Welcome to Moosters Meadows - home of Irish Dexter Cattle! We strive to breed a truly dual purpose Dexter, providing both excellent beef and milk. All of our Dexters are purebred and registered with the American Dexter Cattle Association (ADCA). We'll be blogging about what goes on here on our little ranch in Wyoming and life with Dexters. Feel free to visit our website as well.







Thursday, January 24, 2013

Square Peg and a Round Hole

While we are delighted to actually have hay this winter, we still aren't so delighted about the square bales.  Talk about trying to fit a square peg in a round hole....  Chris has pretty much mastered loading the feeders at this point, but it sure was a whole lot easier when the feeder and the bale matched!  Cows aren't complaining in any case.
 
 

Since we've split the herd for the winter to even out the feeders, it means that we can let the "littles" (last spring's heifers) and their good buddy, Yodel, out in the pasture when the weather is good.  Pure, unbridled joy!  These girls can haul it -- the running went on for quite some while, then Yodel had enough and came to see what was in my pocket.  He never misses an opportunity to search. 

And finally, I admit that the blogging is slow this time of year.  There's just something about winter  that makes me want to copy Ripley.  You can rub her belly for luck - it's impossible to walk by without giving her a pat on her tummy.  She thinks winter is just a great time of year --

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Happy Happy New Year!


 Happy New Year!  This blog has not gotten much attention over the holidays, but I'll try to do a better job now that the festivities are behind us. 
 
 

That's a photo of Bess and Raisin from last summer.  Why am I sharing this now?  Because Bess (Shaw's 18) is homozygous polled!  UC Davis is now offering a test for polledness in Dexters, so we know this to be true.  I did a little happy dance upon getting the report.  We love Bess.  And now we love her more. 

Polled Test Results for Bess(BCCxxxx):

Polled Result:
Pc/Pc - 2 copies of the Polled-Celtic molecular marker, animal is polled and all offspring will be polled.


A little over half our herd is horned; several of our polled girls have horned offspring, so we know that they can't be homozygous.  Only a very small handful have the potential.  We were curious about the new test - what the results looked like, how fast we could get results, and so forth.  The whole experience was a positive one - and from tail hairs no less! 

This one little test can open a whole set of new doors in terms of breeding decisions.  Happy New Year indeed!