Yesterday I went out on the hunt to buy a cow, and after seven hours of searching, found one available to buy. Upon returning home and posting about it on Facebook, I received several comments regarding how it seemed too soon to take the cow from its mother. I want to clear up some ideas surrounding that, and the prospects for a bull calf in a dairy. These are thoughts and ideas procured from living in a valley with more dairies in it than I have even begun to try to count, but they are on just about every road, and within five miles of our house, I cannot even tell you how many there are, but I can think of four within one mile, and they just continue on in that density.
For some, the idea of buying beef is detestable full stop. I am human, and think of it too, and while I agree, and am somewhat aware of the consciousness of a cow because I deal with them just about daily now, I am also aware of one simple fact that overrides even my conscious on the topic. Every single day of my life I have had to have several meals, each consisting of a number of living things that have died, be they plant or animal. Every animal on Earth has done the same, and so have you, dear reader. If anything is going to continue to survive, it is going to eat something else that is alive. For you to live, other things MUST die. Likewise, when I die, some things will live because of me. All of this is beyond our control. It is the nature of life. We obviously can control what dies to a degree. I am of the mind that evolution and science has taught that as a human I am an omnivore who needs both meat and vegetable to survive. I don’t try to dispute this fact, because to me it is as plain as the teeth in my mouth. I chose to eat animals, and while I could detest it, I also detest the idea that some animals eat humans. So there it is.
Because I eat beef and other forms of meat, I do worry about how it is raised, and what price I pay for it. I am lucky because I am in a situation where I can raise my beef myself, and that has been the first endeavor in our work with beef. Our first cow is for our family. It is one that we picked and have raised in the way we feel healthiest and best for our family. It is setting the standard for any cows that follow it through our fields. I want to raise every cow as though it may be the one picked in the years to follow to feed my children. So far, I have not dealt in any antibiotics or growth hormones and where possible I do not want to, at all. Yet, if the health of an animal is compromised and I have to for some reason give it something to help sustain it, I would do that. Otherwise, a cow that comes into our fields will spend most of its approximate two year life eating grass that is not being sprayed with herbicides or pesticides. If for some reason I have to, such as a massive influx of weeds, or something like that, then I would hope to be able to give the cows a break from that section of pasture and keep them away for long enough that any harmful substances would not be ingested by the cows. But as a sensible business practice, I would do what I have to in order to keep my fields productive. You see, raising cows on pasture is more worrying about the state of the grass than it is worrying about the state of the cows. I spend more effort raising grass, and the grass raises the cow.
Winter sets in and guess what? I have to buy hay from someone else. I cannot guarantee that my hay suppliers will have followed the same practices I would follow on my fields. They have to worry about weeds too, and they have to worry about insects and mold, and getting enough growth to make a enough money to pay for farm equipment that costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars. A basic tractor with a cab on it easily tops $50,000, while a bailer, which just gathers hay that has already been cut and left to dry a little in the field, and puts the hay into a bale, costs about $100,000. Neither of these is equipped to put food on your table. That gear will cost a lot more. Yet, I will buy a bale of hay that has been grown, protected, harvested, wrapped in twine, stacked, gathered, stacked again, then possibly moved to another location where I will buy it, for $7.00 for a two string bale, around 80 pounds of hay.
I have not got into graining or finishing the beef yet, so I won’t cover that here other than to say that before a cow is sent to the butcher, grain is fed it to fatten it up a little, not to increase weight, but to add a marbling of fat into the meat that will make it taste a lot better to us humans. Let’s face it, the T-Bone tastes as good as it does because of the fat along the outer edges.
So, mostly, my cows get a happy-for-a-cow existence on my fields in a beautiful valley, which none of them have expressed any personal preference for, and get to eat a fresh salad of grass that I raise with a lot of water, and a lot of worry. I spend my days fighting with a leaky irrigation system that often does not build up enough pressure to hold its seals shut tight, thus not working at all. I turn this irrigation on two nights a week, starting at midnight and I leave it on ‘til 6:00Am the next morning. I get to worry with the irrigation company over how much time I can leave it on, and how many heads I can have on my system. I spend my time keeping the fence in good order so the cows don’t get out and get hurt, eat other people’s food that is out for their cows in open mangers at the dairy next door, cause a car accident, or get bothered by anything that might get in after them in their field, although I doubt there is anything big enough to damage them. I have to make sure the cows don’t fall into the canal and drown. I have to be sure the bridge over the canal is in good working order. I have to be sure the cows have plenty of fresh water available to them. I have to be sure no disease as spread to them from one of the two dairies that are less than 500 feet from the borders of our land. I have to manage field rotation, making sure that the cows eat in one section of field at a time, allowing the rest to have a break and grow better. I also get to buy baby cows and feed them for two to three months by hand, all the while worrying about their size, health, growth, shelter, fresh water, and so on. I have to look at their pooh to be sure they have not got scours! All of their lives they will have to be watched for cancer and pink eye, and any other awful malady that could claim their lives before I have a chance to recoup the costs of raising them.
All the time I am doing all of this I have to worry about pulling the money for it all from our family budget, I have to care for my family, I have other animals to look after, which all have as different requirements as your dog does from your cat. None of this is a complaint! I love doing this! I love seeing the cows grow healthy. I love seeing them thriving. I love seeing them being curious about me in my fields when I am working on fence, or irrigation, or their water supply. They never smile at me. I don’t know if they would if they could. It is a lot of work, and new things crop up every day. I know that the better I raise my cows, the better I will be able to feed my family later on down the road. I also know that if you buy a cow from me for your family, it will have been raised in the best conditions possible.
