Whitesell Farms Wagyu

Meet Our Gals!

Our momma cows are at the heart of our operation. We started our Wagyu adventure from the basis of a commercial cattle farm and our dams reflect that beginning. Many have been with us for a number of years and are old hands when it comes to moving about our pastures and working areas. As we continue to produce F1 (50%), F2 (75%), etc. Wagyu cross heifers, we are keeping the best examples as replacement cows so that we can eventually increase the native percentage of Wagyu influence in our herd. In 2014, we took the plunge into fullblood Wagyu cattle with the purchase of 3 cows from the Lone Mountain Wagyu operation in New Mexico. We have also been in the market for high quality full blooded Wagyu embryos to 'grow our own' breeding stock. In 2015, we also took the step of replacing our Hereford backup bull with a full blood Wagyu bull. This means that every calf produced on the farm will have Wagyu influence. The end goal is a blended operations that offers a range of options from F1 to fullblood Wagyu beef.

In the early days, this page had an entry for each cow on our farm along with the calves they had produced. As we grew, it became impossible to keep up with all of them and the list got completely out of date. One day, we plan to update this page with our flush dams, which seems to be a more reasonable number of entries to keep up with.

The majority of our Dams now show up in the registration books of the American Wagyu Association (AWA). The AWA website has a lot of great information on Wagyu cattle and you can browse the herd book as well. If you search the herd book for cattle whose names start with WF%, you will see a number of our dams. Those with an ID number starting with a B are our cows with no Wagyu influence, but that have Wagyu cross offspring. Cows starting with RE are slightly less than 50% Wagyu since we made the mistake of using a bull the first year that was only 99%. Our PC cows are full F1 (50%), F2 (75%), or F3 (87.5%) Wagyu cross cattle. PB cows (when applicable) are F4 (93.75%) or greater and are called Purebred. Our FB cattle are 100% Wagyu and are called Fullblood.

Our daughters are responsible for providing the names for registration. They tend to pick themes; for instance the naming theme for the 2013 crop of heifers was 'Disney Princesses'. Next up was a tour through the Greek goddesses. Recently, we've been registering pecentage heifers named after flowers and fullblood ones after deserts.