The Jalex Herd is run by Nelson and James Alexander on their farm situated near the shores of Lough Neagh, Co Antrim in Northern Ireland.

We currently have 1200 cattle with around 400 females calving on farm per year.  Despite rising costs and diminishing prices at the other end we believe there is still a future in beef farming when producing the right quality to a high standard.

The aim of our herd is to produce quality beef cattle, with the largest emphasis on producing heifers suitable for Suckler Replacements. We are dedicated to trying to always increase the quality of our herd, following and using breeding from all over the UK and Ireland.  We use no AI with all cattle produced from our own bulls.

The herd relies heavily on the British Blue and Limousin attributes, the Limousin to keep the style, femininity and size in the females and the Blue to bring the muscling and power.

Lim and Sim cows are put to the British Blue bull and Blue cows are put to the Lim bulls to keep everything well mixed up. This is to try and produce as many females as possible suitable for breeding. We try to keep size and shape in the cows without too extreme muscling, while still maintaining a bit of Blue in all the cattle. This combination helps keep the quality of the grading and value of the male calves up as well as produce what we believe is the ideal cow.

We also run 2 Simmental bulls in the herd to keep the maternal traits that the Simmental possess of size, power, milk and docility, in addition to colour. Both our bulls are above average muscled Simmentals and are used on 1^st calving heifers, mainly red heifers, to keep the red and white heifers coming forward into the herd.

We keep an Angus bull in the Herd to bull the heaviest muscled 1^st time Heifers.  We also like the softness and easy fleshing that the female Angus can bring to the herd.

Our one Charolais bull, Alibaba is a very modern, classy bull.  We brought him into the herd as an outcross to bring some real power and size into the females but still keep the style that we are aiming for.  He was also selected for his potential to produce show calves.

Please have a look through our Herd Sires pages to view our bulls.

Our best male calves are exported live to Italy to be finished in feed lots, the rest are finished as Bull Beef on farm with the exception of a few sold as stores.  Nearly all of our heifers are retained and bulled on farm, either to be kept on by ourselves for breeding or sold on for replacements.

Our goal is always to have many more heifers coming into the herd than we need.  We want to produce and supply these quality home bred heifers to other farmers and we currently sell about 200 breeding females per year, either as bulling heifers/ springing heifers or cows sucking calves. We are constantly building our reputation for producing this female and aim to build confidence with our customers so that they can return again and again.

In 2006 we started exhibiting commercial cattle to try and show our genetics and standard of cattle to a wider audience.  Since then it has become, as many of you will know, an attraction all on its own and we have started putting some emphasis on producing show quality cattle.

Please browse through our Shows and Sales  page for more info.