I buy my cows as bull calves. That means they are males, and they have not been doctored to remove their testicles. I cannot leave those on! I have to band them and allow them time to fall off, watching for infection! If I do not, then the animal is a high risk animal that can more easily kill me, my children, my neighbors, and so on. I have a responsibility to keep the animal tamed, and the best way to do this is to remove his little testosterone factories. My bull calves are bought from any of the local dairies, where they have been birthed by a cow whose purpose in live is to first be milked so the public can enjoy the convenience of milk in a bottle as well as all the creams, cheeses, and butter and other byproducts they buy at the grocery store. Even if every family in America were given a dairy cow, it just wouldn’t work out because of all the people who live in cities and cannot raise them. There will always be dairies to provide these products. Once the cow is no longer useful for milk, it goes out of the dairy as a beef cow, just as a chicken will decrease laying eggs and be used for a meat bird. Both cows and chickens also produce great fertilizer, by the way, which is also a byproduct, making them useful for a full three parts of diet as the fertilizer is used to grow vegetables for vegetarians. The milk cows have a useful milking period of about ten months after they calf. Then the milk supply drops off and the cow must be impregnated and give birth again in order to restart that supply of milk. Any female calves are put into the dairy’s service making more milk, when she comes of age. I recently spoke to a man who owns and operates a Jersey Dairy. Of his 2,000 cows, 1,000 were milking. This was at the cleanest running dairy I can find anywhere in the valley. So he is feeding 2,000 cows, and only half are making him a daily return to support all the many activities and people who work for him on the dairy. Bull calves have only one place on a dairy. That is to impregnate mother cows. It does not take many bulls to do all the work, and as I have said before, bulls are very dangerous creatures. They are not nice, and they don’t give a care about how long you live, and whether you have had a high quality life or not. Because of this, most bull calves are sold, and many to guy like me who check with the dairies to see if there are any we can buy and raise for meat.
I cannot speculate what would happen if the bulls were allowed to roam free and live out the happy life in the wilds. They would have to be castrated. They would undoubtedly be hunted. They would certainly overgraze the land, leaving nothing behind for other cows such as the dairy cows many of us drink from, or for the deer or the elk or moose. Instead, people like me must pay market value to buy the bulls, and do everything I have listed above to raise them so they can sell them to a public that complains about how animals are treated before they are eaten.
I know that last sentence comes off as a jab to people who genuinely care about animals. It is a jab to those who carry on eating. It is a jab even to those who eat Jell-O without wondering where gelatin comes from. It is a Jab to anyone who says I don’t care bout my animals, how they live, what they are fed, and so on.
Finally, there have been comments made by family and friends suggesting that because I bought my cow the day after it was born, it was taken from its mother too soon. When it is removed from the mother is none of my choosing. That is up to the dairy, which puts the mother back into circulation. First, the baby is fed colostrums from the mother fir the health of the baby. Then the baby is fed milk replacer, which I don’t think could be as good as mother’s milk. I hand feed my baby cows, giving them a chance to become a bit more familiar with me. I think that increases my safety! If you are ever out on a farm, DO NOT rub a cow on its forehead. That will encourage the cow to butt, and that could result in the death of a human being. I want my cow to socialize with humans and with other cows in order to decrease the dangers of the cow as it gets older. It needs to be familiar with humans, and safe around them. The sooner I can start that, the better. Bull calves will always be put to use as meat in the end. They will have to, or face a wholesale slaughter. What I can control is how they live while they are with me. As I will be selling them for meat, or using them myself, I have to have this part done while they are only about two years old. If I wait longer the meat would toughen up and probably much of it go to waste. If the life of the cow is going to mean anything, then it has to mean that other lives continue on, so waste is not acceptable. The cow must serve for as many meals as possible.
Perhaps you see other possibilities, or just see things differently. This is how the cattle business has revealed itself to me so far. In fact, more often I see dairy cows in much worse appearing conditions than beef, which are usually allowed to graze freely on open pastures in mountains and on hills that would often otherwise be useless for agriculture. Only the best dairies seem to allow grazing, such as Organic Valley, which has a dairy contractor bordering my land, assuring me one less source of pesticides and the like. Other dairies use feedlots with as many as five thousand cows on just 25 acres, much of which is concreted over, and where feed is mixed and put in manger where the cows eat, standing toe deep or more in their own feces. Efficiency is a key factor in these dairies, and until the average family is willing to raise their own cow, including milking at 4AM and 4PM daily, or the cow could die, efficiency will always have to factor in for cheap milks, creams, cheeses, and so on. If you dream of making the lives of just a few cows better than you think they are now, then get some land and get at it. I can assure you that it is very rewarding, and eye-opening. Then go visit dairies to buy your cows. Find sad cows and buy them. Leave the happy ones where they are at, so you have room for the sad ones. For me, I just do what I do with any other living creature. I respect it, and I treat it the best I can. And while I use many of the ones I raise as food, I do so to allow those ones with the greater consciousness to live a day longer, so it can complain about where its food has come from.
I don’t really want, or mean for any of this to come off sarcastic, but some of it has. There is just too much irony not to. We live in an imperfect world, and even some very dear people to me have said things that imply I have not made it better when that is all that I have tried to do in the best way I know how to. If that is still not enough, then my friends, family, you are not making the world any better yourselves. I have a pitchfork, a rake, a hoe, and some fields. Get your shoulder next to mine and show me how it’s done.