Here at Sunny View Farm we were on the fence with raising cattle at first. There has been a lot of thought that has went into this. We don’t consume much dairy because some of us are sensitive to it. This is why we have dairy goats on premises (another future blog post). This cuts our need for cattle in half. We do eat beef though so we couldn’t write off cattle completely. I found the idea of raising cattle may be very daunting. Cows are very large animals and can be very dangerous to young children.
I spent many nights researching stuff about cows. The different types, sizes, uses, types of meat, common issues, type of feed, and the list goes on. After a few weeks I eventually became comfortable with the idea of having a cow around.
The month was January of 2021 and it was a cold winter. I had no idea where to get a cow or even what kind of cow to get. Our primary focus was beef so we automatically jumped on board with getting a beef cow. We knew it was going to have to be young since we were starting it off in an 6 foot by 8 foot shed (for a few months). We then found out that beef calves are larger, more dangerous, harder to find, expensive, and harvest way more meat than we could consume within a year.
At this point I am back to the drawing board. We found Holsteins, Jerseys, and more of the smaller cows are also used for meat but are less popular because of the smaller amount of meat produced per cow. This opened up a few more doors of opportunity to us and at this point I was moving further from a strategic standpoint and closer to a “lets see what happens” attitude. We started asking around and a friend of ours got us in touch with a local dairy farm that was looking to part with some Holstein steer calves that were headed for auction. This sounded like a good fit for us and the farmer ended up being an old school mate of mine. I arranged the pickup of a small 1 week old 50 pound steer.
The farmer is looking to part with the Holstein steer as soon as possible because bottle feeding a one week old calf takes time that he could be spending on tending to the rest of his herd. We have no trailer, but we do have a Yukon SLT (the extended version) and a tarp. So we head over to our local farm supply store to buy some milk replacer (who knew there would be so many options) and a calf bottle. At this point our 11 month old son is sleeping in his car seat and the other two are watching a movie in the Yukon as we head over to pick up our calf. My lovely wife sits with the kids while I go in and meet our new cow. I come out with the calf and put him into the back of Yukon. The kids didn’t even really notice and the baby was still asleep. About halfway home the calf starts mooing in the back and the kids started getting excited. We get home and let the calf out and setup his new home. After dinner I self taught myself on how to mix up the milk replacer and bottle feed a calf. Fortunately I have experience bottle feeding our kids so this wasn’t to unfamiliar. In fact, it is surprisingly similar to bottle feeding a human baby.
The calf made it through the first night, then weeks, and then months went by. I had successfully bottle fed, pail trained, weened, castrated, and readied this calf for pasture. Small steers have very little value on a dairy farm but to my family this guy has tremendous value. I’m still not sure if that farmer knows how much this little Holstein means to our Homesteading journey. We now have three cows and each has their own unique story.