A Grass-based Approach To Beef Stud Farming

The Arwin Farms Bonsmara Stud, founded in 1982 in the Dordrecht district of the Eastern Cape, is run entirely off the veld. Mike Burgess visited Johan and Michael-John Greyling to find out more about their grass-based beef genetics, and the lessons they learnt along the way.

To Johan Greyling and his son, Michael-John, cattle farming should focus on low-cost, sustainable production of the maximum marketable kilograms of beef per hectare of natural grazing. Their Arwin Farms Bonsmara Stud is a product of a near fourdecade-long selection process aimed at producing functionally efficient cows that raise marketable weaners off the veld.

“You don’t start a stud to sell bulls; you start a stud to improve your cows,” says Johan. “If you want to go in a certain direction, you breed them in that direction. It’s a long process but that’s what you have to do.”

TOWARDS THE BONSMARA

The Greylings’ forebears moved to the area between Dordrecht and Lady Grey in the 1840s and settled with their span of Afrikaner oxen and a small herd of breeding cows. Their Afrikaners remained pure up until the 1950s, when Johan’s father, Michiel, bought some Dairy Shorthorns to produce milk for the cheese factory based at the nearby settlement of Clanville.

By the time Johan started farming with his father in 1968, they had 80 Shorthorn x Afrikaner cows and a vibrant sheep enterprise. Johan put Hereford bulls to the herd, and although the initial offspring, fuelled by hybrid vigour, were excellent, it became clear that the new type could not cope well with the mountains in the area. This lack of functional efficiency proved to be a fatal flaw, as an economic analysis of their productivity exposed their redundancy.

“The cattle weren’t paying,” Johan recalls. “We had two options: fix the problem or get rid of the cattle.”