Although it’s possible to get cattle to go where you want them to go by harassing them from behind, the fact of the matter is that when being chased, cattle really want to turn and face the enemy. If you take a little time to understand a cow’s flight zone and invade it from different sides and directions, you can often get them to do exactly what you want them to do with less stress and minimal chance of getting injured yourself.

The flight zone is an area approximated by a circle with the animal as the center point — a small wedge-shaped piece of that circle directly behind the animal is a blind spot. Spend some time in the blind spot and the cow will instinctively turn to face you. The flight zone’s size is directly related to how tame the animal is and how stirred up it is. Completely tame cattle have almost no flight zone, while wild cattle may have a flight zone that’s more than 100 feet in diameter.

If your cattle are calm, you can get them to move forward by arcing into the flight zone slightly in front of a herd leader and taking a few steps parallel and toward the rear of the animal. Once you are passed the cow’s halfway point, you can arc out of the zone, walk ahead and repeat the cycle. It’s counterintuitive but it works.

Take a little time to study how cattle respond to invasion of their flight zone and you may find cowboying to be a totally calming experience. Your cattle will thank you and your health insurance company will too.

Watch the full episode! Hanks shares hints like these in each episode of Tough Grit. Visit Tough Grit online to view this episode and many more. The flight zone tips above appeared in Episode 14, “Rawhide.”

Watch out ... the food runs away so fast. The nutrient stream runs thin, and we have bought in round bales of ‘haylage,’ which is a strike between early cut juicy silage and a later cut of hay. It is much drier, but wrapped like silage. It smells like an exotic tea, and the small holding has the scent of  a Shri-Lankan plantation in summer. My friend Gerald has loaned me a Ring Feeder, which provides a kid’s climbing frame ring around the precious bale so there should be no waste. The International Harvester 574 (68hp) beast with the ’Quicke’ fore-loader  is so used to this kind of grunt work. Feeding time is now seldom, and painless.

Awful storms beat upon the barn and caravan, last week, to the point where sleep became impossible. The cows and calves buried their heads up to their shoulders in the hedge and presented their narrow backsides to the northwesterly torrent. The pigs gave up and took a long lie in. The fouls hardly noticed and stayed inside for two days. Lets not grumble – we have only had 4 frosts this winter, and the shortest day is long passed.

Geoffrey has worked out the final answer for fitting out the ‘bail’ with vacuum lines, pumps and ... even the total answer to the power-take-off ancient ‘bronze age’ spline. Nothing is too much trouble. Everyone involved in this really wants it to work.

I think farmers work constantly against unexpected and overwhelming odds, and they learn a natural inclination to cooperate with other people in similar situations.

The calf pen is finished and ready to trap the teenagers to start the weaning process. This can’t start until the ‘milking bail’ is ready to take over the milking from the calves – will the change-over be smooth and painless? Will the mothers, bolshily, hold back their precious milk from the intervening human? Very soon we shall find out.

NOTES ON THE SIDE 

We have run out of Martin Flour. This is ground from wheat (Solstice variety), which is grown by a village farmer/craft grower in a field called ... ’Well Ground’ ... no, I  didn’t make it up!

Back-of-a-bus-ticket interesting figures: Martin consists of 164 households. If each family use 2 loaves of bread each week – Martin Parish will need 17,000 loaves per year. Each loaf, roughly, comes from a square yard of ground devoted to wheat. That means the Parish needs 4 acres to provide it with the staff of life for one year (4840 square yards to the acre). The other thing is that  our craft grower has been growing ‘bread quality wheat’ year in year out for 15 years in southern Britain; in  damp chalky soils, there you go. We have had the flour tested and baked by great bakers, and there is no need to add hard wheats from Canada or the Ukraine. Martin wheat from ‘Well Ground’ is absolutely fine; it performs perfectly well.

My friend gave me a book called "Wildwood" by Roger Deakin. I walk around in a winter trance. You must, please, read it. You simply don’t know what will happen next ... you might be given a fab book.

I have a nephew-in-law living in Han Province of China, and I hope he is going to help me with stories and with beautiful photographs of rural China. It's difficult not to be excited in 2012.

