscar’s mom, October, is probably the most functional and lovely cow in our herd. She’s small-framed, milks like a champion, breeds back easily, has hand-milking teats, demonstrates remarkable strength despite her prominent dairy elegance and milk-shares like she means it — and she’s really sweet. She’s one of the first cows in the parlor every morning, and gives us all she has, including her butterfat, before rejoining her calf and being a doting mother. Her calves are smart, thrifty and fast-growing.

Oscar works best on cows that need better udders, more room in the pelvis (width between the pins), and more will to milk (-share). He has adequate strength for a dairy-type bull, but he may not move your “grass-fed” program as fast as other bulls in our catalog that have more strength, roundness of belly. Although he isn’t totally deficient in those things and has a nice balance to him — it’s just that most commercial-type cows are so lacking in strength and roundness that it often takes a lot of those things to move a grass-fed program forward quickly, but Oscar shouldn’t be discounted in this ability, either. He’s still young, and we look forward to milking his daughters.

October doesn’t look like a grass-fed cow necessarily in that she still has a lot of dairy angularity in her small frame, but strength is as strength DOES and she has all the attributes of a cow that thrives on forage, even though she’s one of our leaner animals when she’s milking hard. She’s always shiny, even in the winter. And she breeds back easily, which demonstrates a certain efficiency in utilization of feedstuffs that is necessary in a grass-fed program.

October’s cow family traces back to a cow we called P.A. Sadie, who was a purebred Jersey who was papered, but we could never track down her pedigree information after she was given to us by a friend who retired from dairying, and so Oscar is a Gen {4} in the American Jersey Cattle Association’s herdbook — which means he has graded up through the maternal line to be a fourth-generation into a seven-generation process of becoming fully registered. There are NO non-Jersey genetics in him. He is a small-framed animal by merit of true Jersey breeding.

Oscar’s sire, Beledene, comes out of a program that we respect highly at Holterholm Farm in Maryland. Beledene represents three generations of sires from the Revell family in New Zealand. The herd is now dispursed, but their remarkable and true “grazing” genetics (unlike a lot of the big stud companies who were feeding concentrates and whose cows lacked substance and persistency) have become very well known in the U.S. commercial grass-fed world by a bull simply known as “Landy.”

Beledene Dukes Landy was “discovered” three decades ago by a friend of mine in Pennsylvania, Doug Martin (who I actually went to visit the morning after I met Hue…) Doug and a now-late friend of his toured NZ looking for the most functional grazing herds and picked Landy out. Landy was born in New Zealand when his mother was a teenager, and his dam and six nearest grandams all lived past twelve years of age (their average life was fifteen years). Landy stood out for the consistent year-after-year production, rebreeding and longevity that the cows in his pedigree demonstrated.

Landy himself is Oscar’s sire’s great-grandfather, but Beledene bulls are in every generation in between. Oscar’s sire’s dam records 800 gallons of milk per year with 6.3% butterfat and 4.2% protein without grain and breeds back to calve every 365 days (on a mix of endophyte-free and endophyte-infected fescue!).

October’s dam came out of our favorite all-time LIC bull and some of her herd half-sisters out of that same bull are also champs. In general, LIC bulls have lacked persistency of milk production in our herd, but not Zeus (October’s sire). October’s mother, September, came out of a bull out of our program named Becker, who has proven to have daughters in other commercial herds that farmers really like. Our Becker daughter milk-shares well and keeps her condition on grass.

This bull is a balanced package of dairy-forward traits with substance, style and rumen capacity. We chose him because of the excellence of his sire and dam, her milk-sharing traits and fertility and overall loveliness and udder health (she’s not had mastitis or milk-quality issues) — those traits on their own would have earned him a place in our bull book. Combined with the fact that he turned out to have BB/BB for kappa-casein and beta-lactoglobulin cheese proteins and homozygous for the polled trait – he cannot have horned calves – Oscar was pretty much a slam dunk! Oh, and his dam has white islands and Oscar carries some of this white forward, and may have some white on his calves.

*There is a minimum order of three conventional straws per cow. The shipping cost is significant & having one extra is better than needing another shipment.

*For a $10 discount per straw, order five or more straws of the same bull (discount will automatically be applied in your cart).

*There is no minimum for purchasing sexed straws. We recommend purchasing a minimum of three straws, whether conventional, sexed or a combination. If breeding multiple cows, you can round down somewhat because hopefully the law of averages means at least one of your cows settles on the first service, freeing up other straws for multiple services. You can use any additional straws next year.

**TO AVOID an extra charge of $150 for a complete nitrogen refill, you must return the tank within the 2 week timeframe stated in the return instructions.
***Tanks that are not returned are subject to a $1500 replacement fee.

****If you are local to Graham, North Carolina and would like to pick up on farm instead of having your order shipped, please first email stacy@reverencefarms.com to check availability and receive a custom invoice.