Angus Heifers and Hereford bulls

I am planning on retaining three Angus heifer calves since they will be the last straight Angus calves out of our herd for awhile. However I am unsure if I should breeding them to the Hereford bulls next summer. Any experiences on this?

I always breed my angus heifers to an angus bull just for calving reasons. Crossbreeding will add a little birthweight, and Herefords are known for bigger calves. calving ease Hereford with good growth is hard to find, and when you do find one it will cost.
That being said, all of my commercial angus cows now have Herefords on them.
My bwf steers sell extremely well. People cant get enough of the heifers. Can't produce enough of them.

All I can add is that I had a horrible time when I bred my Hereford heifers to our angus bull. The cross breeding definitely adds weight to the calf.

Our angus bull dropped all small calves weighing 70-85lbs when bred to angus cows. All 3 Hereford heifers lost their 120lb calves and I even lost one of the heifers over it.

kentuckyguy":1utosjt8 said:

All I can add is that I had a horrible time when I bred my Hereford heifers to our angus bull. The cross breeding definitely adds weight to the calf.

Our angus bull dropped all small calves weighing 70-85lbs when bred to angus cows. All 3 Hereford heifers lost their 120lb calves and I even lost one of the heifers over it.

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120 lbs. ?? What were the bloodlines represented in those Hereford heifers?

Not sure they were just commercial purebred heifers. The calves were all bull calves and spring born so that added to the weight too.

kentuckyguy":3vf4guae said:

All I can add is that I had a horrible time when I bred my Hereford heifers to our angus bull. The cross breeding definitely adds weight to the calf.

Our angus bull dropped all small calves weighing 70-85lbs when bred to angus cows. All 3 Hereford heifers lost their 120lb calves and I even lost one of the heifers over it.

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That doesn't make any sense at all...

I thought it was strange myself but I watched it with my own eyes.

It was an expensive and sad experience. My favorite one is the one that died. She would follow me around like a dog when I was working on fence.

Dear Muddy,

Buy a puller if you go that route.

Signed,
Experience

I was planning on using my Hereford bull on a set of my black heifers also but you guys are making me second guess myself. On the black cows I've used him on they calf at about 55-80 pounds. His biggest calf was off a char x angus at about 90 pounds (this steer has also out grown his siblings). Seems like it should be ok on my heifers though right?

Pre calving management and genetics can and will play a big part in birthweights. In this case both are unknown in this thread but if I had to guess it would lean toward the genetics of the heifers. I can guarantee you that these results are not possible using one of my line breed Polled Hereford bulls. Four decades of using no extremes helps insure consistency. The hybrid vigor gained from crossing still should not produce these extremes in calving without some heavyweight genetics showing up in the background. Will add to say in forty years of selling bulls I did have one complaint of heifers having some calving issues..... Genetics of the females unknown though.

I have always been more comfortable with using a calving ease Angus bull on heifers of any breed, especially Angus type heifers. I am sure that there are some consistently low birthweight calving ease Hereford bulls around, but we have had really good success with Angus bulls for heifers. This spring I did calve out some purebred Hereford heifers to our moderate BW Hereford bull, with no issues at all, but wouldn't have wanted to ideally breed any heifers of other breeds other than Hereford to him.
I do think that hybrid vigor does play a role, but our heifers have all had calves on their own regardless of breed when bred to CE Angus bulls, except for one breech birth a couple years ago.
In the case of the post where huge calves were coming from Angus bull x Hereford heifers, its something that could happen for probably a number of reasons or combinations. If the heifers were from large BW parent stock, perhaps the bull wasn't a CE bull. Condition could also play a role. Prior to or without DNA parentage testing i'm quite sure there have been a number of mistaken genetic identities. My first Angus bull was not a CE bull, didn't realize back then that not all Angus were CE, bred him to some Charolais heifers and had a fiasco almost like what the fellow with the Hereford heifers had. After that and some research I got onto CE Angus bulls for heifers and haven't looked back.

Not all animals within a breed are created equal.

The last several years I've AI'ed my Angus based heifers with an Angus sire and then used a Hereford bull for cleanup. Haven't had to pull any but the Hereford bull has good calving ease epds and the heifers are pelvic measured.

I had a couple large calves out of the Trask line of Herefords when I bred them to heifers. But no more than any other types of bulls that we've used. Some matings work great others not as well.

Regardless of breed I've found genetics are important. The Sensation bred bulls are low BW. Also many Angus have smaller pelvic areas