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Getting to know you….
….our friend and partner in the English Devon project, John Forelle, stopped by and renewed acquaintances with TDA Churchill. He’s a year old now (the bull, not John) and even more than most of our herd likes to come up and check out visitors. John’s home is Folly Farm at Pine Plains, New York and he was racing to beat the snow storm that covered that area overnight.
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The pay-off….
….regular readers know that we’ve made repeated trips to southwest England in recent years and, with two American partners, have selected outstanding pure, traditional English bulls and cows…collected embryos from the matings….and imported them to the United States. And here’s the result: a three-month old bull calf out of Goldings Norah by Millennium Falcon. We just saw him recently at the farm in Georgia where he was calved and we couldn’t be more pleased. Doubly pleased. There on the same pasture was his brother, another Falcon sired bull calf out of a cow from another great, historic British herd, Essington Park. These two, with a third British bull that calved here…
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An update on our English calves…
…at Walker Century Farms in South Carolina. Bill and Nancy Walker are our partners in Trditional Devon America and caretakers of these two heifers. They’re English Devon calves sired by the great Cutcombe Jaunty out of the famous Tilbrook Cashtiller. There are three more heifers here at Thistle Hill along with two bull calves. They’re all products of our joint effort to import Devon genetics from England. Because of export restrictions, we could not import the cows we discovered, so we bred them there, flushed the embryos, brought them to the United States and implanted them in American cows. These year old calves are the result.
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This just in….
….with apologies for the picture quality, we still think you can determine the quality of the subjects. These are the next two truly pure and traditional English Devon imported by Thistle Hill farm in partnership with two other breeders. Actually, embryos were imported and then implanted in American cows, who carried them to term. These calves are now two months old, both sired by Ashott Barton Millennium Falcon in Devon, England. This has been a labor of love for John and Patricia Forelle of New York, Nancy and Bill Walker of South Carolina and ourselves for several years. Our intention is not only to make a major impact on the American Devon…
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The first one….
…not only our first calf of the season, he’s the first Falcon calf born in this country. He’s only a few minutes old here, already on his feet and walking; freshly tagged but still wet. Ashott Barton Millennium Falcon was the bull we found on our first trip to Devon and eventually was to become the anchor of Traditional Devon America, a partnership of three breeders sharing a love of Devon cattle and determined to preserve the traditional pure English genetic pool. His real mama is Goldings Snowdrop 113 (British pedigree records go back a long way.) The mating occurred in a clinic near Cambridge, the embryo frozen and shipped to the…