Beef Master cattle
- The breed is recognized as a “Dual Purpose” breed, meaning Beefmasters blend strong maternal traits with excellent growth and carcass abilities.
- The cattle are heat, drought, and insect resistant. They can also survive in cold regions.
- They are moderate in size, and while there is no set color pattern in the breed, they are generally light red to dark red and some will have white mottle on their faces.
- The females are excellent mothers, raising a heavy calf each year, and the bulls are aggressive breeders.
- The beefmaster breed excels in “fertility, docility, and longevity,”
- They’re also feed efficient, requiring less feed to gain comparable weights with other breeds.
- Their coat is slick and straight.
- Beefmaster is moderately-framed, beef-type cattle. They are built much like Santa Gerts are, with the loose skin, squarish body, and defined navel areas.
- Beefmasters have “a lot of ears” on them, meaning they have larger ears than the European breeds do.
- They are also low in sickness and death loss.
- Even more impressive of the Beefmaster cow is their ability to calve out in the pasture, alone and unassisted.
- The Beefmaster cow has provided the low birth weights, calving ease, fleshing ability, efficiency, and conception percentage that is unequaled in the beef industry.
- Beefmaster cattle offer the perfect balance of convenience, breed complementarity, and heterosis retention.
The Beefmaster is a medium framed breed, with cows ready to produce their first calves from the age of 14 months and an average inter calf period of 397 days. The cows make excellent mothers, with above average milk. Calves are small at birth, resulting in birth complications being almost non-existent, but grow fast and in effect achieve some of the best weaning weights of all the breeds.
Beefmaster SA, as far as possible, aims to use scientific tools to improve the breed. All stud animals, in effect, have to be approved through the Studbook evaluation system before they can be used as stud animals.
Registered animals have to comply with high standards, with bulls being marked with a “B” on the right flank to show it complies with these standards. The Beefmaster, at the time of writing, was one of the fastest growing and second largest breeds with SA Studbook.
The colour of the Beefmaster has never really been a breeding priority, but the cattle generally have red coats.
