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British Blue Bull Book

British Blue breeders have come a long way in developing the ‘British Type’ of Blue, since their introduction into the UK in the early 1980’s. They recognised their future importance to the modern commercial beef market, being fine boned, heavily muscled, docile animals with tremendous growth potential, leading to a very high percentage of saleable meat. In 2006 a ‘Pedigree Breeding Index’ was been introduced, as a further selection tool.

British Breeders have selectively bred the ‘British Type’ of Blue, with great emphasis being placed on:

Ease of Calving
Short gestation period
Good Mobility and Structure
Excellent Temperament

This has resulted in the breed now enjoying the distinction of being a NUMBER ONE for AI use as a terminal sire in the UK. The experience of British dairy farmers using Blues over many years for easy calving, fast finishing cross-bred stock has led beef farmers to follow their example. Now, with ever greater use of the independent, unbiased BLUP recording data, breeders know that they can rely on a British Blue sire to produce cattle for a wide range of conditions and management systems.

This ‘Bull Book’ contains a selection of British Bred Sires with semen available for a range of markets both at home here in the UK and overseas.

If you are interested in our Genetics please make your own arrangements to contact the owner of the bull directly. If semen is currently not collected to your particular market protocol it may be possible to rectify this when future semen collections are made.

When one calculates the number of calves sired by a particular Beef Breed, the British Blue is the UK’s 5th most popular Beef sire, with over 1 million Blue sired calves being born in the UK in 2003. The British Blue’s growth in the UK is market driven, with meat processors profiting from up to 15% extra yield of saleable meat being obtainable from a Blue X quality carcase. This yield has not been at the expense of eating quality with a Sirloin from a Blue X carcase recently winning a ‘Best Scottish Steak’ competition at the Royal Highland Show in Edinburgh and The Balmoral Show, Belfast.