Holstein/Angus

[dayna]

Hello everyone! It has been a while since I've been on this site. Just a quick update. My Holstein steer went to freezer camp a year ago in February and we are considering getting a Holstein/Angus cross to bottle raise. A little background. I am from a small town in Maine and one of the farms here AI some of their dairy cows with Angus and sell the calves. They have agreed to sell us an Angus/Holstein heifer for $125 (I have no idea if it is a fair price). My dilemma is that I live on another dairy farm and can raise Holstein bull calves here for free, but...they take a long time to mature and are a lot of bone. We already agreed to buy a BIG steer for our freezer this July so we don't really NEED to start a calf right now but we are thinking about buying the heifer for $125 raising it until breeding age, AI to an Angus letting her calve and wean the calf and they put her in the freezer and grow the calf for the following year for the freezer...what do you all think about all that? I know its a lot of information. Anything I should know about Holstein/Angus crosses? We have the advantage of living on a dairy farm and my husband does all the AI and calf work here so we aren't real worried about that part but...the calves here are in a "barn" and our calf would have to be in a hutch...would it do ok through a Maine winter? (we have little jackets for them =] )

[nosqrls]

As long as he has a good wind break and warm bedding and plenty to eat. And hopefully on really nasty days sneak him/her into the barn.

[KSALguy]

we had two old Angus/Holstein seed cows we got from a rancher, they were HUGE, we raised a couple Angus cross calves off them, they put lots of milk into these calves and didn't have to be milked but if they had been gentile we could have gotten decent milk off them.
we got lots of good beef off the calves when these old cows were bred back to an angus bull. it worked great for us

[COWS]

Angus-Holstein cross for a brood cow always made a lot of sense to me, but I never had the chance to try one out.

COWS

[Krooked_S]

Here are our two crosses mother is pure Holstein bull is angus first heifer is around two and the other is 8 mnths


Sent from my iPhone using Homesteading Today

[Jennifer L.]

Krooked's cow looks pretty typical for an Angus Holstein cross. I've milked a lot of them and they generally will look and act more like a Holstein than the Angus half. Udder won't be as nice usually, but then you'll see an occasional one with quite a nice udder, and as a rule they are decent milkers. IMO, there's no huge advantage to meat in the F1. You breed her to an Angus again, and the 3/4 calf will start to look and act more like an Angus. By the time you take your $125 heifer's grandcalf to freezer camp, you'll be seeing something that's essentially Angus.

It's all a genetic crap shoot, though. You might get lucky and have that $125 calf be more Angus than you expect. It's certainly worth the money, in my book, no matter what. Of course, I never had a bias against black and whites. Holstein steers make darned good eating, too!

[KSALguy]

our two old cows were basically GIANT white faced baldies with big white udders, the rest were all black, they were HUGE like the Holstein, and their 3/4ths calves were excellent.