Not All Dexters are Created Equal: Chasing Data and Consistency with Meat Quality
posted on
April 21, 2025
Before we purchased our farm in January of 2023, I spent about a year researching how to raise different livestock and which breeds were the best for meat traits. That sent us on a short quest after we started the farm to find other local producers with the breeds we were most interested in, buying some of their meat, and giving it a try. After trying a few, we made our decisions to test out some of the toss-ups before we selected breeding stock.
The Experiment Phase
Beef breeds we tried: Irish Dexter. We scored some from a Dexter breeder here in Wise county. The conclusion? It was some of the most flavorful, rich, and tender beef we've ever had! It certainly seemed to live up to the hype found online about it being one of the best dual-purpose cattle breeds out there. Plus, their small size (about 1/3 of an Angus) and gentle temperament made them ideal for small acreage like ours (10 acres). Plus, I can milk them if I want and get A2/A2 milk casein genetics to help with my gut that doesn't tolerate regular A1/A1 milk. Total win!
Pork breeds we tried: Red Wattle, Berkshire, and Kunekune. We raised some Red Wattles and Kunekune hogs in our first 6 months of starting the farm and purchased some Berkshire meat to try. After we did side-by-side taste tests, hands-down the winner was the Kunekune for the depth of flavor, tenderness, and fat! (I LOVE fat on my porkchops... always have.) Bonus, Kunekunes minimally root and don't destroy your land. The one we raised was also very mild tempered compared to the teenager meat-head attitude of the Red Wattles. Don't get me wrong, the Red Wattles were sweet natured, but if they got it in their mind to run you over because you were in their way... well... I wasn't into pig surfing, we'll put it that way! Nor was I into having a 600 lb. sow and 600 lb. boar to house. Kunekunes are much more manageable in the 350-400 lb. package they offer. To us, Kunekunes as a slow-growing breed, the 12 month to 18 month grow-out period for THAT amazing, slightly sweet-flavored meat was well worth the wait. Add in the amount of fat you get off of them (they are a lard breed) and you'll have plenty of lard to use for cooking, soap making, etc. for a year or longer! The Berkshire and the Red Wattle just tasted like regular grocery store pork to us, and that wasn't what we were after.
Chicken breeds we tried: Cornish Cross and Freedom Rangers. Hands-down yet again, the Freedom Ranger became our favorite just for the overwhelming amount of juice (fat) in the meat and the depth of flavor. Yes, they took 4 weeks longer to get to processing weight than the Cornish Cross, but it was well-worth it. Cornish Cross, to me, has a "fishy" flavor to it. I seem to be the only one in my household who can taste it, so maybe it's just me. I made sure to double check that none of our feed had fish by-products in it, and that wasn't it either. I tried Cornish Cross from other farms, and I tasted it there, too. Either way, it was also a deciding factor in our selection of using Freedom Rangers as our broiler chicken of choice for our meat selection.
We've found that getting consistent results of carcass merits with chicken is pretty easy. Kunekune carcass merits were a little more challenging and we learned that selecting from a very good breeder who is constantly improving their own breeding stock selection was important.
Dexter carcass merit has proved to be the most difficult as we've learned that while Dexters aren't in short supply in Texas, GOOD Dexter breeders with GOOD cows are in short supply. That was where we made one of the bigger mistakes early on. Here's what happened.
We believed the "hype" online that Dexter beef was some of the most flavorful, most tender beef you could get. The argument was that because they are a very short breed, they have shorter muscle fibers and that's what makes them tender... shorter fibers = less force to chew. Plus, because the Dexter beef we tried was absolutely in-line with those claims, we thought that all Dexters must be consistent. That certainly didn't turn out to be the case.
