Foundation Females

The genetic backbone of any herd is this walking cow base.  This section of our website provides individual pages on thirteen of our foundation cows here at Applecross.  As it is sometimes difficult to tour all the herds you’d like to, we spend considerable time taking pictures of our cows (and often their dams and grand-dams), to try and showcase an accurate representation of what we see working the pastures every day.

When we decided to start Applecross, we were privileged enough to be able to choose from the heart of the Dora Lee nucleus. As cow families are very important to us, we picked four cornerstone cows to begin our herd, two of whom had heifer calves at side. These ladies represented four different (and often unique) pedigrees, that we hoped would build a strong foundation of cow families here at Applecross.   We have not been disappointed, as all four have at least 2 daughters working in our program to date.

To this core, we have selected females, via private treaty and through the sales ring, to provide some additional genetic diversity.  As breeders, it is important to us to develop our own foundation cows with the ‘Applecross’ prefix.  We use a combination of proven AI sires and walking herd bulls to widen our genetic base.

The individual pages allow us to showcase not only the cow herself, but often pictures of parents or offspring.   As the younger cows continue to develop and can often change a lot over the course of a year, the section will be updated and expanded regularly. While not near as good as a ‘tour’, we hope they provide a feel for the cow-base that we are very proud of.  The females are ordered chronologically from oldest to youngest.