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adventure arrowquip cattle cattle management vet work

Cattle Handling with Arrowquip

On Thursday I went to Pearson Farm & Fence in Moses Lake, WA to pick up our new Arrowquip Q-Catch 74 Series Squeeze chute. This is a new design that is much less expensive than the 86 series. I believe it’s a bit smaller and they have been running a special at $4250, so I felt the price was right and I needed one, so I bought one.

I can’t say enough good things about Pearson Farm & Fence. They helped me out every step of the way and were very good to work with. Check them out if you’re ever in Moses Lake, WA.

Arrowquip has been great to work with as well. The chute looks and operates very nicely. I have never had or used one before, but this one has so many cool features, I am glad I bought it.

I set it up right by the pen where we keep our yearling bull, soon to be steer. We have some tarps setup around his pen to keep him from seeing the other bull in the pasture. I think this greatly reduces the bellowing, especially at night. Having more than one bull can be an adventure, and I don’t recommend it.

Here is Beauford, the circus bull, on his way to becoming the circus steer:

Sure wish I didn’t like grain so much.

I setup the chute and put a bucket with a little scoop of grain inside, as well as some apple slices. I came back a few hours later and he had eat them, so I put a few more apple slices in and he walked right in. I clamped him down and gave him a tetanus shot. Much easier than I expected. Next step, call the vet and schedule the second step.

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adventure cattle cattle management dexter

Cascades Contender

We bought a new bull on Saturday – Cascades Contender. What a great bull! We drove down to Sandy, Oregon and picked him up from Cascade Meadows. Kirk and Jason are great and do wonderful things for the Dexter world! They had him haltered and waiting when we drove up and they led him into the trailer. I would never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.

What a good looking bull. He’s very compact and will allow us to breed more compact cows and beef. He’s 39″ at the hips.

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cattle dexter

Fall Calves

While it’s not the best timing – we are expecting 5 calves by October. We have had two born already, on 8/5/20 and 8/13/20. Both are black calves, one bull and one heifer. Both polled and from our exceptional bull, Cascades Forrest.

Friday (heifer) on the left and Tankerbelle (bull) on the right.
Categories
butcher chicken tractor meat birds poultry slaughter

Butchering the Meat Birds

We butchered our 39 Cornish Cross meat birds the weekend of August 8th. I don’t remember if it was Saturday or Sunday. It was great. It took us all day, since it was the first mass butcher we’ve done and we had to get all the kinks worked out of the process.

The killing cones are terrible — we won’t use those again, and I am selling 4 big ones ASAP. It’s much easier to chop the heads off or use a gallows system like what we started to use.

Next time we need a better system to transport the chickens to the butcher location. We started the tractor right about where we needed it to end, so transporting the chickens in a large dog crate took a lot of time and energy. Perhaps we’ll use a trailer next time like Pete from Just a Few Acres Farms (find him on Youtube).

The chicken tractor didn’t go as far as we thought it would! This is not a bad thing. 5 weeks of moving the cornish cross chickens at least once each day, and sometimes twice, resulted in a long stretch of ground covered, but we thought it would be twice as long. I guess math works, so we could have used that.

Getting setup with the scalder, plucker, and cooling bins.
Turn that water on – let’s get the scalding pot filled up!
Killing cones – what a joke. They are far more trouble than they are worth. Sending these bad boys to someone else.
Luke learning the ropes. Doing a great job too!

Overall, it was a good experience. We have a lot of meat in the freezer and chicken feed left over. We will do this again next year and do more so we can sell more. Contact us using the contact form from the top menu to get on the list for next year.