Our Very Expensive Mistake
We purchased a few Dexters and started our herd in the Spring of 2023. In December of that year, we picked up a couple of steers to move some ready-to-butcher meat into the pipeline. Very shortly after that, we had 2 beef halves under contract for customers in January 2024, one with a customer who bought a Thanksgiving turkey from us, and the other was our realtor who helped us find the farm. We delivered the beef to our two customers at the beginning of March 2024. One we never heard from again, even after reaching out for feedback. Our realtor was very gracious and let us know that while the beef had excellent flavor, it was the toughest, worst beef they had ever had.
So, a couple of mistakes right off the bat... we sent a steer to butcher in February, finished on winter hay alone. The carcass yield was... OK... it was in-line with a cow we wound up culling for ourselves at the same time. The cow, for our own freezer, was also some of the worst meat we had ever had. Tougher than shoe leather, you just get tired of trying to chew it and wind up feeding it to the dog. It was that bad. So, was it the hay-finishing and should they have been finished on spring/summer grass? Or was there something more to it?
The steer was 26 months old at butcher. The cow was 10 years old. So it couldn't have been the age -- the young steer was just as bad as the old, worn-out cow!
Was it the hang-time on the rail at the butcher? They both went at the same time and were hung for 2 weeks. Lots of folks say you need to hang for at least 3 weeks to get more tender meat, so maybe that was it?
We had also read over the years that it was almost impossible to have tender meat from grass-fed and grass-finished beef and that you absolutely must use grain and corn to get tender beef. We were already committed to making sure that all of our meat was corn-free, soy-free, and non-GMO, as natural as possible for our fellow Texans. We didn't want to falter on this unless we absolutely had no other choice. Another point to make from reading what other Dexter breeders have to say online is that corn and grain cut the flavor of the beef in Dexters and to them, it wasn't worth it to feed it to them just to get "more." Yet another wrench thrown in the machine...
All of this certainly gave us pause and made us dial back the willingness to discuss our beef program with potential customers. We kept it to chicken and pork for that time being while we waited for our next steer to reach butcher age and see what we got from him.
Moving on from Disappointment
Fast forward to June of 2024. We decided to go to the American Dexter Cattle Association (ADCA) National Expo and Show since it was close by in Oklahoma that year. We ran into several breeders from Texas and elsewhere, who were telling us about using genetic testing to determine tenderness. I had run across that information in our searches, but didn't investigate it further, expecting a large expense to get testing done. Turned out that the test for Leptin (fat/marbling characteristics) and Tenderness were available rather affordably through Igenity Beef for $26 per head. Not bad! Upon returning home, I added the testing into our budget schedule and got testing done on our herd in August, just a few weeks before we were to send our next steer to the processor. His test result, whatever it came to be, was going to be our new "baseline" and our make-or-break moment with Dexters as a beef animal.
After 3 weeks, I got our test results back for our whole herd. Everyone scored 6's and one cow scored a 7. Well, what does that mean?
According to the beef tenderness scale that Igenity provides, each number score is associated with a WBSF scale number (basically, the bite force needed to shear through meat) with 1 being the toughest and 10 being the most tender. Our herd scored pretty high! After talking with some of the breeders again from the expo, a 6 is decent and is where most Dexters tend to land on the test. A 7 is difficult to obtain and very rare in cattle, not just Dexters because of the "C" allele on the CALPAIN 316 gene. Most cattle do not carry this allele, but it's key to getting your meat score into the "Prime Grade" range.
The genes that are on this test are linked to the enzymatic break-down of the meat while it hangs on the rail at the butcher, while Leptin is linked to both marbling and the "satiety" of the animal (Leptin is a hormone that tells the animals it's full and to stop eating). If the animal carries the other enzymes on the test in their genetic code, or produces a greater quantity of them, then the more the meat will start to soften and yield a more tender bite during the hanging process at the butcher.
Armed with this new set of information, we were eager to send our next steer (who scored a 6) a couple of weeks later to the butcher and then sample some cuts and see what we got. We grilled up some ribeyes and a New York strip from him as soon as we got the meat back, and we were amazed at how much better it was than the steaks from the older cow! This steer, I will note, was also finished all summer on grass, and then 6 weeks on hay because of the drought, so we had to start feeding hay in August.
