Posted on 12/03/2013 2:18:20 PM PST by TheRhinelander
Any cattlemen out there? I'm thinking about raising one for meat. It would be more like free range veal as I'd get it in April and slaughter it in October.
Any experience? Is this a good idea? I'm trying to avoid hay which is expensive. Is that long enough to get good weight? Anything to watch out for?
Been there done that.
Make sure the animal does not eat wild onions. The meat will stink of onion. that is one reason why animals are sent to a feedlot and then fed grain.
“I’ve also considered that. I need to work out the costs.”
Start with a couple of goats. Easier to maintain and cabrito tastes wonderful.
My Mom was a nurse. The doctor she worked for had a ranch North of town. When I was a kid she and another nurse would buy a slaughtered and processed calf every year. Lots of meat, cheaper, and some really good beef!
Not going to read the whole thread so I’ll tose out two question’s. Who much land do you have and where is it located? Been in the business all my life, our ranch is over 41 square miles. The ranch is well over 120 years old.
Bingo.....you know what the hell you are talking about....a pro.
Another thing to do is to buy a finished steer at the FFA/4H
livestock auction at a county fair. There will be a processor or..
.two to give you a price on cut/wrap after all the animals are
slaughtered (and inspected) at the same slaughter house. It
will be the best beef you ever tasted, Angus, Hereford, Shorthorn,
whatever. It will cost, yah, but while at the fair talk to older
FFA and 4Hers who have raised one beef at a time. Talk with
the advisors, the Ag teacher. And, BTW.....sorry all you Scouts
but FFA is the finest youth organization ever.
When we were kids, my brother and I held things for dad like the gentian violet spray while he did that. We had a bunch of boxer dogs and they went mad for what dad threw over the fence. It was an enlightening experience that I didn't even understand until many years later. Then I learned from my grandfather that the Wyoming sheep ranchers did that with their teeth way back in the day. Ah, the simple life of a rancher!
lol that still doesn't always work. My dad bought a cow that had been branded so we called it one-eighty-one. That was her name, 181. When you're young, cows and steers are fun to love, especially when they come up from the bottoms every evening like clockwork to feed.
Now that works! Our pigs were named Pork and Chop. When they were butchered in the backyard we never had a problem with what came from the freezer or the salt box for that matter.
The “purple medicine” works good on wounded children too.
Keeps the screw worms out.
Aren’t Wagu cows extremely expensive? I know nothing about raising cows, just cooking them, lol...but know that the meat from Wagu is extremely expensive so I’m assuming the live animal would be as well.
Thanx for tossing this out there. Been raising barrel horses for 7 years, got a pet goat. nw Fla.
Good pastures. Been thinking raising a goat or two for meat,
several neighbors do so to market. The arab emigre folks have created the market for goats. I’ve also been thinking
of a pig or two.
Uuum bacon.
I spent some years in Puerto Rico as an AF brat. Piglet or goat on the barbeque spit at the fish camp nearly every week
end. Us kids would compete for the pig ears, they were done first, then the tail. Missed it during the missle crisis.
My neighbor, a former zookeeper, bought a calf, bottle weened it, pastured it, and butchered it.
He had to grind the whole thing, with fatback, into hamburger for it to be edible. He couldn’t give away the steaks. We all had venison in the freezer.
If you’re going to eat lean eat bambi.
Thanx to freepers for the info, even the conflicting info.
That’s why I love FR. Every dang option is put forth.
there?, Ditter wrote:
If you buy an animal in April, keep in next to your house and plan on killing it in October, your kids and your wife will have made a pet out of it by then, given it a name and they will refuse to eat it.
Goats are from the devil. I am convinced that all the scapegoats sent out on the day of atonement carrying the sins of the people have left many, many progeny.
My partners brother had a big ole pig and the kids loved to take care of it. Every day they would come home and it would greet them at the driveway. One day it didn’t and kids all had their hands out knowing that Dad sold it to the market! lol
My wife and I retired from Arizona and decided to raise Angus beef cattle in Florida. We bought our first half dozen head and are breeding the rest. There are downsides. We’ve lost two calves at birth in the last two years. Some insurance companies won’t write you a fire policy on your home if it sits on more than five acres or you have “hooved” stock. There’s a liability risk if your cattle get out of their fenced pasture and cause an accident on a roadway. And then there is all the fence maintenance required to keep you stock contained on your land.
It takes about one acre of pasture grass per cow, so we will top out at 25 head since we have 25 acres of pasture grazing land. We also have several acres that we grow for just hay for winter feed when the grass dies off. You have to have enough land for them to graze on grass to keep it from being a money pit. It’s too expensive to feed them hay and grain all the time. You feed them grain when you get ready to fatten them up to butcher them. We have two big freezers and a whole beef takes up most of one chest freezer. What we don’t butcher (it takes two people a long time to eat a whole side of beef), we take to the livestock auction to sell to supplement our retirement income.
We are not a commercial operation but we do expense what’s allowed on our taxes for farming. We live next door to a commercial milk dairy with 1,100 head of milk cows. We learn a lot from their operation since neither my wife or I were in this business before we retired. Read a lot and talk to other cattle people. We’ve leaned a lot that way.
It is cheaper to buy your beef from the market. It’s like a garden or chickens. It’s a lot cheaper to buy your vegetables at the produce section at the supermarket or your eggs. Yes, what you grow is fresh, but it is not cheap. Our small operation is more of a lifestyle choice than a money maker or money-saver.
Don’t forget fuel costs, trailer costs, stock tank costs, fencing costs, etc. And if you’re on dry land in the west, chances are that you’ll need quite a bit of acreage. For forage, 5 acres of cleared hayfield will work for one head in some very fertile areas of the east. But on semi-arid western land, that can be anywhere up to 80 acres or more.
I raised cows/calves for 30 years. When I wanted meat for the freezer, I sold a calf that was ready to slaughter, took that money, and went to the store and bought the beef that I wanted, Not 100 pounds of round steak. 200 lbs. of ground meat. And most butchered calves never have ribeye roasts, filet mignon, or porterhouse steaks.. You’ll see what I mean when you get one butchered.
You think you can watch them, but they will hang it in the cooler, and NEVER cut it up while you’re there.
Other than all that, it’s a good idea...lol
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