Why Our Own Beef And Do We Make Money?

Anyone that spends any time around us gets to hear about our cows on a regular basis.  We endearingly talk about them all the time, providing almost daily reports of what they're doing and the latest pasture gossip from previous day's activities.  Sometimes it's a simple morning feed report, or sharing a story of getting mauled by an overly affectionate cow that wanted a good scratching and took it upon herself to initiate by rubbing her neck on a leg.  Sometimes it's as mundane as explaining why there's hay on our clothes.  Yes, the cows get fed before coming to work and I hope that's just a little mud on my shoe.  Most everyone we socialize with knows our cows by name, and I'm sure they're thankful we only have five rather than a herd of 100 to hear about.

I'm also certain our discussions spark some curiosity and we occasionally get asked why we raise our own beef and do we make any money from it.  The money question is fairly easy to answer, no we really don't make any money off our beef because we don't have the land resources to produce our own hay and to have a herd big enough to generate profit.  Sure, we'd like to make a little money to help support the farm but we're lucky if we break even with all of the associated expenses of buying and caring for the cows we do have.  At best it helps offset the cost of our beef we consume.

Why we raise our own beef is the bigger question, because there are a lot of reasons.  Knowing how the meat we're consuming was cared for and what it was fed are the primary factors.  We literally know the beef that hits our table, and have the utmost respect for where it came from.  In this modern day as consumers we're so removed from our grocery store food supply that we have no idea where the meat and produce is actually coming from.  It may have a label with country origin, but that tells so little of the story of that food you really have no idea what you're eating.   Also, since we've moved to our small little homestead we have enough space to raise a few cows and that experience is an opportunity that most don't have.  Raising cows has truly brought joy to our lives.

Some of the biggest challenges we have on the homestead is trying not to do too much and strategically planning all the farming activities we're undertaking.  Cattle raising can be a lot more complicated than simply beef or dairy, there are far more options than you might think of.  To name a few, there are: calving operations, registered breed operations, feeder lots, show cattle, rodeo cattle, dairy cattle, micro cattle, mini cattle of various breeds, and probably things we haven't heard of.  Our original goal was simple, to have a few standard sized cows to produce calves for beef and raise them to processing age.  We'd sell any heifers that dropped to buy feeder steer.  We didn't want more than 6 head of cattle in the pastures at any given time to keep the impacts of grazing and winter damage low, and overall pasture health to a reasonable level.  We've already made a few mistakes with our first cow selections, the Jersey-Belted cross was probably not the best idea since we're not likely to start our own milk harvesting.  We also bought a cute little Hereford calf that's promising to be on the small to mini frame size, so we're now considering focusing on mini cattle.  Plans can change on the farm, you've got to be ready to roll with the flow.

So overall the answer to "Why are we raising beef?" is simple, we're loving it!

Winter Calving & Do We Have A Mini!

We're getting down to the last couple of weeks of gestation for our Limousin cow, Becky.  She was artificially inseminated (AI) March 31st from an Angus bull named Thunder.  She has a due date of Jan 8th, 2020 but could drop a calf as early as Christmas.  We'll likely name the calf Thunder Struck, it'll be a Lim-Flex (Limousin-Angus cross).  This will be our first calving on the farm and we're hoping for a smooth, non-complicated delivery.  We'll manage either way but ideally Becky can manage this, she's looking large and in charge as you can see from the pic below taken a few days ago.  Our Jersey-Belted X just barely in pic on the left is due at the end of February.  Unfortunately she failed to take on two AI attempts and we finally got lucky (or she got lucky) when our neighbor had his Angus bull in an adjacent pasture and allowed us to have her bred to his bull.  So in a couple of months our herd will have grown by at least a couple of calves.

As we've been watching our cows and herd grow we've noticed our cow Belle doesn't seem to be getting any bigger.  She's about a year old already and about as big as a six month old calf, in fact our six month old Angus steer just pasted her in height.  You can see how tiny she is in the pic above, and honestly we're hoping she stays that small and also hope she's a viable heifer so that we can breed her to a Mini Hereford and start our own Mini Hereford operation.  We'll have a better idea in a few months if she's going to get much bigger, and be patient because it takes a bit of time to build a herd.  Here's to hoping we have a Mini!

