Dairy and beef producers could be saving hours of their time or bought-in labour and improving the performance of their calves, by taking one simple step when making breeding decisions.
At the root of the issue is the dehorning of calves which has a far higher cost than many people realise and can be more easily avoided today than even a decade ago.
This is an issue which Molly Westwood, a respected dairy farmer and highly successful breeder, feels strongly about and she aims to reduce the number of calves being disbudded on her family’s Exmoor farm.
Molly also works for start-up cattle breeding company, Mastergen, whose portfolio of dairy and beef sires includes the UK’s largest offering of polled genetics which is presented in the only catalogue exclusively offering bull semen from cattle without horns.
“Many of our bulls come from continental Europe where there’s a strong and growing movement against the dehorning process,” explains Molly. “As farmers, we know that having cattle on the farm without horns is absolutely necessary for animal and worker safety, but we also know there’s a far better way of achieving the hornless state than disbudding calves, or worse still, dehorning older cattle.”
In fact, she points out that the gene for polled cattle is dominant over that for horned, which means that just one polled gene needs to be carried for the animal not to have horns.

Lord Red P

“This makes breeding for hornlessness easier than many would realise,” she says. “The progeny of homozygous bulls with two copies of the polled gene will all be hornless while 50 per cent of the progeny of heterozygous bulls, carrying just one copy of the polled gene, will also be born without horns.
“Achieving hornlessness this way is far preferable to dehorning the calf which has a considerable cost involved,” she says.
This cost comes in part from the farm workers’ time taken up in the dehorning process and the direct costs of anaesthesia – which is an essential part of the process – along with a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory which is also recommended for pain relief after the event.
“But there is potentially far more cost involved than just in the dehorning process, including the check in growth which occurs after dehorning,” she says.
“We all know that any stress event will compromise an animal’s immune system, so there’s also the possibility that calves will be more prone to infection,” she adds.
Today she says there is also pressure from animal welfare groups, which are becoming increasingly intolerant of removing horns from cattle by any technique.
“These pressure groups exert a particularly strong influence in parts of continental Europe and in Germany in particular, have influenced the cattle breeding programmes for many years,” she says.
With much of the Mastergen product originating in Germany, she says that some of the top polled genetics in the world are now available to UK farmers.
“There used to be a time when compromises had to be made when choosing polled genetics, but now, things have moved on so far that some of the best performing bloodlines in the world carry the polled gene,” she says.
In the Mastergen stud, this includes dairy bulls like:

• Niffer P (Numero Uno x Lawnboy x Boss Iron), a jet black genomic bull offering huge value for money and transmitting dairy strength with outstanding functional type and exceptional daughter fertility (Fertility Index +7.1) He is priced at just £14 per straw, with further discounts for volume.
• Lord P Red (Ladd P-Red x Shottle x Rubens), an exciting elite polled red bull, sired by the former number one genomic TPI polled red bull, Tiger-Lily Ladd P-Red. With a Type Merit of +2.58 he is predicted to breed stylish, feminine daughters suitable for a variety of management systems and with show winning potential. He is priced at £32 per straw, with further discounts for volume.
• Chris PP (Critic-P x Eclipes-P X Lemvig), a polled Jersey and a complete outcross with the ability to make near-perfect udders with a mammary score of +3.44! His gift of producing 100% polled offspring will make his daughters profitable from day one. He is priced at £20 per straw, with further discounts for volume.
A variety of polled beef sires are also available at Mastergen, where there’s a strong emphasis on value for money, just as there is with dairy.
“We are able to price bulls so competitively as the Mastergen ethos is to cut costs out of the supply chain and pass the savings we make on to the farmer,” says Molly. “We have no costly reps driving up farm drives and very low overheads, preferring to take orders over the phone.” Tel: 01823 430317.