This year will mark the first year that we’ve planted a crop specifically for late fall/winter grazing, so we’re excited to see how long we’re able to keep the cows on the pasture this winter. For now, they are still happily grazing on the cool season pasture – alfalfa, orchardgrass, volunteer summer annuals (foxtail is their favorite), and some sparse MaxQ fescue. They are about to rotate through the bermuda pasture one more time (lightly), and then will be back on the cool season grasses.

So for our extended grazing crop, we’re currently seeding 2 different types of forage ahead of the cattle. Our choices were Surrey ryegrass and turnips, both of which are well known for quick establishment and hardiness during colder weather in addition to producing solid weight gains for the cattle. If all goes well, they’ll be strip grazing the ryegrass and turnips when snow is on the ground here in Missouri… and we will be dealing with significantly fewer round bales this winter. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Steven and I are learning first hand the work load increase that any small farm, grass fed dairy incurs. Steven wakes up one hour earlier to make his trek out to the paddock where the cows are grazing. (The walk gets progressively shorter since the rotationally grazing mob is on their way back to the barn. Every day, the walk is 30 feet shorter.) For the majority of dairies, they cut out this trek to the pasture by keeping the cows in sandy stalls or a dry lot and bringing them hay and grain.

Ivy is the cow. Milk is her game. She is a dehorned, black Irish Dexter cow and despite her eight years as “just a cow” she has become a quite trusty and calm milk machine. Steven halters her and leads her to the barn. He built a milking stanchion last year in hopes that one day he would be able to lead one of these dual purpose bovines up onto the raised platform to get a taste of this solar powered butter, cheese, ice cream, and milk. The crest of Ivy’s shoulder is just above my waste, so you could imagine the problems one may have when trying to milk udders that are so close to the ground.  We milk with a “short bucket” and a raised cow.

Day after day, Ivy gets more and more comfortable with her new roll. She knows where the stanchion is and will walk up into it and put her head through to chomp down on some delicious alfalfa cubes. I’ll admit, she liked my husband way more than me at first. She landed three kicks of about 30 tries when I first tried to take a turn at milking. Now when I see her shifting her weight, I rub the cow equivalent of a shin on her back leg until she calms and levels her weight back out. When you’re so “personal” when the cow and your head is totally in HER space, you can tell when she starts to have thoughts of kicking.

Milking is definitely a learned technique. You just have to learn it by doing it. Steven gets her going and the bucket gets all foamy. I tried and I was barely able to get a squirt out! Now, I am proud to say, that I can hum the melody to “I’m a Soul Man” to keep a rhythm and milk our three quarters of a gallon. Oh, yeah! Sure, she still gives Steven more milk, but my skills are growing.

When Steven milks both morning and evening, we are getting just over two gallons a day.  All this milk, what to do? What to do? Well make butter of course! Dexter milk has a fair share of cream. The lush alfalfa, clover, and orchard grass pastures make fine milk with plenty of cream. One quarter or more of each jar is cream after 24 hours. It takes longer to separate and float to the top than Jersey milk because the fat globules are smaller.

We’ve been exploring Gelato making. So far, we’ve had two batches that were C to F grades. This was due to our rookie mistakes. Now we are just pulling out two more batches, one vanilla and one Nutella. They are better but we may need to get a gelato maker as it seems that the speed of the paddles are slower when making real gelato.

For all of you who don’t know why one would go through the trouble to milk a cow I’ll just sum up some of the reasons. First, Ivy is 100% grass fed. Her milk has benefits similar to meat that is grass fed. The milk fat is healthy. Ivy is not fed “preventative” or sub therapeutic  antibiotics. So this is not in her milk. She is not given any bovine growth hormones to increase her production. Her body is cycling like a natural cow, a healthy cow, a womanly cow, as God designed. She’s giving the amount of milk that God intended her to give, not artificially over-producing for the sake of business profits.  Hormones come from the cow into her milk mainly in the fat molecules, so if there are added hormones (or naturally elevated estrogen due to the cow being pregnant) they are found in the cream & butter.  Ivy’s cream and butter, on the other hand, contain (probably) higher levels of CLAs and better ratios of EFAs.

Read more on Eat Wild

Anyone else have experience with a milk cow that you’d like to share? Anyone milking a Dexter? Anyone have any stories about Raw Milk benifites that you’ve experienced?

