As with many other breeds of cattle in Australia, demand from commercial cattle producers for polled Charolais is on the increase. Palgrove recognised this trend about ten years ago when we began developing our breeding program to enable us to satisfy our buyer’s demand for polled genetics.
It has been a systematic and carefully designed selection process over this time that now establishes Palgrove as Australia’s largest polled Charolais female herd with over 1000 polled breeding females joined to calve this year. In 2014, we will offer over 300 polled Charolais bulls to stud and commercial markets with this number set to reach over 550 in 2015.
We have been mindful of the environment that our bulls have to perform in when making breeding selections. It would have been simple to just cover our female herd with the most popular homozygous, North American polled sires that have performed well for breeders in the States.
However, the majority of our commercial producers target a grass fed product requiring progeny to stand on strong bone, adapt to difficult environmental conditions and have the ability to finish easily off available paddock nutrition.
These limitations narrowed the field of available sires somewhat and required a more critical look at the traits of the North American sire offerings. This led us to introduce a large percentage of our own proven, consistent-breeding polled sires into our program. We have never joined a sire to any Palgrove female based on the fact that he is polled alone, believing that every sire must fit our breeding objectives first and foremost.
As a result of this approach, we believe the cattle produced from the Palgrove polled program have retained the body capacity, substance, character and doing ability that have made Charolais the breed of choice in profitable commercial crossbreeding programs.
One of our newest polled sires, Palgrove Formula (P) (pictured above) has been performing up to all expectations, with his new crop of calves absolute standouts in their contemporary group. They demonstrate all of our benchmark traits for Palgrove-bred cattle.
We welcome visitors to our main breeding property at Ben Lomond anytime to see how Palgrove’s polled breeding program has advanced. We have more than met our high standards with paddock after paddock of females with ‘picture perfect’ udders, volume and fertility now producing the next generation of world class polled Palgrove genetics.