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.
Category: cattle
Scheduling a beef for butcher is a tough one. We’re working through the process for the second time now, for our own beef. The scheduling part is something you have to know months in advance. If you had an emergency and needed to get an animal in “right away”, I don’t know if that’s possible. We’re scheduled about 6 months out.
As far as running the business side of things, it will set a requirement to get a good deposit and commitment from customers for a share of the beef. The customer must then budget for the balance of the payment when the beef is ready for pick-up.
In an ideal world, a beef would be slaughtered at the end of the grass growing season. The taste and texture is best when the animal is in the growing phase of the season vs when nutrients are getting less nutritious or less available, in general. The age of the animal is less a factor than what (and how much) it’s eating at the time. All fall slaughter dates are very difficult to get unless scheduled 1 year in advance. The best time to slaughter is September/October as grass growth drops off precipitously in most places.
We initially had some concerns with putting a new calf in with the bull, but those concerns were completely unfounded. This bull is great with everybody. Here is our 10 year old herd bull Forrest with our 6 week old heifer calf.
We’ve been looking for a good used head gate / squeeze chute to help with basic cattle handling tasks without a lot of luck. We needed to take some DNA samples of 3 calves to help with the registration process with the ADCA. This process requires that 30-50 pieces of hair with roots/flesh attached at the base be taken from each calf and send to the farm we bought the cows from so they could get them registered and transferred to us.
While looking around on craigslist yesterday, I noticed that a neighbor had a mobile cattle handling business – Colson Cattle Company. I went over for a visit today and this afternoon they came over and helped us get all of our DNA sampling from the 3 calves done.
It wasn’t even a minor adventure, no injuries or broken equipment — always a good thing. I don’t think the calves are too worse for wear.
Colson Cattle Company has state of the art mobile equipment from Arrowquip that made the process much easier than it could have been without it. If you’re local and need handling help, call them!
We had Mike Erickson’s Mobile Slaughter come out yesterday and slaughter Rusty, our first bull. The slaughter process was very fast and efficient. I honestly can’t see how those businesses make money, with all the travel and equipment maintenance they have.
We got a call from Salmon Creek Meats last night saying he weighed in at 632 lbs, hanging weight! That’s great for a grass-fed Dexter bull. The carcass had lots of fat on it, really good looking. I kept all the scraps for compost, dog food, and kept the head/horns and will clean that up as well as I can.
The slaughter company typically keeps the head, hide, and possibly other parts. If you want to keep any of that, be sure to discuss it before, or at the time of slaughter. It will save you from a misunderstanding. I kept the head/skull from this bull because it was my only horned bull that I will probably ever have and I want to dry and hang it.
Categories
First Cows
We’ve had Rusty and Luna for 6 months now. Rusty is a 3 year old registered Dexter bull and Luna is an un-registered 2 year old dexter heifer. We believe Luna is due with her first calf in January.
This is what they looked like on the first day:
Getting these cows home was a big adventure. We nearly had Luna crawl out the window of the horse trailer and had to haul them separately.