I’m moving the cows every day between 5:00 and 6:00 pm. We’ve got 6 Dexter cows, 6 Dexter calves of all ages, 1 Dexter Bull, and 5 Belted Galloway yearlings. All of these bovines are grazing paddocks each day that are right at 0.14 acres. That’s just over 1/8 of an acre. At this time, May 30th, each paddock is starting at knee high and over, of alfalfa, clover (ladino and red), orchard grass, and a little Max Q fescue. There is a small amount of weeds and I’m starting to see crabgrass and some other grasses that I haven’t identified yet. We are now on our second rotation since…. I believe March 27th of this year. This is the date that we let the cows off of their winter paddock by the barn and stopped feeding hay. We did supplement with just a little hay to help them keep from bloating though. When we first started rotating the cows were grazing most of the forage off, after a couple of weeks we were able to get the right paddock size that caused the cows to trample any forage that they didn’t eat. This has been spectacular for the regrowth!

Now, in the second rotation the grass is tall and the cows are continuing to do lots of trampling, now as much as 40 or 50%. If we were grazing existing pasture I might feel bad about all that trampling but we have to keep reminding ourselves that 13 months ago this “pasture” was all dirt! Being crow crop land for 30 years or more, the organic matter was very low and this trampled forage is helping to build soil and create the excellent soil fertility that we desire. It’s amazing to see how long moisture is held in the areas with tall forage and or trampled forage. It’s also great for us to see how soil life is thriving. We see many insects in the fields, worms in the ground, and dung beetles working hard to bury the manure! This is actually really important because the manure (fertilizer) is being moved closer to the plant’s roots, flies aren’t able to reproduce in the cow pies, and holes are left in the ground that help to absorb and store water when it rains.

On to some pictures of this years forage.

First is a picture of the grasses just starting to grow. We have really bad rows showing because of using a seed drill last year and it was worrisome to me in the beginning that we may have not left enough grass standing last year.

Next is a picture from just a little later. This is when we were allowing the herd to graze just a little each day, in preparation for the start of full grazing on the spring lush.

These pictures are probably 2 weeks into grazing. Each day the forage residue is a little different but this is a pretty good look at a typical move. The cows are eating tall (first rotation still) spring growth and leaving shorter, damaged forage behind with a high amount of manure deposited.

This is probably 2 weeks of rest.

The rest period on the first rotation was around 50 days but here is a picture at about 25 days rest. There is really no comparison to how it looks now.

This is my little girl sitting right in the middle of the salad bar at about it’s maximum height. I feel that allowing the forage to get tall and mature helps them to develop the root system that will benefit us in the future. Not to mention that our cows are our only tool to manage the farm at this point and they can only eat so fast!

Getting back to the thought that I had when starting this post, Moving the cows IS the best. I have such a great time moving the “mini mob” onto new forage each day, taking note of how the last paddock looks, now the new paddock looks, providing water and minerals to the animals, and walking backwards through the field to see how it’s all recovering and what is working the best. We do have an area that was trampled really badly when it got too muddy and it’s really interesting to see how it’s recovering over time too. If in the future we can get away from feeding hay at all, and just rotate cows onto clean salad bars each day, now that would be the ultimate job for me!

Do any of you have the same feelings about moving cows, have experience doing Management-Intensive Grazing or mob grazing, or have a similarly gratifying “chore” on the farm? I love comments!

The reason that you might notice the cattle bunched together is that we are practicing managed intensive grazing.  I could write volumes on the benefits of this method, but that’s not the topic of this post.

The topic of this post are those “oreo” cattle… five Belted Galloway cattle, to be exact.  We are experimenting with this Scottish breed in 2009, and so far, we are really impressed with them.  They are a larger breed of cattle than the Irish Dexters that make up the majority of our herd now, and the other major difference is that they lack the “dual-purpose” benefits of Dexters (Belties are primarily for beef, while Dexters are considered good milkers as well).  However, we’ve been really happy with their qualities so far, and they will certainly provide more beef per animal.  Later this year, we’ll be finishing both Dexter and Belted Galloway grass-fed beef, so we’ll be able to evaluate the two breeds for taste, cutting losses, and grade.

Belties and Dexters on pasture

This is our second growing season to graze on our newly reclaimed land.  If you haven’t kept up with the history of the farm, the brief version is that we converted to pasture a portion of the old family farm that has been in corn, soybeans, and wheat for ages (farmed with a non-family farmer in a profit-sharing arrangement).

Thanks to the wet weather last year, we weren’t able to actually plant anything until around mid-April.  When we did, we planted (onto bare dirt) oats as a cover crop, along with orchardgrass, alfalfa, and white clover.  In the fall, we overseeded fescue (endophyte-friendly) and medium red clover.  We also planted a couple of acres of Bermuda to have a strong hot-weather pasture to use in our rotation cycle.

So here we are, almost a year later, after having intensively grazed (though relatively gently) this crop, and we’re just starting to put our cattle out to pasture for this growing season (we’re easing them onto it an hour or two at a time to avoid bloat problems).  And since this is the rainy season and our pasture is still immature, we’re also taking it slowly so that we avoid too much growth-potential-killing tromping.