After caring calf treatment, Lucky La Moo has survived her health crisis and is back to her sweet self. It started almost exactly a month ago, we noticed late one afternoon she was straining while trying to defecate. By that evening a part of her rectum was hanging out. My cowboy was calm, separated her from the herd of misfits and valiantly disinfected her backside area and placed it back in. I could barely sleep that night because I knew there was an underlying condition causing this and that she was going to have a rough time surviving it. By the next morning, she had a prolapsed rectum. It was a horrible sight. I thought she was going to die.

Our vet made a barn call and said he had seen this over a hundred times. He even said it was common after weaning (and we had weaned her just a few weeks before). We have weaned four others and never had anything like this happen, but there is always a first for everything. Instead of feeding her for almost 4 1/2 to 5 months, I weaned her at 3 months according to a very famous bovine care book. Another farm lesson learned, don’t always listen to the experts and follow your instincts sometimes.

The vet gave her an epidural (to stop further straining), an antibiotic injection and then corrected the condition with minor surgery and stitches. Her back legs were paralyzed for almost 12 hours. It would be touch and go for the next few weeks while her intestinal illness waged a bacterial war inside her. He told us not to get our hopes up too high.

Lucky’s backside got better but she was dull and seemed to be getting weaker. We fed her milk replacer, scour ease and electrolyte gel but she was just not getting better. We called the vet after two weeks and had him come back out again. He was surprised that she was still alive. He said we must be doing something right as many calves do not survive the intestinal illness and infection. He gave her another round of antibiotics and this really seemed to help her fight off the internal infection.

We did not give up on her either. We made sure that she drank large two bottles of milk replacer mixed with the electrolyte supplement, and that seemed to help keep her energy up. We had her segregated from the rest of her calf friends and her mom at first, but we decided it would be better for her to re-join the herd. We would just have to make the pasture trek to bottle feed every day. My cowboy had to rope Nandi the little bull calf that shares the pasture with her, otherwise he would fight for the bottle. Lucky was finally feeling so much better on Easter that she even came up to watch my Godson’s Easter egg hunt.

Our calf box that we keep stocked with essentials came in handy through this crisis. I highly recommend having an emergency box stocked with powdered colostrum, milk replacer, scour ease and electrolyte gel. I also recommend having wound cleanser, clear iodine, medicine droppers, clean bottles and latex gloves handy. We replenish it every time we make a trip to the tractor supply and feed store. Emergencies tend to happen when everything is closed, and a few hours can mean life or death.

Lucky’s voracious appetite is back, and she is up to her funny antics in the pasture. She has really lived up to her name. We are SO happy to have you back Lucky La Moo! You really are one lucky little calf.

I was trying to figure out what I could raise on such a small farm besides the normal chickens, rabbits and pygmy goats. I do not want a bunch of hogs to worry about. One or two meat hogs are ok but any more than that and I create fencing and odor problems. So I figured why not Miniature Cattle?

Mostly kept as a hobby and only measuring under 42 inches tall, miniatures do have many advantages:

• Small efficient beef for “backyard beef.”
• Good pets to keep on small acreages as little as 1/2 acre.
• Use to qualify property for agriculture use status.
• Use for investment groups.
• Great for 4-H or FFA projects.
• Good potential to develop a gourmet meat market.
• Most breeds eat 1/3 the food of large breeds.
• Not as harsh on the land and the fencing.

As in large cattle, miniatures have many different breeds. Some of the more popular ones are:

Miniature Zebu

Miniature Zebu, LLL Twister, photo courtesy  Lipperts Exotics .  

Miniature Zebu are one of the smallest breeds, and the only true miniature breed that has not been bred down to get their size. However, Zebu cattle are known to be one of the oldest breeds of cattle, possible dating back as far as 6000 B.C. Mature cows should be 300 to 500 pounds; mature bulls from 400 to 600 pounds, and are still extremely rare (about 550 purebred animals in USA) They come in gray red black and the painted color pattern like the bull above, and the babies are a sight to behold looking a lot like a little fawn at birth weighing from 12 to 22 pounds. The advantage of the miniature zebu is that they are better adapted to heat and have a high resistance to disease than most European breeds (they come from India). The maximum allowable height is just over 42 inches behind the hump.

