Educational Resources

Here are some practical resources to help you with animal selection. We discuss why EBVs are important, how to use them and why we do DNA verification on all our animals. We also describe our process for selecting Vastrap Bulls. Finally, we have an informative video on how to brand cattle.

How to Use EBVs for Selection

When selecting animals to buy or retain in your herd its physical appraisal or how it “looks” will always be important. Stockmanship, or the art of being able to judge how an animal will breed on its “looks” is an art that takes years of experience, working with cattle, attending breeders courses and learning from…

The Importance of Accurate EBVs in Animal Selection

This article explains why Estimated Breeding Values (EBV’s) are so important and how they can be used to help pick which animals to buy in order to build or improve one’s herd. EBVs supply crucial decision-making information to a buyer, but they are only as useful as the data used to calculate them. It is important…

The Importance of Parentage Verification through DNA Testing

At Vastrap Boran, we verify the parentage of every stud animal through DNA testing at Unistel laboratories. This is not only because we use more than one bull in each breeding herd (multi-siring), but also because we believe that it is crucial to establish the parentage of our animals with 100% certainty. The confirmation of…

Cattle Branding Tips

Quentin made this video on how to brand cattle neatly and efficiently. This is something that can be very hard to do if you don’t have the right equipment and good technique. Cattle branding is the primary means by which animals are identified in South Africa and it is compulsory by law to brand all…

Bull selection and performance testing

At Vastrap, we believe that bull performance tests are an important complement to other criteria in our bull selection. For the past five years we have put all our bulls through an official Studbook on-farm Phase D growth test under extensive conditions. It is notable that more than a third of all Boran bulls that…