Farm of the Week: Son shows good breeding runs in his farming family

He will be taking three cross-breed heifers after the title of supreme champion in commercial beef. His father, William, has the title somewhere in his collection of too many rosettes to mention. They have often been a team at the show. Now it is Jonathan's turn to take the lead, showing his own cattle under his own name.

He has raised his own hopes high, with a remarkable run this season – best commercial beef and overall beef champion at Otley, Market Deeping (Peterborough), Todmorden, Honley, Crowle and North Yorkshire, supreme champion at the Beef Expo at Hexham and best beef cross-breed at the Rutland Show and at Lincolnshire Show.

The county shows do not allow commercial beef crosses to compete for the interbreed championship, which is the only reason the Timms have not set their sights on it next week.

They also had the champion Belgian Blue at the Lincolnshire and there were some reserve titles, too, but they can afford to skip over them.

The main reason is a heifer called Tip Top, from a black Limousin-cross cow and a champion Limousin bull, which became Jonathan's in March, when he got to 21 and she was 11 months. His dad gave him a choice of birthday present – heifer or car.

"I love her," he says. "I know when something is wrong with her and she knows when something is wrong with me. I'd much rather have her than a dog."

Tip Top was bred by John White of Middleton in Teesdale, he mentions. It is part of the etiquette of showmanship to credit breeders and bloodlines.

But breeding is only a part of the art of winning shows. The formula is to breed well, select well, buy well and make the most of what you have.

A promising animal has to be washed and combed and trimmed and brushed all the way along the line to show day, so its coat flatters its lines; trained to walk calmly on a halter and to move its feet at the nudge of a show stick, so it poses to perfection; and, above all, fed to suit its age and metabolism.

Willie Timm has been playing with feed mixes for 35 years and has been passing the secrets on to his son. Grass is only a small part of it. Turns the fat yellow, he says. The customer wants it white and that takes three months of selected diet.

The customer wants the meat lean, too, nowadays, and just leaving an animal to forage is an unpredictable way of getting peak condition at the right time.

He used to buy for 20 butchers and has seen a lot of animals through from walking beef to sides on hooks. Commercial beef is produced for the butcher's eye and the butcher represents the customer. So the commercial man likes to think he is closer to the point of the whole game than anybody else.

"Without our animals, there is no need for the pedigrees," sums up Mr Timm. He means almost all the beef we eat is from cross-breeds and the pedigree business is ultimately about making good crosses.

We meet at Kirby Sigston, near Northallerton, where he and Jonathan are renting space off a Herefords specialist, Jane Walker, and there is some banter on the subject. Pedigree breeders (and celebrity chefs) always say you cannot beat Angus or Hereford, Longhorn or Shorthorn, or whatever, when it comes to a steak or a roast. Mr Timm says he would like to see that tested.

"If it is hung the same and cooked the same, I'd be surprised if many could tell the difference," he sums up.

He and his son have their own pedigree favourites. They keep Limousins and Blues, including bulls of both kinds. Some farmers are sniffy about Continental beef but there are Continentals and Continentals, says Mr Timm. The Limousin has become dominant because it has proved itself in his opinion.

In between farms, and operating on a relatively small scale, he sells 10-15 animals a week, weighing in at 520 kilos or so, to old-fashioned butchers, through the markets at Northallerton, Gisburn and Newark.

Beef prices have been dipping but he says: "Ours don't slip more than 10p. At Newark last week, we were getting 220p-230p a kilo, because the buyers want what we have. They get 70-plus per cent in saleable meat. It's good meat. And the cuts are the right size. It has become surprisingly hard to get animals this size."

Small butchers love a champion's rosette. But Jonathan has other reasons for chasing show success. He wants to do more selling for breeding. He says he has had "cheque books thrown at me" for Tip Top – and eventually, she will be a career mother.

Cross-breds for breeding change hands for around 2,500, compared to up to 1,500 for slaughter. You can buy them a lot cheaper with work still required and that is part of the satisfaction when one of them becomes a show champion.

"You are thinking – all those 10,000 animals and mine cost 800," sums up Willie Timm.

He used to farm in the Goole area, arable and beef, but sold up after a run of problems with robbery and yobbery. He and Jonathan are currently living in Leeds, looking for premises for the new busi-ness they have in mind, TWH Farming. Meanwhile, they rent in Cumbria as well as at Kirby Sigston.

In preparation for going back into business properly, they are getting into embryo implantation, as well as using live bulling and artificial insemination. For the host mothers, they fancy Hereford-Friesian crosses.

Jonathan's older brother, James, is a cocktail barman in Leeds. It sounds very different. But as Jonathan and his dad talk about their endless pursuit of perfection – a tweak of Hereford here, a smidgen of Blue there – you suspect they are all driven the same way.

CW 10/7/10