Next we tried a roast. It was the most amazing, most tender roast I've ever cooked! It was right in-line with the roasts we received from the other Dexter breeder when we first tried Dexter beef the year before. Now we were starting to get somewhere... maybe this tenderness testing really is key to understanding where the best breeding lines for tender Dexter beef came from. This steer was also out of our cow who scored the rare 7, but he did not carry that rare allele. He also hung on the rail for only 2 weeks, the same as the previous two animals, yet he was tender. He had some very fine, micro-marbling in his meat, and was homozygous for Leptin/marbling (two copies of the allele).
I would rate the 6 steer's steaks as a good choice cut. Not tender, but not tough. Middle of the road. His roasts? Absolutely melt in your mouth prime. His tenderloin? Prime. Prime. Prime!
So was it the summer grass? Was it the genetics? Did he need another week of hang time to get even better meat? The other two animals we butchered were never tested. It would have certainly been interesting to know what their scores were!
One thing I knew from all of this, was that I wasn't about to disappoint another customer with terrible beef. We were officially using our 6 steer as our benchmark for our program, and knew that a 6 was acceptable now. Not perfect, but acceptable... and worth selling as grass-fed and grass-finished beef.
We wound up feeding all of that 10 year old cow we butchered to our dogs. We tried her ribeyes, her roasts, her brisket, and her tenderloin. Her tenderloin was ok, not the most tender, but still tender enough to be enjoyable. So we ate all of those. But the rest... wasn't worth the amount of effort to chew on shoe leather. That was a $750 cow, plus $300 to butcher, $200 vet bills (because we saw some issues), and about $100-200 worth of hay in her = $1300-1400... dog food. The steer we sold to our customer? It was their $800 mistake (each). Yes, we made money on the transaction, but I would have much rather had repeat customers who got more than their money's worth on a pathetic side of beef. A mistake we don't intend to make again and will go to the lengths to make sure it doesn't happen again.
That's why we test. Data is cheap. Disappointed customers are not.
Where are we today?
Fast forward a few months, and we decided to sell our bull, Concho. He was a sweet boy, we liked him a lot, and he was very much the Dexter "type", but he scored a 6 on his tenderness test. That's not a problem if we want to keep everything the same. A 6 bred to 6's will yield mostly 6's, and that's ok. But it's not improving the herd, and it's not improving the grass-fed and grass-finished beef product that we were striving to provide to our local community. We were lucky to have one cow score a 7, and when a 6 and a 7 breed, there's a 12.5% chance that you'll roll a 9. That's exactly what Concho did for us, and gave us a cute little black heifer who scored a 9 on her tenderness test! What a great send off from a great little starter bull! Thank you, Concho! Concho also corrected the legs on our 2 heifer calves that he gave us. Their dams' legs turn outward a lot, Concho's legs were too inward. Together, the calves legs are more straight. He also added a little bit of butt padding to his calves, not much, but it helped because their dams are all boney butted. Concho wasn't all that bad and did fix some things.
So, to fix our breeding, we opted to purchase AI straws from a bull in south Texas who scored a 9 on his tenderness test. AI made better sense for us since we're so small and have such a small herd. Then about a week after I purchased straws, our friends from 25 Blessings Ranch (the Gentry's) pitched us the idea of purchasing a bull together to co-own. That was a great idea! Our vet had already let us know that using AI on Dexter heifers doesn't work, and they need to calve first for them to be "open enough" to use the procedure on. The Gentry's had heifers as their first Dexters and needed a bull. We had heifers we wanted to keep and needed a bull. We both agreed that whatever bull we purchased needed to be a 7 or better on the tenderness test. So in January, I started focusing on tracing pedigrees and trying to find available bulls with the right lines in him for tenderness, just to increase our literal crap-shot chances of rolling a 7 or better.