Too Busy to Blog, But Still Doing Stuff

I suppose if my writing were good and attracted readers, and if I had amazing things to write about that peaked interest, I might be a good blogger.  But alas I'm a bad blogger, either too busy to commit the time and effort for posts or lacking the whit to conjure up tantalizing or important topics enticing followers.  I never intended my blog to be the real attraction, it's merely a web space to share info on our homesteading and farming adventures.  Besides, we're not a 'commercial' operation, we're just doing stuff.

Since last winter's fence work and the progress on our round pen in the spring, we've done a few things. Maybe more than a few things, like: storing hay for winter, building a goat pen, acquiring a few goats, breeding a horse, processing honey, hatching quail, building a quail grow-out hutch, losing  a dog and a horse, canning peaches, started a batch of peach mead, growing the cow herd with a new heifer and a new steer, and now we're getting into the apple processing season.  We did a bit of riding the horses, routine maintenance, and a little fishing in-between. Most of what we do is seen in real-time on facebook with posts to our individual pages or our farm page, so posts here or sort of redundant some of our farm fans.

This year we opted to buy more hay in the spring to get us through the winter feeding for our horses and cows.  We'll likely need to get more hay, but ~400 bales should be a good start.

Putting hay up in barn

Cleaning up after stacking

We also picked up a few dwarf Nigerian goats to start a small herd of milkers so we can make goat cheese and soaps from goat milk.  We had to build a goat pen to accommodate our new farm family members.

Bunk feeder

New goat pasture

Fenley, Maple, and Granger

Double trouble, our does

Homemade gate latch

It seems we're always adding new animals to the farm, so why not a new horse.  Last year we tried breeding our maiden mare, but she just didn't take.  The stud owner gave us another shot this spring so we opted to have our paint spend a few weeks in their pasture to ensure she naturally cycled into heat; and well, that seemed to work.  Thankfully the stud owner was patient with us and our mare took finally!  Her foal is due end of April, beginning of May 2020.

Placental attachment to uterus ~40 days

Anya, our prego paint mare

Last year we started a hive, but didn't get any honey.  We're new to bee keeping so we expected a slow start.  We also believe that was partly due to the crazy yellow jacket season we had and the impact they had on our hive robbing it.  In fact, for awhile we feared they killed off the hive to the point it wouldn't last over winter.  This spring we added another hive and had high hopes for the old hive because it was very active, but it turned out they made a new queen and the hive swarmed.  Hard lesson for new bee keepers.  They left behind a lot of honey though, so we harvested that and it turned out our new hive of Italian bees were super producers and we were also able to harvest from our new hive too!

Filtering raw honey from extractor

Our new labels

Over 3 gallons of honey harvested

A grey fox came to help clean off the frames

Since having a lot of animals is something we planned on doing on our farm, I decided to hatch some quail.  They're small and don't take much space to manage so I thought it would be an easy endeavor.  I bought 3 dozen fertile eggs and ended up with 20 quail chicks hatching, so it was a fairly successful hatch.  I chose cutornix jumbo brown quail as they're the fastest growing and largest quail suited for meat and egg production.  I had to build a grow-out hutch as well and we're hoping to have farm fresh quail in the near future.  I'm collecting what I hope are fertile eggs already in hopes of hatching another batch soon.

Eggs ready to begin hatching

Quail chicks in the hutch

Grow-out hutch near completion

Quail fully grown at 8 weeks

Our first quail egg!

Along with all the positive things we've been doing, we've had to deal with some rough patches.  In the late spring we lost one of our dear family members, our little chihuahua Autumn.  She got out of the yard and crossed the road and was hit by a car trying to get home.  It was heart breaking and a loss we still haven't gotten over with.  She was a special part of our family and taken too soon.  We also recently lost one of our horses, Cody.  He unexpectedly passed from colic/twisted gut and wasn't an easy thing to deal with both emotionally and physically.  Cody was only with us a year and he had just started to really bond, so it's been difficult.  

Autumn, pure love

Cody boy

Keeping busy helps distract from focusing on the sad days, and thankfully we have lots of good memories which helps us cherish the time we had with our loved animal family members.  We have plenty to do and preserving food is one of those things that keeps us busy.  On the weekend Cody passed we had picked up a few cases of peaches so we had lots of canning to do. We got so caught up in canning them we forgot to set some aside to make a batch of peach jam, but that didn't stop us from starting a batch of mead.  With all the honey we harvested I set aside enough to make a six gallon batch of honey wine, and why not add some of those peaches for some flavor.  Peach flavored honey wine!