With all of that being said, the growth that we’re seeing in the pasture is really encouraging.  We’ll post updates throughout the growing season that show the progress of a 2nd year pasture on a rotational grazing program.

After looking at her a few times, noticing that her tailhead was becoming more pronounced and that she had a little discharge, I had to take another look at her teats…  The hair around them looked like someone had sculpted them with hair gel and they were not wet, but looked awfuly clean! My first thought was that the new weanling Belted Galloway bull claf may have nursed from her. That quickly was disputed by the fact that she’s not too fond of him. Then I got the bright idea of searching around for a calf, just in case. Remember, it’s very dark by this point so I started at the water trough and walked the fence line in their enclosure. With every big, dark, shadowy pile of manure, I thought I might be walking up on a calf but finally one of these tiny dark piles moved on one end and lifted up it’s HEAD!

I quickly forgot how cold my hands were and got down on the ground to check her over. Using the light from my cell phone I discovered that she was a heifer and after only a few seconds I herd mama come running. Black Lady is a 7 year old cow so she knows how to take care of her babies. I actually started running too because Black Lady has some impressivly sharp horns. She chose a great time her have her calf because it was pretty mild and dry this week. It’s now back in the 20′s at night but at least the calf is dry now. The next morning I went back to check on her and got these pictures. We’re pretty excited about her because she’s only the second heifer to be born on the farm. It’s great to show up to the farm and find a healthy, active calf that needed no human help being born. I sure hope this continues for years to come.

Feel free to leave name suggestions in the comment section. She was bred at Lonesome Valley Ranch so her name will be Lonesome Valley _something_ or maybe LV _something_.

Chris & one of the boys on the big day.

After months of collecting fruit and nuts, setting up fencing, and letting the pigs teach us what they like and don’t like to eat, we’re finally eating what we like, PORK. Our two 3/4 Red Wattle borrows were finally taken to the butcher a few weeks ago and the last meat, the ham steaks, are back and it’s all ready to sell. We were anxious to taste our natural, hormone and antibiotic-free, free range, pecan/apple/persimmon/walnut/acorn/corn and forage finished heritage Red Wattle pork and are delighted to say that it’s all excellent! I’ve feasted on pork burgers, pork chops, bacon, pork steaks, pork chili, and of course ham and loved every bit of it. Now I can’t wait to share it with you, the customers.

We decided to keep a whole hog and we’ve already sold some so there is a limited supply left for those of you who read this. We’re selling by the pound, $3.75/lb for 20-22lb packs and $3.50lb for  a half that is around 70 lbs. If you check around, this a great price for what you’re getting. The variety packs are as close as possible to an even share of all of the cuts… so it will be approximately 3 pounds of pork sausage, 3 pounds of ground pork, 3 pounds of pork steak, 5 pounds of pork chops, 2 pounds of bacon, 1.5 pounds of spare ribs, 3 pounds of ham steaks (either fresh or cured), a pound of hocks, and some neck bones (which are optional and only $1/lb). That’s actually closer to 21 or 22 pounds, but that is more or less the breakdown and most of it is vacuum packed for a long life in the freezer.

Contact me at steven @ franciscanfamilyfarms. com if you’re interested, or if you have any questions.

These were all taken today, while we did farm chores. Braeburn is really filling out and we’re really proud of him! (Note: I just noticed that the photo is stretched so if you want to see a true shape, click the photos)

Here’s one of our new cows that we got 2 weeks ago.

Here’s a shot of the cows in their paddock. It shows how we build paddocks with high tensile fence on each side and polywire in front and back. The reel is a Gallagher reel.

Our Great Pyrenees, Brother Bernardo, is really growing too. He’s still a puppy, despite his size.

Here is Mario, the first steer that we will be butchering next year. He’s the same age as Braeburn (to the day) but seems to be putting more of his energy in growing taller. Hopefully he’ll put on some muscle in time.

Have a great Sunday! We’ll be taking Chris and Natalie’s kids to see the new pony. Shhhh, it’s a surprise.

Our two acres of Bermuda border the highway and were especially embarrassing because from the road you couldn’t hardly tell that there were any desirable grasses in the pasture. So, the mowing was a must! It was an interesting day. Bill was the guy with the tractor. He’s the same Bill that raises shrimp near by. The said tractor doesn’t have a working alternator so we spent the first 15 minutes jumping the tractor then hooked up the bush hog, a King Kutter. I was surprised how difficult it was to hook up as I’ve never used one before. It gave the impression that it wasn’t meant to be put on and off very often. None the less, I was very greatful to have the chance to borrow it. