Lots of neat breeds mentioned here. The variety of cattle breeds is like the variety of horse breeds.
We have a local person that sells unregistered Lowlines, but they cross them with unregistered Dexters, which means the offspring are little and sold cheap on Craigslist. Too small to get good auction prices. Registered cattle get a lot more; that’s why ours were always registered. Plus, if you’re raising a heritage breed, the stock is limited, so you need to keep track of which lines to use. We still sell straws from the bulls we raised (still bringing in some $$). We’ll use AI for our Belted Galloway cows. Just not enough room to keep a bull, plus enough pastures to keep him separate while raising his weaned daughters.
They say that Holsteins devote more energy to marbling instead of trimmable fat and because they take longer to reach butcher weight the meat is better tasting, they also dry age their beef. Although there’s a trend now for grass fed beef they think that corn finishing provides a better taste, and I think their cows live happy lives up until butchering.
Holstein bull calves and heifers with repro problems get raised for beef. The most delicious beef I ever had was from a Holstein heifer named Goddess. I have no idea why she was so much tastier than any of the others over the years - maybe time of year for butchering, maybe better aging, maybe just her genes.
And here we go, it’s only 7am and I want a Goddess burger. LoL
Nice, Wilesdon! I would love to visit some farms over there. The management of small farms was perfected in your country. I wouldn’t mind seeing some of their practices. I’ve heard great things about the tastiness of both Dexter and Galloway. As a medium sized breed, the Galloways seem best for us. I would love to raise Ancient White Park, but no farms even in our region. Light colored animals do better in the heat.
I love how red cattle look, but they seem to have a higher percentage of crazy in their genes. I don’t know what it is, but the old cattlemen I know say the same thing. We handle our animals closely, so we don’t want crazy.
Most people prefer the taste of Bos taurus to Bos indicus. I wish it weren’t so, because breeds like Brahman crosses and Crackers do great down here.
One fun fact is that there is a strain of white Angus in Florida. They were accidently developed by UF.
I do find Cattle breeds almost as interesting as horses. Red cattle here are usually very placid: it is the black ones that can be feisty, thinking of Galloway, dexters.
I live in Gloucestershire and we have our own local breed, the Gloucester. A very handsome animal, described as “mahogany black” with a white dorsal stripe and tail with the white extending onto the udder and belly. They were almost extinct, down to a single herd, before serious effort was made to build up numbers once again. The best action was to tie “single gloucester” cheese to the milk from the gloucester cows. “Double gloucester” cheese can be made with generic milk.
ETA The British White is similar to the White Park in appearence but, unlike the wild Park, it is very docile. One of my favourite breeds, so pretty.
There’s a local who has a ton of oreo cows (cannot convince the SO to go for it) supposedly they are pretty easy all around.
SO has f1 baldies, we just sold off our Longhorns, he wanted to buy some more corriente and breed them to a charlois, those are also usually easy.
I remember growing up and always wanting to show cattle in 4h etc. I was always told no. Somehow managed to find a guy who’s reallllllyyy into cattle and horses :lol:
Show cattle people are very serious. I never got into that with our cattle. It’s like horses, I suppose. I like good using cattle, lol!
Ours are easy to handle and work with. They lead, load, pet, feed treats to, and you can milk them, if you want.
We just did vaccines yesterday. We have a chute and curved lane leading up to it, just like I learned from Dr. Grandin back at CSU, but the girls buffaloed me because they’re too tame to drive in. We don’t even own a hotshot. So, I ended up haltering them and leading them into the chute. They tie up as well, but I never do anything unpleasant while they’re tied. They know the chute means pokey things.
My friend was asking if our chute was big enough for Oreo cows. We got the ‘economical’ one. I told her it should work for all but the double stuff ones, lol!
A neighbour up the road from us has belted galloways. Unfortunately they just sold the farm, the closing date is coming up and the herd is gone now
I’ve always wanted to get into some of the lesser known breeds. Unfortunately we aren’t set up to keep them over the winter, we just pick up a few in the spring, keep them on grass with grain as treats, and butcher and sell in the fall. Typically we just buy and sell at auction, but if someone local is buying/selling then we’ll work with them. We’ve done some dairy crosses and bottle calves. The charolais and angus that we’ve had have done the best from a financial standpoint, the herefords and hereford x’s have been the easiest to handle.
My son showed cattle in high school and we kept, and bred, two cows. I took care of them and treated them like pets. My son got so mad at me one day when he was trying to load them on the trailer. They wouldn’t let him drive them into the pen, just kept trying to get him to feed and scratch them. I went out with a bucket of feed and they followed me right into the pen. He said I had ruined his cows. :lol:
We started with traditional horned Herefords from a reputation herd some miles South of here in 1910.
It took several days to drive them up here.
Those were wild cattle, not hardly handled, other than twice a year, calves to be branded in the spring, and weaned and the cows dipped in the fall.
Herefords were considered at that time, for large pastures of thousands of acres, with serious predators like wolves and mountain lions, with weaned calves held for another year or two, then driven to the stockyards, put in cattle train carts, with water and hay and attendants along, for several days, to travel to Midwest markets from Dodge/Kansas City to Chicago, depending on prices.
Angus would not have fared well under those conditions.
They needed more pampering, more water, more grass, were not rustlers like Herefords were, that would climb up the steepest canyon walls to reach a clump of grass left up there.
If grass was short, any self respecting Angus would stand in the feed grounds, waiting for room service.
Hereford bulls would roam and take care of business.
Angus ones stay by the water holes and wait for cows to come for a drink to check them out.
