The Farmers Mart Dec/Jan 2014 - Issue 31 | Page 31

TREE BRIDGE FARM

today. This young lad has
come with two bulls and he’s
got champion and reserve and
they are good quality bulls.
You need to up your game.’ Or
at least they were words to
that effect. I was very proud.
It was a big boost to our ego
and showed us that we must
have been doing something
right.’
David and Penny’s next big
step was to come around
1997-98. They had admired
a cow in the ring at the Royal
Highland Show by the name
of Nicks Delia. ‘We both
thought wow! What a cow!
We knew that we couldn’t
afford her but we also knew
that we wanted the type of
breeding that brought her
about. We bought semen from
Colin Davidson of Orkney and
it did the trick. We had some
great bulls out of semen from
his bull Dustin Hoff of Skaill.’
It brought about their next

big adventure. A trip to the
Orkneys to see Colin’s herd
first hand and perhaps,
because their herd was now
growing, they were now in the
position to splash a little cash
on where they wanted to be.
‘We went in 2000. James
(Playfair-Hannay) came too
and our daughters were in
the back seat. We bought a
bull called Skaill Duplo who
was the grandson of Nicks
Delia. He was the type we
wanted and fortunately at a
price we could afford at 6000
guineas.’
‘Skaill Duplo did a fantastic
job for us and set us even
more on our way. We
eventually sold him to a
farm in Devon because his
daughters were coming
on. We wanted to keep the
Nicks Delia thing going on
so we bought another bull
from Colin called Skaill Delta,
who we nicknamed Del Boy

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and was out of a full flushed
sister of Duplo by Rawburn
Transformer. We had Del Boy
a few years and then we used
a son of his for a year.’
‘Our next bull was to be an
outcross this time through
Donald Biggar of Chapelton,
Castle Douglas. Donald had
his herd taken out through
FMD and had restocked with
Shorthorns and Aberdeen

Angus. He’d gone to North
America to choose cows and
bulls and had then arranged
flushes and brought in
embryos. We were chatting in
Perth one day and he told me
how pleased he’d been with
his calves. We needed a bull
with our own specific traits we
look for and Donald arranged
for us to see 24 of them at his
farm.’

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