The Big Romagnola Proves Itself In The Stormberg

Neville Bradfield is one of 18 South African Romagnola stud breeders who have established themselves since the Italian breed’s arrival in Africa 25 years ago. Mike Burgess visited his farm in the Eastern Cape to see how he has incorporated the breed into his mixed farming operation.

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The first Romagnolas were imported to South Africa in 1995 by Italian businessman Armando Balocco, who established a stud on the farm Rosengarten near Hekpoort in North West.

Balocco originally imported a bull, a cow with calf at foot, and two heifers. Before the end of the year, he augmented these with six more heifers. The fledgling Rosengarten stud was then developed in virulent redwater, heartwater and gallsickness veld via an artificial insemination and embryo transfer programme.

Neville Bradfield managed this pioneering Romagnola stud from 2003 to 2009. It became the source from which other South African breeders, including Bradfield himself, would procure their foundation genetics.

“It was amazing at Rosengarten,” he recalls. “It’s incredible to be involved in breeding large animals that are in such balance.”

Bradfield registered his two-cow Argyros Romagnola Stud on Rosengarten in 2006. Three years later, he took the animals with him when he returned to the 2 500ha family farm near Dordrecht in the Eastern Cape, Mount Hope, where his father still lived.

Today he has 90 registered Romagnola females that produce exceptional bulls, including the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) National Special Performance Test Bull winner for the Romagnola breed for 2018.

FROM ITALY TO AFRICA

Bradfield is passionate about the Romagnola and its history, and in 2005 attended the Romagnola World Conference in Italy. The breed can be traced back to the 4th century AD, when the Goths introduced its predecessors to Italy. These cattle became synonymous with the fertile Romagna, a region in Northeast Italy, and by the 20th century were divided into three subgroups that were sought after as draught animals.