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!