New Cows!

I feel like we’ve been saying for 4 years (the entirety of Farmcraft’s existence) that we’ll be getting our cattle herd going soon, that we’ll have some cattle on the farm in just a couple months. 6 months later we would still be just a couple months out. No more. Today I would call it, without irony, a herd. We have a herd of 18 cattle at the moment, and the herd is a beautiful thing to see and be around.

We bought 5 the cattle about a month ago. This (and maybe the next post) will be the story of introducing them to Farmcraft and to our other cattle. If you’re a cattle rancher, maybe you’ll enjoy this perspective from naive, impractical and inexperienced novices. If you’re everyone else, maybe you’ll enjoy this because, like me until very recently, you have never touched an udder, considered how cattle are sorted in a corral, or given thought to getting cattle onto a trailer.

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We showed up at Kathryn’s farm midday. She was selling us the remainder of her herd of organic and grass fed cattle – 1 cow, 3 bred heifers, 1 bull. We have a small stock trailer (an old horse trailer) that holds 2 horses or 2 cows. This trailer stayed at home. Instead of taking 3 trips, we thought it better to hire a cattle hauler with a bigger truck and way better and bigger trailer. That way we would have the experience of the hauler to lean on, and the herd of 5 could stay together (animals become stressed when you separate animals or break apart the herd).

This is a very small farm, so no cattle handling infrastructure, per se. The herd of 5 cattle were in a square corral of mixed fencing (welded panels, pipe gates, woven wire, etc) about 40’ on each side. We set up some pallets outside the coral gate to create a “loading chute” and the hauler (very skillfully) backed the long trailer in. The hauler got out and swung the trailer gate open. Osage (the bull), without persuasion or coercion, waltzed over, jumped 18” up onto the trailer floor and walked right to the front of the trailer. The trailer has “cut gates” that close off the 3 or 4 separate sections of the trailer. Osage walked all the way forward, the frontmost cut gate was closed, and Osage was loaded. 1 down.

Osage, center.

 

The rest were more of a circus, but the cool head and experience of the hauler and mostly cool demeanor of everyone else kept things from getting out of hand. The swinging trailer gate, the entrance to the trailer and the pallets held up by Andrea made a triangle. Each of the girl cattle, by combination of luring with alfalfa and pressuring with our presence behind them, walked into the vicinity of this triangle. Then the hauler would use the trailer’s swinging gate to wedge this triangle smaller and smaller, until the limited options – to go through the steel trailer gate, through Andrea and the 5’ tall pallets, or into the trailer opening – persuaded the cow to take the last option, jumping up and into the trailer.

This was going smoothly enough, and we had four of the five total cattle on the trailer. One left. One left is not good. “Wendy”, a friendly but at this point very scared, heifer was the last remaining. Cows don’t like being alone, especially in tight quarters with a bunch of strangers around, a loud clanking steel trailer, and nothing good to eat. One of Kathryn’s children ran to get some more hay to calm Wendy down and tempt her toward the trailer.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, short and round pigs swarmed around ours and Wendy’s feet. A half dozen pigs, previously unknown to us, were under a squat shelter, and they chose this moment of peak stress to burst forth and throw another variable into the equation. They were Kune Kune’s, comically stout and with the cutest of fat faces. Kune Kune pigs are a pleasure to see, but not really at this moment. They found the whole scene very interesting and started exploring the strangers, the alfalfa and the open coral gate. Kathryn and her kids started trying to round up the pigs. I didn’t particularly give a hoot about the pigs, figuring that pigs are exceptionally food motivated and any escapees would be easy to get back into the coral with a bucket of feed. What I didn’t want was Wendy, the wide eyed and running around heifer, to leap a fence and make a drawn out, stressful and chaotic situation. I asked that we forget about the pigs for a moment, please, and focus on Wendy. We did, with Kathryn’s child walking to the trailer with a bucketful of alfalfa pellets and Wendy following, wading through the pigs to follow the treat bucket. Wendy entered the loading triangle, the hauler closed the gate and, with some protest but no choices, she jumped up and into the trailer.

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Holy cow. Got er done. Cattle loaded, a sigh of relief, but only step 1 of 10 before we would feel comfortable with these new unknown animals on our farm.

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Poppy, Wendy, Osage.

Back at Farmcraft, we had set up a receiving area for the new cattle with layers of confinement. First layer is the pipe gate coral they would be unloaded into right off the trailer. Only a wildly determined or extremely upset animal would escape the coral. Once they calmed down, ate a bit of hay and reoriented themselves post-trailer ride, we would open the gate of the coral and allow them into layer 2, a ¼ acre paddock created with 2-strands of temporary electric twine. Finally, surrounding all of this is the third layer, farm’s perimeter fence of 3-strands of high tensile steel electric wire.

