Glen & Karen Hastie
960 Wildwood Road
Sunbury
Victoria
Australia 3429
Phone (03) 9740 9010
Fax (03) 9744 9010
hasties@bairnsley.com
JOINING HIGHLAND HEIFERS
Most breeders join Highland heifers around two years of age. Some will even
do
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so at three years of age,
while others will treat them as purely commercial and get them in calf at around
15 months.
Generally you want cows to calve without any problems. (What does a normal calving look like?) While Highland calves traditionally have lower birth weights, making this process easier, Highlands are usually slow maturing and so take a little longer to reach full body weight. They are not considered mature/fully grown until around 4-5 years of age. This is balanced by the fact that they live longer. We expect our cows to continue calving until they are 15-20 years old.
In the commercial world, they like to have their heifers calving at two years of age because they cull their cows at 7-8 years of age as this is when they start to become less productive, less fertile. Since we do not need to cull our Highland cows at such an age, we are comfortable that we do not need to get them in calf as early just so that we can squeeze an extra calf out of them. So we generally have them calving at around three years old.