Miniature Longhorn

Miniature Longhorn, LLL Royal Flush, photo courtesy  Lipperts Exotics .  

These attractive little cattle stand just under 42 inches at the shoulder in a mature bull. They are horned cattle, which, after all, is one of their breed features. They also come in any color pattern you can think of from solid to spots. The horn span can very from 30 to 50 inches wide. A good rule of thumb is the cattle should be the same height at the shoulder as the length of their horns from tip to tip or less. These animals take a considerable amount of time to raise to get the perfect little cow, and all that horn is quite the thing to see in person.

Miniature Hereford

Miniature Hereford, photo courtesy  Point of Rocks Ranch . 

The cows are about 42 inches tall, and their average weight range is 650 to 750 lbs. The calves have a birth weight of around 57 pounds and at weaning the average weight is 375 pounds. The advantages of this breed are the smaller cuts of meat, the higher stocking rate per acre, high feed conversion rates, less damage to pasture, especially on wet soils, easy calving, and excellent weight gains.

[If you're near Austin, Texas, and would like to see a few Miniature Herefords in person, check them out at the Star of Texas Show March 12-27, 2010. The Miniature Hereford Sale is March 19, 2010, at 11 a.m. – Eds. ]

Dexter

Photograph by Patrice Lewis

Dexters are a hardy breed of small mountain cattle, originally derived from the Celtic cattle of ancient Ireland. They are the smallest British breed of cattle with a cow being from 36 inches to just over a 42 inches at the shoulder. An average cow weighs about 775 lbs. The coat is usually black, but it can be red or dun brown. They are very hardy, requiring no pampering, yet remain efficient converters of feed to meat. Like most small breeds, they require only half the space a conventional animal would take. Pasture fed animals can finished early, at 18 to 24 months and 775 pounds live weight, without supplementary feeds, and still have good marbling and meat flavor. Heifers are precocious, and can be mated at 15 to 18 months. The Dexter is noted for easy calving, and the breed is known for the long useful breeding life of the cows – up to fourteen years, sometimes more.

This is just to name a few of the breeds I have been researching and noticed a popularity trend among them.

I have found that even though miniature cattle are small in size, the price tags for these little grass eaters made my heart skip a beat. It seams the smaller the cow is, the more it costs. I am leaning toward the Dexter breed due to their hardiness, easy calving and of course the cost.

References:
American Minature Zebu Association, www.americanminiaturezebuassociation.org
American Dexter Cattle Association, www.dextercattle.org
Lipperts Exotics (Miniature Longhorns and Miniature Zebu), www.lippertsminiaturecattle.com
Point of Rocks Ranch (Miniature Herefords), www.minihereford.com
The Natural Food Hub, www.naturalhub.com

I’m at an exciting point in my life, and I know it. I’m engaged to the love of my life, doing what I love, and preparing to find my place in the country. Reading about Belted Galloway cattle feeds right into that. 

After living in the country for my whole life, I delved into city living when I moved off to college. City living – to some, Lawrence, Kansas, population 80,000 may not be a city, but to me it is – was new, fun and in the end, rewarding. I studied abroad in Australia, near Sidney. I met my future wife bartending in a bar that I will never forget. By and large, college was great. But I’m ready for city living to be a chapter of my life that I’ve closed the book on. 

My excitement now is based on finding my place back out where the pavement ends. Gwen’s fine with country living, as long as she is within an hour of a city. Works for me, as in northeastern Kansas it’s pretty easy to reach Topeka, Lawrence and Kansas City in an hour from most rural areas.

And as I look for properties – the spot where I will raise a family – livestock is always on my mind. I have grand plans, all in my head, about what I want to raise and how I want to live. I talk about it at home all the time. I read breed guides to livestock a lot (Storey’s is great). It consumes me, and I love it. 

In researching, one breed of cattle that strikes me, and appearance is part of it, is the Belted Galloway, a heritage breed of cattle that is hardy and, as we said in GRIT’s Field Guide to Heritage Cattle, well known for excellent performance on pasture and flavorful beef; perfect. Helen Burkett, an ad account executive, told me she misses raising them for their disposition, their gentle and friendly personality.

