Breeding Goals
The Herd Generally
The bloodlines we have today of course include many newly developed polled Simmental/Fleckvieh Canadian and USA cow families. In more recent times we have added bloodlines from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Norway, Ireland and the UK.
The Ideal Cow
The geology at “KOKOMO” home of Knox Farms is heavy red basalt soils, being an old potato growing farm of 500 hectares. A better than average rainfall at an altitude of 1,000 metres helps us to have strong pasture and a cropping program. We are not alone in always culling hard to keep a superior base herd, but of course IVF and ET demand good recipient cattle with plenty of milk. Knox Farms primary purpose in breeding is to select for width and depth to chase the early maturing types. We don’t cull horned or no eye pigment or absoluteness in colour. However, like everyone else, calving ease, good udders and temperament is selected. We play to our strengths which is having a far greater diversity in bloodlines than most other breeders. Record keeping on calving ease and weighing our herd regularly apart from 200, 400, and 600 day weights which are breed standard measurements, is a continuing enlightening process.
Performance
It would be a fair personal view to say our observation of what other breeds, such as Limousin, Charolais, Angus both red and black and Holstein are doing does give us good guidance of what not to do. In breeding and trying to please to get a ‘Black’ or ‘Red’ look-alike Angus is a self-defeating battle of basic mathematics, because if you get a premium for these sorts of cattle that are a certain colour, but are 150 kgs lighter than Original/Traditional Fleckvieh Simmental at weaning age, or even worse at 400 day weights, the mathematics of the brain is on malfunction. Our performance criteria are that you breed from not just great cow families but have muscular frames nearer to a frame-score 6.5 for bulls that are polled and easy calving, grow rapidly on mother’s milk and keep growing on grass, silage or our own stored ration of harvested crops.
Horned or Polled (PP or Pp)
Knox Farms believes that the progression to a totally polled Simmental/Fleckvieh animal is inevitable because of animal rights activist antagonism, the Vegan movement and the move already to a chickpea alternative to red meat. Knox Farms has both horned and polled cattle, with a bias to polled PP cattle. However, the genetics from the past of Simmental/Fleckvieh were always horned. It is a slow and rewarding way forward to achieve our aim.