Red Alpha FarmsThere seems to be a shortage of research on whether grass finished beef is better than grain finished beef. I won’t go into the politics of the issue, but it’s easier and cheaper to grain finish large amounts of beef, from a feed-lot management perspective. It takes a lot of ground or hay to grass finish a beef, relative to grain.
Here are some resources that will help clear it up, with a bias toward grass finished beef.
We have 5 Dexter calves so far this year. We expect 2 more before calving season is over, but they are not all on the right schedule yet so we’ll be calving until September. Hopefully we can be more lined up for next year, although we’ll have one later than we want.
So far we have 4 red calves and one black one. Our red bull calf has the wild red gene, which gives him the black nose. This picture was taken before the 5th was born (this morning).
Also, we just started moving the cows onto pasture today. It’s been cold, rainy, and muddy and the grass didn’t grow well enough to let them out before May 11th.
Calving season has finally begun for us this year. We would like to get everything timed for May, and we are working toward that, slowly. Here are the first two, born yesterday, both bulls.
We had a red bull, born out of Cascades Contender and Woodlands Maybelle and a black bull born out of Cascades Contender and an unregistered cow – Buttercup, who is our favorite cow.
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.
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.