Skipping ahead to March, I saw an ad for a yearling bull from Ballard Family Farm in Oklahoma named Elvis. Charlotte Ballard had a thick, stocky, perfectly proportioned bull available for purchase. Even better, Elvis is the son of Silver Creek Kent (sired by Daggett's Shay... another very hot ticket bull!). Kent was our favorite bull from last year's Dexter show! I looked at Elvis' pedigree and there was a line in there that gave him a very slim chance at being a 7 or better on his dam's side. (This is solely based on what little is currently known about the lines in common on the tested animals from a small group of us who are doing these tests). I asked Charlotte if she'd be ok with testing him for us if I sent her the sample media in the mail and paid for the test and the shipping. She agreed. Even if he didn't score a 7, I would have at least bought him for just ourselves because he brought so much more to the table than just potential tenderness. More on that in a bit.
At the end of March, she messaged me with the test results.
Elvis scored a 9. Hot damn! I let the Gentry's know and they were in. We were off the next weekend on April 6th, 2025 on a road trip to Oklahoma to pick up our new stud muffin of a bull, and my gosh was he just a little stunner! As Steve Campbell teaches in his cattle classes, a bull needs to be 10 lbs. of animal stuffed in a 5 lb. sack! That was Elvis just a couple weeks shy of his 1st birthday. We were smitten with him, and he was coming home to Texas. We also decided that he needed to be shown... he's just too nice looking! So he's entered into the Junior Bull category for the 2025 National Dexter Expo and Show in Oklahoma in June. (Wish him luck! He's going up against Ballard Family Adonis, son of last year's Grand Champion Bull, Ballard Family Titan).
Elvis doesn't just bring tenderness to the table (literally) though. He also brings muscle volume, correctness with Dexter conformation and frame, plus a real hard one... excellent udders on both sides of his pedigree! Using him on our herd will help out tremendously with beef yield and quality as well as replacement heifers for our herd and the 25 Blessings herd.
It doesn't really stop there though. While we were at the Ballard Farm in Oklahoma, we had a chance to walk amongst Charlotte's herd of 18 animals and saw the thickest, meatiest Dexter cows and heifers we've seen! Granted, Charlotte does feed some grain because she enters her animals into a lot of shows, but my gosh, our cows are well-fed, but they're just gangly compared to hers!
I don't think it's all in the grain though. These cows weren't fat. They were just built. Well-bred. The Dexter stock that has been available in Texas has left us disappointed in many ways except for the sweet Dexter temperament. We will certainly be going more north and more eastward in our future Dexter pedigree purchases to get some much nicer animals that will yield a small framed animal with a thick carcass and a ton of meat that's not just tender, but fills up a freezer.
Lastly, crossing Elvis with our 9 heifer, Magic. That will yield 7's, 9's, and 10's. Elvis crossed with Juniper (our 7 cow) will yield 6's, 7's, 9's, and 10's. Elvis crossed with the rest of our herd of 6's will yield 6's, 7's, and 9's. Plus bigger meat volume. Plus better frames. Plus better udders. A good bull will really bring up your herd!
As for our AI straws, I still have them on hold at the storage facility and will certainly use them when I need to change up genetics, but for now, they're staying put.
Elvis is staying at the Gentry's ranch and servicing their two heifers over the summer. All of our girls were bred back by Concho before he left and will calve around September/October this year. Then we can use Elvis on them and the two heifers we're keeping will be old enough to breed.
Our Next Beef Restock
Our next purely grass-fed and grass-finished Dexter beef steer goes to the butcher on June 25th of this year. He also scored a 6 and is a half-brother to Concho. He's also the calf of the terribly tough cow we culled in February last year. His sire is RHV Jupiter, a very nice looking AI bull. He will be 28 months when he goes to the butcher and will be the oldest steer we've sent. It will be very interesting to see what we get from him. Right now, he is stout, he is big, and he looks nice. He'll have had all the spring and summer grass he can get before the heat sets in and it dies off. This is the only real window we have to send him while he's at his peak. We will of course poison test some of his steaks before we list them on the website for sale. ;)