~40 quarts and 12 pints of canned peaches

Peach honey wine fixins

Measuring potential alcohol, 12.7%

We've also been busy with working on growing our cow herd.  Earlier this spring we added a Hereford heifer calf and more recently new an Angus steer.  We now have five cows in the pasture with two pregnant heifers.  Our limo heifer, Becky, is due mid January and our jersey-belted cross heifer is due end of February.  We're hoping for a couple of bull calves but will be happy with healthy calves.  We're planning on running 6-7 cows on the pasture on a regular basis.

Cow Belle, our new herd heifer

D2, our latest Angus steer

That brings us to apple processing season.  Recently I finished making a few new apple pallet totes so we can harvest our apples and move them around more efficiently.  This past week has been raining so we've only gotten one tote filled so far almost finishing harvesting one tree.  A few more trees and couple more totes to go, then lots of cutting, crushing, and pressing for cider!  We'll set aside a few cases of quality apples to make apple sauce, dried apples, apple pie filling, and apple butter.  Lots of work in the next couple weeks in front of us.  That should have us caught up on our doings for now.  Keep checking back and maybe I'll start posting more frequently!

Shaking apples from top of tree

Loaded trees

Moving pallet of apples around

Just a pallet of apples on the porch

80' Round-pen on $500 Budget

5-wire 80' Round-pen

We finally finished building our round-pen, or should I say it's finished for now.  Eventually, we may add some lumber rails, but for now we're satisfied with the 5-wire setup.  I'm not going to go into details with step-by-steps, or how-to build details for the round pen because there are already a ton of great how-to videos and pages that provide those details, I'm just sharing a few pics here of what we did and our materials list to give you another reference for your own design.

It's fairly simple, figure out how much space you have and how big you want your round-pen.  The bigger the better so you have room to work your horses.  For our space we settled on an 80' round-pen and found the center, measured out a 45' piece of rope to help with spacing the posts tacking it to the center of circle, then measured the posts with about a 10' spacing.  We started with an 8' gate opening so we could drive a tractor through to work the ground for good footing, so we set those posts first.   We set the posts in late winter while the ground was still wet and soft.  I used a chainsaw and trimmed points on the end of each post and we drove them into the ground like nails using the bucket on the tractor as our hammer.  It took us less than 3 hours to drive all 25 posts.

Once the posts were set, we hung the gate and that's about as far as we went for a couple months.  Afterwards I tilled the ground within and did a bit more leveling to even out a few small low spots.  We didn't want to hang the wire until the ground was hard and posts were set firm.  We came back and tampered around posts and ensured they were straight up.  I couldn't find the plastic coated wire locally, had to order from Tractor Supply Co and it took about a week to get here.  All other supplies we bought from Wilco Farm Store when they were on sale.

It took me about an hour and a half to measure the staple spacing and hammer in all the staples, then drill and tap the eye-screws.  I did that while we were waiting on the wire to arrive.  Once we got the wire it took 3-4 of us less than two hours to sting the wire, trim and tie-off the ends, and apply some tension.  We did take a break to play with a gopher snake that visited while we were working.  That's pretty much it for the pen itself.  And that's what a $500 round-pen looks like.

Line strainers bolted to eye-screws

We'll want to put down a layer of gravel and then river sand over the top for footing.  It will likely take a couple loads of 3/4 minus, which we'll till into the top layer of soil to provide foundation and drainage, then a couple truck loads of river sand or one truckload of 1/4 minus and a truckload of river sand.  It all depends on how well the 3/4 minus tilled finishes.  The small crushed rock provides better traction over the river sand but too much is harder on the horses feet.  The footing is going to cost another $600 before we're finished I think, but we'd still have that cost even if we'd spent $1,800 for steel panels.



Materials List

25 qty 4-6" x 8' treated post - $7.99 ea. ($200)
8 lbs 1.5" barbed staples - $16.99
6 rail 8' utility gate - $79
Polytuf 12.5 ga. coated high tensile wire 1,350' - $179
5 qty Line strainer - $3.49 ea  ($17.50)
10 qty Eye-screw - $1.29 ea ($13)
5 qty 1/4" x 1' stainless bolts ($0.80)

Getting started

Posts Hammered In

Fencing Project 1 - 2019

We have over a mile of fencing on our property, dividing it up into three pasture areas and the farmhouse and working area.  When we bought the place we knew the fencing was old and in bad shape, but we had some hope it could be used at least a little while since the pastures were being leased by a local cattle rancher.   Last year we stretched nearly 400 feet of fencing to divide the big pasture, which gave us the three pastures we have now allowing us to rotate animals.  Unfortunately, hope doesn't keep the cows contained.