It is one breed definitely on my radar. The only real drawback I see is that they don’t have horns – they’re a polled breed. I’ll admit that I do like horns on animals, and why that is is interesting to think about. Of course, I’m a hunter and hunters in general like horns, but I’ll bet I’d like horns even if I didn’t hunt. There’s something primitive about them, something in them that allows me to relate to my ancestors, maybe. I’ll never fashion tools out of them – at least I don’t plan on it – but I like the look of a horned beast; it looks more powerful and majestic. 

But horns aren’t always good. Working cattle is different, with different equipment needed to handle and control the horns. And even though Scottish Highland cattle will probably only bump you with a horn in a playful manner, they can be rough without meaning too. That makes Belties slightly safer for children, in my mind. But maybe taking care around animals, especially of the horned variety, is a lesson that needs to be learned on a farm. Safer isn’t necessarily better. As you can see, I’m definitely still wrestling with this, but the Belted Galloway is an animal I’d consider raising. 

When it comes to feeding efficiency, Belties are right up there. Jon Bednarksi, a council member on the U.S. Belted Galloway Society, speaks of his friend who has Angus cattle that go through two to three times the amount of hay in the winter time as his Belties. Angus are larger-framed animals, so it takes more to fill them up, and to maintain their condition. Now with steers, it takes the Belties about two years to get to the desired weight, and with the larger breeds it’s in the 16 or 18 month range, but with two to three times the consumption of feed, the efficiency advantage is still with the Belted Galloway. 

That efficiency means Belties do well on grass, and the grassfed beef trend sweeping the country is part of the reason for the Belted Galloway’s resurgence in numbers (the breed’s status is Recovering in the ALBC). 

Another thing is simply the look of the animal. The stripe on the middle of the animal is a distinguishing characteristic, very recognizable. 

For me, as I mentioned earlier, the hardiness of the animal, the fact that it does well on grass, the personality that Helen mentioned, the feeding efficiency Jon mentioned, mothering instincts and extraordinary beef are what do it for me. 

The Belted Galloway is available in nearly every state. You can go to the Belted Galloway Society’s website and find Beltie cattle near your homeplace. The 20th National Belted Galloway Sale will be held Saturday, April 24, 2010, in Fryeburg Maine. You can watch live and even bid on animals at this year’s sale using Edgecast. For more information, contact Scot Adams at 207-696-3812 or e-mail mnshadow@tdstelme.net.

Top Beltie photo courtesy U.S. Belted Galloway Society

Update: I added the second picture of a red Beltie on March 9, 2010. The red Beltie is probably my favorite color of the breed. Second photo courtesy Klover Korners Farm

I’ve been raising cattle and horses since I was a teenager growing up on my parents’ ranch in the late 1950s, and have been writing about these animals nearly that long. My husband and I have been raising horses and cattle together for the past 44 years. My life work and major goal has been to learn all I can about the care, handling and management of these wonderful animals, and to share what I learn – in my books and magazine articles.

A question I’ve been asked by a number of people is: what’s most important in raising livestock. What are the biggest challenges?

I’d say the biggest factor is responsibility and commitment. In the wild, Mother Nature is in charge of things. If an animal has a serious problem it dies. If there are problems with a birth, the mama and baby both die. It’s survival of the fittest and luckiest (because even normal, healthy animals sometimes fall victim to freak accidents or to predators). With domestication by humans comes a responsibility for the welfare of the animals in our care.

We breed them to raise and use for our purposes, and they would not exist except for us. So we must give them optimum care to make sure they stay healthy, and make sure that their birth and growing up is safe – and that their interaction with humans is positive and happy. We are their guardians.

Thus we must take their welfare seriously, and commit to raising and caring for them as best we can. Tending to their health and comfort should come first, in our various priorities and activities. This is why taking care of animals is so good for kids. Children who have animals or help their parents take care of animals learn responsibility, compassion and a good work ethic at an early age. The animal chores must come first, ahead of other “fun” things or activities. And if an animal has a problem of some kind, you drop everything else you are doing and take care of that animal.

