This week, we are talking with Saul Dorado Rodriguez of Mantono Holsteins. Sit back, relax and enjoy your passport to Spain!

Holstein World: Tell us about your farm. Number of cows milked? Herd average? Family involved? Crops grown? Do you classify?

Saul Dorado Rodriguez: Our farm is Mantoño Holstein, a family farm operated by my father, my mother and I. At the moment, we have 45-50 cows milking and 50 calves and heifers and some bulls. It is “a young” farm since we began only 13 years ago to register. But we have improved much in the last years. Our average of production in 2006 was of 11,489 kg/cow (25,333lbs.) with an average of score of 85 points (one of the best in Spain). Seventy percent of the herd is scored VG or EX, with none lower than 82 points. We sell 4-5 bulls per year to insemination centers and are flushing our better cows constantly. We put much interest in the care of our cows to try to have fewer problems, resulting in longer-lasting cows. We were the first farm in our country to sell genetics to centers of insemination of Europe 3 years ago. We like show cows with deep pedigrees, and strive to breed these types of cows for the future! At the moment, we have members of some world-famous cow families in our herd, including GYPSY GRAND, LAURIE SHEIK, BLACKSTAR DAISY, HARDTAC GINA, BLACKTAR MIRAGE ….and others. Every year, we incorporate some new family to our herd in addition to those high-type, high-pedigree cows which we are working to breed ourselves.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 9:19 am by kknutsen and is filed under Guest Blogger Series. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.