We chose to raise Irish Dexter cattle for a number of reasons. They are small, efficient, great foragers, docile, easy to handle, easy calving, dual purpose, and have great quality meat and milk. All these things things are easy to say or write about an animal but until we experience it ourselves we don’t really know for sure how they’re going to work out on our small farm. We can now check off some of these qualities as definitely being true.
Small – Our Dexters are small alright. The adults that we have come to my elbow or a little higher and have an impressive amount of mass but aren’t at all intimidating.
Efficient Foragers – We planted our pastures this year and after 5 or 6 weeks started rotating our 6 animals they have all done well on pasture alone and some even seem to prefer to browse the scrubby weeds before moving on to the grasses and alfalfa.
Docile & Easy to Handle – Through selective culling Dexters have became an easy to handle, easy to approach breed of cattle that can be trained to lead or milk pretty easily. Many people have trained Dexter Oxen and some even ride Dexter steers with a saddle. Ours have learned the routine of moving to a new paddock everyday very quickly and as soon as I pull back the polywire fence they are ready to move into the next paddock and graze. I’ve also trained a couple of our animals to lead and will soon be training a cow to be milked in a stanchion. Our one exception is a “bull-headed cow” that may need to become Heritage Dexter Beef in an effort to keep Dexters with a good reputation.
Ease of Calving – I hope that our last calving is a sign of things to come. Corretta had her calf on her own, we found it already running around and nursing, and we’ve not had to remove either of them from the herd for any reason.
Dual Purpose – So far we’ve only tried Dexter Milk a few times and it was really good, made great ice cream, and had plenty of cream. Getting a taste of Dexter Salad Bar Beef is something that is still in the future for us but we’ve heard many accounts of it’s superior flavor and tenderness.
In the picture below you can see Breaburn, our young herd bull, browsing on the leaves of some of the tall weeds that have invaded our new pasture. Because most of these large weeds are annuals we don’t expect many of them to be around next year but it’s great to see our herd making use of them now (and helping to kill them off).
Here is a picture of Corretta a 2 year old and Ivy a 7 year old, both from Grandma’s Dexter’s in Iowa. They’re busy eating a volunteer (came up on it’s own) grass that I believe is Meadow Bromegrass. This grass comes up very early in the spring and pretty much died off in the hottest part of the summer.
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