Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
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.

Categories
brooder chicken tractor meat birds poultry

Poultry out to Pasture

We put our first batch of meat birds out on pasture in our new tractor today. These birds are 3 weeks old.

First, a couple of pictures of the birds in the brooder. Here are two custom brooder boxes, each is 3’x4′. The boxes have guillotine doors that are both open to allow them access to both boxes at the same time.

Here are a few pictures of the birds in the tractor on grass.

Categories
chicken tractor chickens construction farming meat birds poultry

Pastured Poultry

We just finished building a “Joel Salatin” style chicken tractor to tractor our meat birds around the pasture. We’ve built and tried a lot of different chicken tractors, but this one is sanctioned by the master of pastured poultry profits, so it should be great!

I tried to match the original design fairly exactly. I did use 2×4 lumber for the base with some re-enforcements to ensure it will be solid.

We’ll start using this on Wednesday with a batch of meat birds.

Categories
butcher cattle cattle management slaughter

Scheduling Beef for the Butcher

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.

Categories
calves cattle

Morning at the Water Tub

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.

Forrest and Buttercup enjoying the morning sun.

Categories
farming hay

Haying the Field

There are a lot of different opinions on how to supplement hay to cattle when on pasture. The majority opinion appears to be to put out just enough hay to keep the cows from breaking out of the pasture and finding their own elsewhere. Also, most would use a hay ring or indoor feeder to keep the hay as long as possible to reduce hay costs.

An alternative, as illustrated by Greg Judy, is to hay the field, not just the cattle — and not in the traditional sense.  By hay the field, we mean to put out a lot more hay than necessary to add boost the productivity of future forage growth.  This is what we are doing here at Red Alpha Farms.  We’re putting out a significant amount of hay that the cattle can further enrich with nutrients as they eat and loaf around.  We’ve been doing this with a couple of cows and horses for nearly a year now, but more recently it has increased significantly with the increase in our cattle herd.

After years of no maintenance, we began mowing the field in January of 2019. We mowed 4 times over 2019 and that has nearly eliminated weeds, significantly increased the amount of biomass in the soil, and has turned the soil from clay and read to dark and rich. Before this year, you could count the number of mole hills in the field without taking off your shoes. Now, it would be a difficult task to attempt. Moles thrive in areas with good soil that has lots of bugs – we just didn’t have good enough soil before to support moles.

Categories
Uncategorized

Rolls of hay

Here’s Forrest and a few others tromping down a new bale of hay. He looks intimidating but this guy is a gentleman.

You can see the two week old calf in the background with her horned cow mama.