Dexter beef
The Dexter is a breed of domestic cattle and is native to Ireland .
History and origin
The Dexter breed was first introduced in 1840 by Mr. Dexter, an estate inspector in County Kerry, southwest Ireland. He had selected the best wild mountain cattle and crossed them with a smaller breed of dairy cattle . In 1882 the breed came to England and Australia .
The small and robust dual- purpose cattle almost became extinct in the 1960s and 1970s , as they faced competition from modern performance cattle. The Dexter cattle are no longer threatened in their current existence, but they belong to the rare breeds.
Breeders of this domestic cattle are mainly in the United Kingdom , the USA , Canada , Australia, New Zealand and South Africa . In Europe you can find the breeders mainly in Scandinavia , Holland and Germany . The number of breeders is also increasing in Switzerland .
In the 19th century, Dexter were considered the ideal “cow of a country house owner” who produced a lot of milk for the household and one calf a year for the meat. The animals vary greatly in size, but are about half the size of a Hereford cattle and about a third of a Holstein-Friesian dairy cow .
economics
Dexter cattle are a dual purpose breed and provide milk and meat. They are quite undemanding in terms of feed and husbandry. They feel most at home in the meager mountain world and on fertile meadows . Since they are robust and hardened, they can protect themselves very well in winter. Because they are small in size, they are ideal for part-time farming . Dexter are ideal users of roughage . Usually the young bulls are not slaughtered until they are three years old. However, due to the BSE crisis, the UK banned the sale and exploitation of cattle for more than 30 months. This had the effect that the fattening bulls were fed concentrated feed in order to fatten them out before the 30th month. An animal that is not fully fattened tends to have only a small percentage of fat in the carcass .
The Dexter cattle are precocious. Therefore a first calving age of 24 to 27 months is ideal. Since the cattle have good mother characteristics, they can be used in breeding for 14 years or more . That means they can produce more calves per cow than other breeds. They produce enough milk to feed two to three calves and are very easy to calve. The ease of calving of the breed had led to a growing market in the USA for Dexter bulls, which were supposed to cover the first calving heifers of heavier beef breeds in order to eliminate the birth problems.
The animals can be slaughtered at 10 to 18 months and weigh 100–250 kg, depending on how they are fed. Dexter beef meat is of the traditional type; H. it has a higher proportion of marbled fat than the average supermarket beef. It also tends to be darker, partly due to race, partly due to the fact that the carcass is usually hung up longer, which results in a more tender and tastier meat. Some people claim that Dexter beef is sweeter than other meats.
Dexter cows can produce a milk yield of 2000 to 3000 kg with approx. 4.3% fat . Some claim that milk is naturally better homogenized than other milk due to the smaller fat globules. Dexter cows give an average of 7.6 to 9.5 liters per day.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Breed description cattle: Dexter. In: Central Documentation of Animal Genetic Resources in Germany (TGRDEU). Federal Office for Agriculture and Food (BLE), accessed on July 17, 2015 .
- ↑ Ordinance on the protection against the spread of animal diseases in cattle traffic (Viehverkehrsverordnung - ViehVerkV), Annex 6 (to § 28 and § 32 paragraph 1), breed code. In: juris. Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection, accessed on July 17, 2015 .