SNAPSHOT PROFILE OF
DANSK SIMMENTAL AND THE BREED IN DENMARK Thank you very much to Simmental breeder, and Dansk Simmental Board Member, Henning Hansen who has kindly supplied the following overview of the breed and Society in Denmark. Henning is a well-known breeder to British Simmental visitors to Denmark and earlier this year also acted as a judge for one of the BSCS’s Virtual Show classes.
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n Denmark we have just about 3500 pedigree Simmental cows. This makes Simmental the second beef breed in the country closely followed by Hereford, and quite a bit behind the largest breed which is Limousine with about 7500 cows. Simmental is very popular for crossbreeding, so if we count the cows with minimum 50 % Simmental blood, we are about 7500. The pedigree cows are spread in about 900 herds, meaning an average number of cows as small as 3.9 per herd. In many herds you would see a few pedigree animals and the rest would be crossbred. The total number of suckler cows in Denmark is close to 90,000, averaging to just about 15 cows per herd. There are very few farms where sucklers would be the main income. This is due to the fact that most of our country is arable land, and grass land is only existing 202
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in small spots. In full time farming, the sucklers would normally be second or third, to milk or pork production, or to arable crops. A big part of our sucklers stand in part-time, or hobby farms, where the main income is brought home from outside jobs. That is why many of our breeders are known as the dentist, the baker, the vicar etc. This structure, which I believe is unlike most other countries, also has a large impact on the strategy for breeding and keeping cattle. AI is very popular in Denmark, and more than half of the Simmental calves born are results of AI. We have a long tradition for using AI on dairy cattle and when the beef breeds arrived to Denmark in the 1960 -70 years, most of them were settled in with people who were used to the AI concept. So it was an easy way to go and it actually made a