The hauler backed in, opened the trailer gate and the 5 newcomers calmly filed out of the trailer and into the coral. Immediately they started eating hay, had a drink of water and were placid as can be. “Well, that’s pretty calm” stated the hauler.

 Andrea and I did some other chores then came back in an hour. The newcomer cattle were tranquilly munching hay and looking around at the new scenery. We opened the gate to let them into their ¼ acre paddock, where we planned to keep them and feed them hay for the next couple days. They filed out calmly, then hit the “open pasture” and started running and bucking and having a good ‘ol time. Calves do this frequently, and older animals sometimes too, when we let them into new paddocks. They’re excited, I guess. It’s not very relaxing though. They sprint toward a fence, surely not seeing the skinny black and white twine that suggests their paddock boundary, and when it seems inevitable that they’ll fly right through the fence, somehow they see the polywire and come to a skidding halt. They stare at the fence for a moment, then run off, leaping and bucking in another direction. This went on for a few minutes, and it was largely expected. One of the animals did get pushed by another animal through the temporary fence, but Andrea and I got her back in the paddock without much excitement.

What wasn’t expected was the bull. This is just a little guy, in relative terms – maybe 700 or 800 pounds, short and stocky. He was cool as a cucumber at Kathryn’s farm, on the trailer and in our coral. Once into the more open pasture, though, he became something we had never seen before. He barreled around at twice the speed of the girls, not bucking and leaping but just sprinting like a greyhound. Somehow he saw and minded the fences, but not without several hooves-sliding full-lockups of the brakes just inches from the fence. Then he started howling. Bugling. Moaning and groaning and roaring. We didn’t know cattle had such a range of vocalizations. Our other herd of cattle mooed back, and the bull blew and whistled and bugled again and again. It was awesome, it was terrifying. Andrea and I stood dumbstruck, completely captivated by the vocalizations and wild behavior of the bull as he stood at the fence and bugled, ran back across the paddock and pawed the earth, rolled his horns in the grass and dirt. We watched, enchanted by the primal display, washed with awe, fright and suspense. At one point the bull was near to where Andrea and I stood, and he was panting, tongue lolling halfway out.

“Think he’s going to die?” I said, mostly in jest.

“I hope so” replied Andrea.

We had brought a monster onto our farm. This beast clearly could not be controlled. Andrea was joking, mostly, but it was so intense that we truly would have considered it a blessing if the bull keeled over right then and there. He didn’t. He went on screaming and roaring, passing the climax in about a quarter hour and slowly winding down for another hour or two.

For the next few days, we fed these new animals each morning and afternoon by hand, throwing them hay across the fence, so that they would get to know us and understand that we are good – we feed them! They settled in nicely and without much more drama. A couple times a day they would stand at their fence line and our other herd would stand at their closest fence line, and the two groups would moo and bellow to each other. In a few days we planned to combine the herd, and this would surely be a great show. Next blog, I’ll describe the dramatic and primal scene of the meeting of the herds.

Thanks for reading!

PS

I never said what the new cattle are! They're 1 dexter heifer (red), 1 dexter cow (red), both of them rather small, even for dexters. 2 speckled park heifers (speckled white and black). One short and stout dexter bull, about 4 years old, named Osage Shaman on his registration papers. We pronounce it oh-soggy, which is almost certainly wrong, but fun! They all come from 100% grass herds, and are intended mostly for beef production (with a little bit of dairy or dual-purpose genetics). They are great 100% grass animals, they're very content on the hay we've been providing and even the burnt out grass they nibble at this winter, and we can't wait to rotate them around the farm on fresh summer forage. They will all hopefully calve this Summer. The calves will be raised for beef or for additional cows. Osage will re-breed them, hopefully in mid to late summer, so they calve again the next year. The time line for this stuff is relatively long. A calf won't be ready to butcher for 2 years from birth. Or, if keeping a heifer to breed, she won't have a calf until she is 2 years old, and that calf would then need 2 years to grow before butchering or calving herself. These things repeat, the seasons change, the grass grows, new calves are born, and suddenly you've got a bunch of cows that were born on your farm and every year you're butchering a bunch of beautiful 26 month old 100% grass feed beeves. It just takes time to get there. These 5 are an addition to our herd to grow our cow-calf-to-finish operation. Thanks for reading, from Farmcraft Ranch ;)