Success With Sussex Against The Odds

Linden Hewson owns the 2017 Farmer’s Weekly/ARC National Best Elite Sussex cow. This achievement is significant, as the Grey Maclean Stud near East London has been kraaled every night since 2002 to keep the animals safe. Mike Burgess reports.

- Mike Burgess

Sussex stud breeder and qualified chartered accountant Linden Hewson admits that when 10 pregnant stud cows were slaughtered by stock thieves in the space of three months in 2002, he considered emigrating. He was deterred, however, by his long-held love of farming beef cattle, and his determination to continue improving his stud on his 130ha family farm of Grey Maclean, near East London. Linden’s beef initiative has its roots in a few crossbred heifers he received from his father, Mellie, while still in pre-primary school. It triggered a lifelong passion that is today exemplified by a stud which produced one of the country’s finest Sussex cows (LJ 06 0209), with an ICP of 359 days over 10 calves.

This achievement is all the more remarkable considering that Linden has to spend great effort and cost to protect his stud animals, including 80 breeding females, from stock thieves.

A LOVE FOR CATTLE

During Linden’s high school years, he and his father began speculating with cattle, carefully selecting heifers and cows for a small crossbred herd. By the time Linden left school in 1981 to begin studying through Unisa, the father-son team was running a sizeable herd on Grey Maclean and nearby leased land. Then in the early 1980s, Linden convinced his father to keep some Hereford heifers – purchased near Port Alfred – and put these to an Afrikaner bull. This produced good results.

Later, Shorthorn and crossbred Shorthorn heifers were added and the herd was closed to produce its own replacement heifers.

In the late 1980s, they introduced a Sussex bull to the herd, producing outstanding two-thirds Sussex and one-third Afrikaner weaners weighing as much as 320kg at eight months.