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I have always felt that when you have cows you are officially living on a farm! I don't know why that has been the criteria in my mind for so long, but Y'all, I am, officially, living on a farm. Ha ha.
When we were looking at getting some cows we already had some breeds in mind, and the Irish Dexter was always at the top of my list for reasons I will go into in another post. We had been looking for a few weeks and we came across a listing on LSN for some Dexter cows with calves that we already bred back (pregnant).
We wanted a couple steers to raise for beef anyway, so that seemed like the perfect setup for us. The price was reasonable, because they were looking to sell their farm and move to a smaller property. Score one for us!
Austin made the call and the next weekend he had rented a trailer from out local Co-op, driven over and picked up two mommas and their two steer calves. We were the proud new owners of our very small herd of cattle Miss K, Rosie, and their calves Kirk and Dan (named after each of our dads!).
As the spring growth really started in our pasture, we started to wonder if we may possible want a couple more cows to help keep the grass grazed down if we were already raising cattle. It was already growing like crazy with the amount of rain that we got this spring!
So Austin and I decided yeah, a couple more cows and their calves would be a good idea. He call up Miss K (the lady not the cow) and told her "we want a couple more of your cows". She talked to him for a while and when he got off the phone he asked me what I thought about buying the rest of the herd?! Ummmm, WHAT!?
I was not so sure that I wanted THAT many cows when we were just getting started and really did not know what we were doing. But like everything we do, in the end we decided lets just go for it, and jumped, both feet in!
So he rented the trailer again and went one night and the next morning and picked up the rest of the herd. 20 total cows, calves, and one bull. Guys, TWENTY! WAAAAAYYYYY out of my comfort zone. We let them loose to get comfortable and situated and I sat back to think, ok, WHAT NOW!!!
After a couple weeks Ferdinand (our newly acquired and named bull) was getting too interested in the ladies next door for my liking. I didn't want him to bust the fence and go on a walkabout , especially while Austin was out of town. So I scheduled him a date with the butcher. We also had a friend that wanted to buy two of the calves so we needed to round them up and separate out the few we wanted to get rid of.
That was an adventure all in itself! It took the truck, the tractor, and a few ropes to FINALLY get him and 4 calves and 2 mommas in the corral. I was quite happy with that setup and did not want to push our luck.
We ended up selling the two calves just a couple days later, and Ferdinand went on his date about a month and a half after we got him in his separate enclosure. Now he graces our table at dinnertime and I couldn't be happier NOT having a bull in our pasture.
Now we just have to figure out how many of these girls and their babies we want to keep through the winter and which we want to sell. . . . guess we'll wait to see what babies they give us in the next month or so and go from there!
