Belted Galloways

The Family Farm Favorite

Breeding Stock

Fertility

Longevity

Profitability

When purchasing Belted Galloways it is important to consider both physical conformation and production data so that you can choose animals which meet your personal goals.  The Belted Galloway Society has published a selection guide for purchasing Belted Galloway breeding stock: http://www.beltie.org/brochure.html

Our breeding program focuses on performance rather than the show ring, and animals retained for our herd are chosen from the best of each breeding season.  Our goal is to have a herd which is highly uniform in the characteristics which we consider to be economically important.   Although we have chosen to use a forage based management system, we believe that our breeding stock will do well in any management system.

The most promising of all of our bull calves are placed in our forage based bull test and compared to one another.  From the start, we have consistently bred our cows and replacement heifers to trait setting bulls in an effort to build and improve the overall performance and maternal gentics in our cow herd.  We constnatly monitor and measure performance and use that data to determine what matings will be most successful.

Rigid culling is used to devlope a highly productive and functionally sound beef herd that will excel in our environment.  Since EPDs do not exist for Belted Galloways, we use our performance and ultrasound data to select for antagonistic traints such as low birth weight and high weaning and yearling weight at the same time.  We are now using ultrasound data to select for marbling (intramuscular fat, IMF) and rib eye area (REA).  We have recently added the use of DNA data to select bulls for the tenderness genes.

Performance is important, but we have not forgotten the non-measurable functional traits such as teat size, udder structure, longevity, fertility and the important esthetic quality of the belting.

Reference Sire: 

Rose Farm Maximum:  "Max" is bull born in 2004 and he was our primary herd sire for the 2005 breeding season.  He has proven his value by his production data, but also, the ultimate proof, in his excellent progeny.  He is pictured here in field condition, after a busy breeding season.  He is of moderate-large frame.  His dam weighes 1175 lbs., which we consider to be the ideal size for a cow.

Max is a well rounded bull, one of the best of the best.  As compared to the other test bulls, he excelled in 205 day adjusted daily weight (ADW 205), adjusted yearling weight (AYW) and weight per day of age (WDA).  He also excelled in testicular size, a measure of his fertility. 

On ultrasound, he showed excellent marbling and his actual rib eye area at 2 years of age was 11.5, the ideal size for the consumer.  He weighed 1145 lbs at 2 years of age, on nothing but forage, suggesting that his male off spring could be finished in less that 20-24 months of age, about the perfect size for a market steer.

He has been DNA tested for the "tenderness gene" and he is positive with a desirable score of 3.  His disposition is excellent.  Max has been sold.

"Max's" pedigree is below:

			Beltway Magnus
		Beltway Brutus
			Black Magic Pamela
	Rose Farm Teddy
			Cedar Mill Teddy
		Lazy L Yanick
			Green Arpents Rita
Rose Farm Maximum
			Beltway Magnus
		Beltway Brutus
			Black Magic Pamela
	Rose Farm Jackie
			Anderson Hill Kool Dun
		Rose Farm Felice
			Lazy L Yanick

Currently For Sale

We have sold most of our yearling heifers and older cows.  We will be weaning our 2006 calves about Christmas time of 2006 and will have an up-dated "For Sale" list at that time.