Birth weights of the first Fullblood Japanese Black Wagyu calves at  “Westholme”, Tarana NSW augur well for pre-weaning performance. These calves born in April and May 1999 out of beef-breed recipients, mainly Angus, averaged 30.6kgs at birth with a spread between 22 and 44 kg in weight. These results are remarkably consistent with 1998 born calves in the USA to the same 3 champion sires.

These weights are just slightly lighter than those collected on straightbred Angus calves that were previously run at Tarana.

Birthweights for Westholme calves in kgs.

There were only small differences between sires in progeny averages for birth weight. Three sires were represented being 001 Hirashige-Tayasu, 002 Itomoritaka and 003 Kitateruyasu-Doi representing the Kedaka, Fujiyoshi and Tajiri strains respectively. However because all embryos in the Westholme programme are from matings exploiting the different strengths of the donor sires and dams from different bloodlines, the result is actually very similar for matings by each sire.

For example some of the heavier Kedaka females are mated to the lower birth weight potential Tajiri sire 003 and Tajiri females are mated to the more powerful Kedaka line sire 001 thus balancing the genetics for birth weight.

Since only Westholme embryos are implanted at “Westholme”, Tarana it is impossible to benchmark these results with general Wagyu performance in Australia. Some inference can be made however form data from “Gooree Park” an Associate to the Westholme programme.

Gooree Park has weighed 27 calves from Westholme embryo matings. Their average showed 29.3kg with a similar range from 22 to 44 kg for calves born at a similar time. Fullblood embryos calves procured from JVP in USA were born just before the Westholme-bred calves at Gooree Park. Out of similar recipients, the average of the JVP-bred calves was 22 kg at birth. These calves were by Kikuyasu 400 and Fukutsuru 068 and the matings were mainly Tajiri-Fujiyoshi.

The strong performance of calves at birth at Westholme has been followed by greater than 1-kg daily gain. For future updates on these calves keep watching the web site.

For the Westholme Tarana calves the following graph shows 100 day weights although all calves were weighed on 10.8.99 and therefore this is an average 100 days not an exact 100 day weight result.

Average 100 day weights for Westholme Tarana calves