RIGEL HERD OF CHAROLAIS CATTLE
When travelling in France in the mid '80's, we saw of herds of grand red cows, running with powerfully muscled Charolais bulls,
and each cow suckling a tremendous growthy beef calf. We were looking for a purpose bred suckler cow for our suckler
herd, as the Limousin x Holstein was proving inconsistent as a successor to the Hereford x Friesian which had all but
disappeared. It was this practical demonstration of what should the Salers cow could do, when put to the Charolais bull,
that first attracted us to the Salers breed. Once we had established a herd of pedigree and commercial Salers, the
natural next step was to start breeding our own pedigree Charolais, with the intention of replicating the highly muscled
type of Charolais we had seen in France. The effortless calving performance we were getting with our Salers cows, allowed us
to select heavily muscled sires for our breeding program, but influenced us to retain only those Charolais females that calved easily
whilst producing the structurally correct calves exhibiting high growth rate and strong conformation that we wanted.
Our pedigree Charolais
are run with our commercial Salers X suckler herd; mature animals receive no supplementary feed, and our young breeding stock are kept on a primarily forage diet to ensure a long and healthy working life.
Our
current stock bull is Rigel Poseidon, his performance (158 calvings) is outstanding, 99% calf yield, and 97% unassisted.
Rigel Poseidon
LEBLANC LUSTY - born 15th Sep 1995
by Escott Diplomat (a Tattenhall Hublot son)
Calves like a Salers !!
12 years old, 10 calvings, 1
set twins, 11 live calves, all unassisted. 3 daughters and 2 grand-daughters retained in the herd
RIGEL ORCHID - born 22nd Oct 1998 by Oldstone Egbert out of LeBlanc Lusty (an Escott Diplomat daughter)
8 years old, 6
calvings, 5 live calves, 1 set dead twins, last 4 calvings unassisted, 2 daughters retained in the herd
RIGEL SUNRISE - born 8th Nov 2001 by Oldstone Egbert out of Glebedale Morn (a Chidlow Marquis daughter)
5 years
old, 4 calvings, 4 live calves, all unassisted, 1 daughter retained in the herd