Our last Angus steer (Ron), and even the heifers occasionally, demonstrated how easy our fences were to breach.  We also recently learned from some of our neighbors that the rancher's cows would find themselves wondering the roads periodically, so the fences haven't been doing their job for some time apparently.  We did our best patching it up after each incident of Ron's escape, and even tried a hot wire in spots, but the overall condition of the fencing is just too much crap to work with.  So this year one of my (our) big priorities is to work on replacing the perimeter fencing so we'd worry less about cows getting out and could focus more on all the other work needed on the farm.  Fencing isn't cheap, and we have a lot of it to replace, so we decided to focus on the worst perimeter sections first this year and wrap up the remaining perimeter fence next year.  So, the west and south sides are where we started--roughly 1,600 feet.   That amounts to about a $1,200.00 truckload of wood posts, t-posts, rolls of fence, barbwire, staples, and clips. 

Truckload of fencing

  

First perimeter section to tackle

The work began in February, the weekend of the 23rd right before the big snow storm hit.  I spent a rainy Saturday and a rain-mixed-with-snow Sunday getting started on the southwest corner of the pasture.  Unfortunately, we didn't get any pics using the tractor bucket to drive the corner posts in on the south side of the creek.  We placed some heavy planks over the creek creating a makeshift bridge, and drove the tractor onto them reach the posts on the other side..  It was one of those "hold my beer" moments and Theresa was certain the tractor and I were going for a swim.  Several whacks with the bucket later the posts were driven into the soft creek bank and no mishaps occurred.  It was onto driving t-posts by hand before the heavy snowfall.

Tractor in the snow

Taking a moment to enjoy the weather

T-post driving

The snow storm slowed us down a bit, we lost our power for a week so there wasn't much fence work going on with all the snow on the ground.  We also had to deal with a lot of cleanup with downed tree branches, so after another week of cleanup work and waiting for the snow to melt we didn't get back to working on the fence until around March 9th.  That following week we finished the southwest end of our south pasture, and then moved onto working on the west end.  Thankfully, our neighbor on this side wanted to pitch in and help.  With his assistance we made quick work of installing the fence on between our properties, and installing a good neighbor gate.  That gate will come in handy if we ever need to help each other with pasture work or deal with cows getting out.

West end of South Pasture

Good Neighbor Gate

With the west end finished we were down to just the southeast fence on the upper pasture.  This fence line has a couple old apple trees right on the property line and also adjacent to an old Christmas tree farm field left to grow out of control in the upper corner.  That meant I had to deal with a big apple tree branch that was growing over the line about 18" in diameter, almost seemed like half the apple tree, and a bunch of 6-8" saplings of various species.  I believe they were mostly wild cherry and maybe a few alder. A few hours of chainsaw work, piling, and hauling away to a big burn pile; we ere ready to finish the last stretch.

Thankfully I got the last of the major work wrapped up before all this rain started.  I haven't gone out to take pics of the finished product because of all the rain and foul weather.  Theresa and I did walk the finished fence line last night after work, looking for any old fence wire still in the pasture or other trash from our work.  Only found a few pieces to clean up and things are looking good.  It's an incredible relief not fretting about the cows while we're away.  Having good pasture fence relieves a lot of stress.  Now if we can only get those cheeky heifers calving then we'll be in business!

Preparing for the Worst

Preparing for emergencies on the farm is something we've thought about and I can say we've gotten at least a little prepared accumulating some necessities over the years, but the recent snow storm that knocked out our power for a week and even longer for others, woke us up a bit.  We have a nice 4500W generator we've had for awhile, but it only provides 120V service and has never really been used until now.  We never lost power in our old house, all the utility in our suburban neighborhood was underground.  Even if we had lost power in the old hood we had City water to rely on so little to worry about unless a water main broke.  On the farm we rely on our own well, so water supply is a little more vulnerable because it's gone without power.  Our well pump is also 240V service, so the generator we have couldn't help us.  We're also at higher risk for fire and medical emergencies because of our remoteness, so emergency planning is a bit more important and we're stepping up our game a bit.

