Our Luing Herd
The Vision
The Luing breed was created to fulfill the demand from commercial cattlemen for a fertile, efficient mother cow in tough environments. The breed’s founders had a clear vision for their breed - it was to be based only on functional efficiency in a real world environment, completely divorced from the fads and fashions of the show ring.
We share that vision and have followed their production and selection methodology as closely as possible. We run a closed herd, utilizing only home-bred bulls in a line-breeding program designed to propagate more predictable, easy care, maternal genetics.
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Although our Luings are all registered they are treated as commercial cattle throughout their lives. This allows us to:
a. Provide our customers with commercially proven breeding stock that will be a successful component part in their crossbreeding programs.
b. Make our breeding selections under the same type of low cost, forage based environments that most of our customers operate in.
c. Sell our breeding stock at commercially realistic prices, not the artificially inflate prices often associated with purebred cattle. ​
The Females
Our purebred cowherd works harder than many commercial herds. Our entire cattle system is built around maximizing our production off our cheapest resource - grazed forage. During the winter months when we have to feed the cows they are maintained on a "least cost" ration. The ingredients vary from year to year depending on availability but can include cereal straw, silage, hay or greenfeed. As our production system is designed around grass our calving season begins on April 18th so that cows can calve out on banked grass, with minimal interference from us. Calving at this time of year aligns the early summer flush of grass with the cows peak nutritional needs - early lactation through to re-breeding. We graze as far into Fall/Winter as we can without losing undue condition on the cows prior to weaning.​
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Weaned calves are backgrounded on hay or silage with a protein/energy supplement. We aim for a modest weight gain of around 1.25lbs -1.5lbs a day and rely on compensatory gain off early summer pasture to allow the heifers to achieve a target weight of around 700lbs when they are exposed to the bull the following July.
The Males
The bulls that we raise for home use or sale are wintered exactly the same as the steer and heifer calves. They then graze from May through until November completely un-supplemented.
In their second winter, leading up to sale, they are fed on hay or silage with around 3lbs of wheatshort pellets . This gives us fit, athletic bulls weighing around 1200lb -1400lbs at 2 years old.
I firmly believe that growing the bulls slowly like this greatly increases longevity and reduces foot and leg problems. Many mainstream bull sellers feed their bulls to weigh 1400lbs as yearlings and a ton as two year olds. This level of feeding results in growing cattle carrying more weight than nature ever intended their young bones to, leading to more lameness and injuries from fighting.
