Across the mantel above the living room fireplace at New Hope Farm, a row of plaques stretches.
For 40 years, Dr. John Dykers Jr. has worked to improve both our purebred Charolais cattle and the fescue and clover pastures on which the cattle live. In the farm's early years, John would come home from his medical office and work until dark, checking cattle, trimming briars from gates and watching for signs that a mama cow was about to give birth.
If John found the latter (a cow ready to give birth), he noted the time and checked back later to assure that a new calf had arrived without problems. The New Hope Farm breeding program began with the idea that with planned breeding, mother cows should be able to have a calf without assistance in a clean and well-maintained pasture. We've considered it a failure if we had to take a cow to our cattle chutes or barn to "help" her give birth.
So to achieve that goal, we carefully plan which bulls mate with which cows. We match smaller-frame or first-calf "heifers" to smaller-framed bulls; but we also match our larger, experienced cows to the most "growthy" bulls we can find. As a result, we've won awards when our careful matings have produced top-gaining bulls at North Carolina and Virginia state bull-test stations. Scattered around the nation, we have a number of happy customers who've bought our top-flight breeding bulls for their cow herds.
In order to watch our cattle at calving time, we plan brief breeding seasons of about 6 weeks in order to watch cows to assure every calf's birth is problem-free. That does not always happen, of course. But it's always our goal. Twice each year, we're excited to see how many planned artificial inseminations "took" and how well new bulls we buy or raise for natural breeding do their breeding "jobs."
Over the past two decades, we've been part of the sustainable agriculture movement. We used solar-powered fence chargers as soon as they came on the market. We were pioneers in fencing off ponds and streams to keep cattle from wading in and polluting the water. We've also created a series of small-acreage paddocks across the farm for controlled grazing to keep both our cattle and our grass in great shape. Those practices helped us win a national conservation award several years ago. We're continuing work on new ideas for green farming.