In general we weren't completely unprepared.  With all the canning and food storage work we've been doing our pantry wasn't a concern, we have plenty of food stored away.  We also have been keeping cases of drinking water on hand, so we had plenty of fresh water.  Oh, and hard cider...yep we still have enough hard cider on hand to get through an emergency, so that was a big relief!  Unfortunately, without the well though our 50 gallon pressure tank didn't supply many flushes in the bathroom before running dry, so we had to carry water buckets to fill the tanks for flushing.  It's a good thing we have the 300 gallon water tank for rainwater catchment, came in real handy.  Some of the other things we relied upon was our old kerosene heater that we used to assist keeping the house warm along with the pellet stove we ran off the generator, and I have a 30 year old white gas single-burner camp stove we put to use to make coffee and cook simple meals.

The experience got us thinking about the things we can change for next time, to maintain a normal level of comfort, like a generator upgrade to power the well so we're not hauling water and a kitchen stove that doesn't rely on electricity.  We were actually shopping for a new generator before the snow storm hit and almost bought one, but as luck had it we passed because we didn't have the chance to do any research.  Thankfully the power outage gave us new motivation so we dug into the specs and options of new generators and found ourselves a dual fuel option that can run off propane or gasoline.  With intentions of replacing our electric range with a propane gas stove having a generator that can run off propane is a big plus.  Also having both 240V and 120V allows us to power the well and a few circuits on the house.  We're going to have an electrician install a transfer switch for a few emergency circuits in the house to cover the refrigerator and some lights.  It will be convenient having to only worry about one extension cord to the transfer panel.

Generator Upgrade - old > new

The next big item is finding a new gas range for the house.  We've wanted a gas range for years, it's more enjoyable to cook with a visible flame and we won't have to worry about a power outage.  It would also be nice to have a griddle burner and the edge to edge cooking surface.  The research has begun, just need to figure out if we want to deal with 100lb propane tanks or get a 400lb tank with delivery service.

That's pretty much it for our big items.  We still need to keep our emergency medical supplies on hand and feed for the animals.  We're also upgrading our rainwater catchment system, adding a 2500 gallon tank and plumbing to the barn and garden.  This wasn't intended for emergencies, but I could imagine the potential for power outages in the summer because of forest fires, or having a tank of water on hand in an emergency fire of our own.  The farm work continues.

Rainwater catchment tank

Our First Beef

Farmers Helper mobile slaughter

We recently finished our first steer for processing, and have sold our first beef.  We only sold a quarter to help offset the processing cost and to ensure we have enough beef for our own freezer.  We'll likely be canning some beef stew as well to have a bit of fail safe food storage.  It was a far better experience than we had with our hogs out in Mohawk.   Farmers Helper (FH) is an excellent processor to work with, and will be our go-to handler for future processing needs.

The guys that came out to perform the slaughter were skilled in their craft and made quick work of skinning and halving the steer.  They were in and out in less than an hour.  Theresa was a little surprised that the chickens swooped in to drink the blood, but the FH crew told her it was normal.  Theresa helped take care of the waste with the bucket on the tractor and it got buried under the compost pile.  We kept the hide and are working on cleaning, drying, and tanning.  It's a big hide and a lot of work goes into preserving it.  We hope to make some chinks or other useful items from the hide.

 Our steer was on the smaller side when we opted to harvest, but still ended up with 506 lbs of hanging weight which produced nearly 400 lbs of excellent fresh grass fed beef.  We're pleased  with our finished product and glad we didn't greedy and go for bulk rather than quality.

Six of the eight tubs of beef

loading beef into boxes

Perfect marbling, excellent beef top loin steaks

Now that we have some experience under our belt, we'll be working on developing our heard and pasture maintenance to establish our own grass production for winter hay.  Still a lot of work ahead, but we've been busy.  Recently we finished the head-gate and chute so we can work with the cows, to administer vaccines and inseminate our heifers.  We also picked up a new Angus steer, we named R2, so we have more beef to process at the beginning of next year.  With the AI tech coming out this Saturday the 26th to inseminate we should have calves on the ground this coming November.  The herd is starting to grow and the pastures are being put to work.

Chute added to head-gate

Adding chute bracing, with Patty licking on...

R2 in holding pen