My advice on raising cattle or horses is to learn all you can about taking care of them and how to keep them healthy and safe. Get advice from other stockmen or a good large animal veterinarian if you have questions. Read books and articles about the handling, care and management of these animals. Spend time with your own horses and cattle and learn about them – their personalities and their needs. Knowing your own animals intimately helps you understand them and learn how to handle them most appropriately, and also gives you a better clue regarding what’s “normal” behavior for them and what is abnormal, which would enable you to tell the early signs of illness (or the signs of early labor if your mare or cow is preparing to give birth).

For a good source of information about breeding and raising horses, I recommend my book Storey’s Guide to Raising Horses (new edition just published). It has a large section on basic horsekeeping, a section on health care, and a final section on breeding (selecting breeding stock, genetics, care of the broodmare, keeping a stallion, foaling, care of the newborn foal, etc.). For information on how to safely handle horses and to make sure they are well mannered and easy to handle and train, I recommend my book Storey’s Guide to Training Horses.

Basic cattle care is covered in the new edition of my book Storey’s Guide to Raising Beef Cattle – everything from breeds and genetics to calving, calf health, weaning, getting the cows rebred, pastures and fencing, feeding, keeping cattle healthy, tips on buying and selling cattle. For the serious cattle raiser, my two books Essential Guide to Calving and the Cattle Health Handbook together serve as an in-depth reference. In these two books I’ve tried to address all the issues a cattle raiser might face, and have also sprinkled the text with real-life examples of various animals on our ranch – their challenging health problems or calving situations and how we dealt with those to save the animal.

Veterinary textbooks and animal nutrition texts are difficult for the average person to read. Books for novices rarely contain enough information and cannot answer some of the questions that arise. My goal in writing about cattle and horse care is to bridge that gap and present solid information (more in-depth than you generally find in publications for new owners) but I try to discuss it in ways that are very easy to understand and interesting to read.

For more background on my writing and to read about some of the adventures I’ve had raising cattle and horses, and things I’ve learned along the way, check out my bi-weekly blog Notes From Sky Range Ranch.

Times are always busy on a farm and "pre-winter" is no exception. In the last two months, Andrew and I have been swamped with projects. This explains our noticeable absence from this blog and for that I do apologize. However, I'd like to fill you in on what's been eating up our time!

In September, we threw in the towel with our pumpkin patch and grabbed every last pumpkin that showed orange or the promise of orange out of that field. Weeds, cucumber beetles and squash bugs had decimated our crop and left us with about a couple hundred various sized pumpkins and a metric ton of gourds. To put into perspective, we had planted about a half acre of plants. We should have been up to our elbows in pumpkin splendor. Now, though, we have learned a lot about the business of chemical free gardening and not reaching for pesticide even when the going is tough. We'll plant smarter next year.

We put together a lovely sign and organized the pumpkins onto a nice wagon in the front yard.

All we really wanted to do was make back our money on pumpkin seeds from the spring. The first week, there were no customers. That was understandable since it was not even October. However, as the days and weeks progressed, people from the area came trickling in to see what we had. "Organically Grown Pumpkins and Gourds" is not a sign readily seen in this area of Wisconsin, so the people that came in our drive were very interested in hearing about our other potential operations. Plus, it was a great way to meet the extended neighborhood! Most of our pumpkin customers this year were folks and families from the 10-mile area who normally passed our home en route to work or school. We were able to talk to them about our future plans and get the word out about our more sustainable farming practices. Hopefully, these people will stop in again. And, we were able to make our money back and then some!

During this time, we were wrapping up the garden produce. Mostly we had tomatoes, but we also brought in carrots, potatoes, broccoli, and a few herbs. We would have had squash, but in letting the sheep graze the pumpkin patch, we discovered that those animals love that fruit far more than we ever could. Honestly, we went to check our squashes (butternut and acorn) and couldn't even find the vines that the fruits were growing on! It was disappointing to be sure, but one of those experiences where all you can do is laugh.

In order to store all the fresh produce, we turned mostly to canning. Andy is an experienced canner, and we worked together preparing various recipes to utilize the many tomatoes we brought in. We now have a stocked root cellar complete with pear butter, homemade catsup, pizza sauce, stewed tomatoes, BBQ sauce, pickles, pickled veggies (Bloody Mary fixin's!) and homemade Bloody Mary mix. (Our winter indulgence!)