You had to drive Angus bulls away from water and feed grounds, take them to the cows.
The lazy bums would not go on their own, missing the short time any one cow is in heat, stretching calving intervals, resulting in uneven calf crops.
In favor of Angus, they were and still are the prime breed for meat, for the best steaks, best when properly finished and aged.
Also more of a hot house flower breed to manage, less athletic and resilient thru droughts than most others, on average.
In the winters on stockpiled mature, dry grasses and a protein supplement, you had to feed more to keep Angus cows in similar condition as the Hereford ones.
One downfall of Herefords, their immune system can be somewhat lacking.
They tend to catch all kinds of cattle bugs easier than other breeds, suffer more morbidity and mortality.
They get sicker and die easier than hardier breeds when it comes to their health.
Traditional Herefords are horned and know how to use those.
There were later muley Herefords bred without horns, that are more placid and gentle, but were not as good an animal in past years.
Polled Hereford breeders have improved them the past decades and are now very nice also.
I thin that the OP is already on the right path for niche beef raising, going with cattle that she can tell a story, that are heritage breeds or something makes them different than commercial cattle, to appeal to those markets.
For some years, beef production had been malingered as carbon costly to our environment.
Who doesn’t remember the old animal rights extremists propaganda of “those horrible farting cows ruining our air”.
That is not a concern today, so much more research is showing how that was not true.
The latest research in fact has been showing cattle have a neutral carbon footprint, by some measures even a positive one, bringing more than they cost in resources, mitigating carbon footprint of agriculture.
There is room for all in food production, commercial and niche producers, big farms and everyone’s little home gardens.
The world is going to need all we can produce, so there will be enough for everyone.
THIS is why there are so darn many BBQ guys peddling their special rubs on Youtube. Steaks look great, tender and well marbled but not a whole lot of taste so use the rub, but then lose all the subtle flavoring if you by some chance get a good steak. Not complaining about the rubs but that’s a lot of seasoning.
In the 1960s Hereford breeders in the UK started to use American bloodlines which radically changed the appearance of British animals, and, in the eyes of some, diluted their unique characteristics. There is now an * (asterix) in the Stud Book to indicate animals with no Amercan blood. These so-called ‘traditional’ Hereford are much more stocky, rounded and look almost like a different breed except for their coat colour, bred to be hardy, early maturing and to put on good flesh.
I do “drive by” needling for vaccinations and repro. I walk into the herd with my list and loaded syringes and walk up behind and do hamstring shots. “Oops, sorry about the bee sting!” It is rare for an unrestrained Holstein to give a crap. I’m actually a lot more careful with my drive by needling when they are restrained. That’s when you’ll get the odd one that jumps or kicks or carries on like a hooligan.
Holsteins are different, aren’t they? My first experience working with cattle was at a big dairy. These huge creatures were pretty docile, but their size made them dangerous. One wrong move and splat you went against a wall, lol. I was a calf feeder and also helped in the calving barn. Gave the heifer calves their bottle of colostrum and toweled them off (the bull calves were picked up by the local university for a colostrum replacement study, so we toweled them off and they got them within an hour or so). Sometimes, I’d get lucky and one of the other mama cows would come over and lick one of my charges before I moved her to a hutch. The cows typically gave birth and walked away.
In feedlots, pen riders say holstein steers gang up on their horses and try to play with their horses, rough play, mounting including.
When they want to get them out of their pen, they pull an old jacket or feed sack with a rope and all run behind it, bucking and playing, right out the gate.
If they try to drive them out, steers are too busy playing to even see the open gate.
Any chain or rod latch in their pens is fair game, you have to double and triple chain their gates or somehow they will open them and get mixed with other pens.
What holsteins are rarely is aggressive, trying to get you.
The world is their oyster and they love any interaction, taking it as play, which is nice.
Growing up milking one, the worst she would do was switch her tail into my face.
Here, working with range cattle, I say range cattle are way different by temperament and raising.
They would run you up a fence at the slightest provocation.
I learned that the hard way from one mad horned cow, that I ran from and barely missed me.
I was told, why didn’t you get out of the way? I didn’t expect her to take offense by me just standing in the pen.:eek:
They are kind of the “dumb bloods” of the bovine world. And yeah, mostly the mothering instinct of a rock. However, you get a mean one or the odd one that has a mothering instinct and you don’t approach unarmed.
The playful nonsense is driving me batty just lately. We have mud. We have late gestation heifers needing additional attention (Selenium and VitE, rumensin, vitamins, etc.) And they need to be restrained for all that since those injections and bolus are more than a quick bee sting. I might go out for 2 heifers and end up penning the trouble maker and then go back out to cut them out and bring them in only to have to pen the next trouble maker. “Let’s make the human run through the mud!”
It should be noted that when there is no mud there is no running. I just walk out and cut the ones I want and herd them into the barn with a few random hand signals. Jerks. LoL
That’s funny about the feedlots. I completely believe it. “My” babies loved to play. I would rub their backs as I went by and they would race in and out of their shelters, jumping and playing, before coming back for another vigour back rub. It was a good way to see that they felt good. The older babies went into big playpens and they had a great time playing. But the big milk cows could spook and smack you against the wall without even knowing what happened. Not aggressive at all, but they didn’t seem to know their own size.
We fed out a Holstein steer once. Too much bone and not enough meat. We had one of our small heritage cows that lost a calf and she was still mourning days later. Felt so bad for her that I picked a newborn Holstein bull calf and she was thrilled with him. Didn’t care that he looked completely different from her.
