using salers, angus bulls

[sonlifefarm]

Hello, I will give a little back ground to me our farm.  We moved to our 100 acres 3 years ago with no experice in farming at which time we bought our herd of pure but unregistered Dexters.  We have built up the herd to 11 cows.  We have no barn just some bush for them to stay shelter in.  They are very hardy.  We just had out first Dexter meat and it is awesome,perfectly marbled and textured.  It surprised me because they looked so scrawny when I brought them to the butcher, my pastures are not very good yet.  
I have been reading as much as I can and came across a discussion board called IrishdextercattleforsaleUK.  On this board 2 of the owners were using salers, angus, shorthorn bulls on there pure Dexter cows.  Does any one here have any experience with this?  Would there not be allot of calving problems? What do you guys think.
Thanks, Scott

[zephyrhillsusan]

I know a guy who raises Salers in France, and I've seen photos of them. I would never consider breeding my Dexter cows to anything the size of a Salers bull. The calves are between 30-40 kg; at 66-88 lbs., that is a lot bigger than our purebred Dexter calves. So far, my biggest calves have been 40 pounds! A female Salers weighs 700-750 kg, which is about twice the size of a Dexter cow. The only Angus I can think of that I would breed to a Dexter cow would be a Lowline Angus. From what I saw, Angus bulls can get over 2,000 lbs. I would never consider putting a bull that huge with a Dexter cow. I know some dairy farmers use Dexter bulls on their heifers for small birthweight calves, but the other way around sounds like a recipe for disaster to me.

Did they give any reasoning for what they're doing?

[cddexter]

There is the story that Dexters control the size of the calf, so even if bred to a big bull, the calf will be small. Don't bet on it.

If you are bent and determined to cross, perhaps a breed like Piedmont might be worth a look. The calves tend to be small, and then grow faster than weeds once on the ground. Perhaps Allyn Nelson in Alberta might give you some info, I think he has some experience with crossing. He can be found on the Cdn registry website Canadian Livestock Records Corp (clrc), either by province or by name. Cheers, c.