In researching ways to be more energy conscious and sustainable, we came across a preservation technique called lacto-fermentation. Lacto-fermentation is a process whereby good bacteria transform sugar and starches into beneficial acids. We have learned that this is an ancient technique in preserving that very much predates canning and freezing. The starches and sugars naturally found in fruits and veggies are transformed into lactic acid by lactobaccilli. Lactobaccilli are found on the surface of all living things and especially on plants growing near the ground. There are a number of benefits of preserving in this manner. Digestibility is enhanced and vitamin levels are actually increased! The bacteria produce helpful enzymes as well as antibiotic and anti-carcinogenic substances. The main product, lactic acid, keeps fruits and veggies in a state of perfect preservation (if done correctly) and promotes healthy bacterial growth in the intestine. On top of that, the whole process requires NO BOILING! That saves a lot on our propane stove and much with time. We decided to start small and make a lacto-fermented sauerkraut and lacto-fermented salsa. We busted open one of our sauerkrauts this past week and it was AMAZING. I never liked sauerkraut in the past; too vinegary and harsh on the tongue. But this stuff, well, it was great. I'll post another blog on our recipes and the whole process. Needless to say, though, we are hopeful to use this easy technique for future preserving endeavors.

As the last few jars of canned goods were being sealed, we embarked on our chicken adventures, of which you are already well-versed. To take over where Andrew left off a couple weeks ago, we have had much learning and success with the new laying hens. After about a week of leaving them in the hen house to acclimate, we let them outside into a small fenced enclosure. For about three more days, we allowed them "free range" outside, but not enough that they would get lost.

Finally, last Monday, we let them loose for real and they were all over that acre field in about 25 minutes! It was a beautiful sight. Groups of hens led by one rooster would wander here and there, pecking and scratching as they went. Each day, they explored a little farther and by the end of the week, those perky birds had the run of the whole farm. They mingled with the ewes next door and the rams in the barnyard. They "raked" leaves in our apple orchard and picked beetles off our front porch. Reinhold, our chief rooster from before, had worked his way up the rooster ranks and is clearly the head of this entire chicken household. (It's odd, but we're more than a little proud of the big guy.)

In the meantime, we have been keeping track of the number of eggs we collect each day. The numbers have dipped and rose a few times, but are hovering at about 55 eggs per day. That's about a 50% average for the flock. It's not conventional standards at all (80%) but we are happy that the hens are happy. Recently, Andy put his sales background into practice and hooked us up with a local fast food chain. We get all their day old bread FREE whenever we want it! This is a chain that makes delicious sub sandwiches and they were more than happy to have a place to dump all the completely edible, but corporately sanctioned bread. (It's so good that we even partake on pick up days). Finally, we have a friend in the woodworking business who has offered all his wood shavings to us for free as well. That will be a boon this winter as we strive to keep the chickens' litter clean and thick.

And, the eggs are SO good! Just by word of mouth, we have been able to sell every last dozen. We are so thankful and blessed.

The farm has been in a state of fall clean-up. Andrew and his father hauled over five hay wagon loads of combustibles to the pasture burn pile in one day. His mother has been continuing the effort to clean up the old dairy barn in preparation for milking cows and my father, Dave, has been tuning up machinery and concluding the fall crop harvest. The animals are looking shaggier and are concluding their time on pasture. And the rams are eyeing the ewes with much fondness lately... We plan on breeding the ewes this November.

Today, we pick up a pair of twin Jersey heifers calves from a farmer friend named Lennie. He and his wife are giving us the two month old babies as our very own cows as an investment in our future. In return, Andy will work with him to build buffalo fencing and other farm chores at a generous rate in order to "pay off" the heifers. But the knowledge Andy will gain and the promise of milk in our future is more than payment enough.

With chickens pecking at our doorstep and calves nuzzling our palms, we really feel like things are starting to take off here at the farm. Harvest time is usually a season of winding down and settling in; saying farewell to the year and bracing for the cold. To us this year, we feel like the hope of spring has just entered our household and warmed us to the bone.