Why Black Angus?
Black Angus beef has long been recognized as among the best tasting, highest quality beef in America. For these reasons, and also because Angus cattle have strong maternal instincts, calve easily, have a very calm disposition and adapt well to their surrounding environment, we have chosen Black Angus as our breed.
Angus cows are known for their inherent mothering and calf-rearing abilities. They have superior milking capabilities and udder soundness, along with high fertility, making them ideal mothers. Ease of calving reduces birthing injury and mortality and limits assisted births to less than 1% for us. We further promote birthing ease with a low target birth weight of 75lbs. Calmer animals are easier and safer for us to handle. This coupled with the fact that Angus are naturally polled (meaning they have no horns) makes them ideal for our humanely raised herd and our small staff.
Our cattle remain on pasture year round and we provide plenty of tree cover as well as man-made shelter for inclement weather. Although our winters are not typically as harsh as the Scottish where these animals hail from it was important to select a breed that could thrive in the more extreme temperatures in the summer and winter of North Carolina.
Most of our young mother cows and all of our breeding bulls are registered with the American Angus Association (AAA), an organization dedicated to the Angus breed. Many of the practical and proven advantages of Angus are a result of the breed’s genetic predictability—the ability to identify desirable traits and assess an animal’s likely genetic performance. The American Angus Association provides predictability through the world’s largest beef cattle registry and database. They provide statistical expectations for an individual animal against all the animals listed in the database using Expected Progeny Difference (EPD’s) to track everything from milk production to weight gain and meat marbling. They help Angus farmers select animals for their specific production needs (for example, we selected our mothers based on birthing ease, calf weight in the first year and other qualities) and promote the Angus breed. Find out more about the AAA, look on the Resources page.
Here are a few pictures of our breeding bulls.
Yon Bextor U191
Yon Matrix W241
Yon Predestined U67
Our name is inspired by a river and its surrounding moorlands in Devon, England. The River Taw rises at Taw Head, a spring on the central northern flanks of The Dartmoor National Park. It reaches the Bristol Channel 45 miles away on the north coast of Devon at a joint estuary mouth which it shares with the River Torridge.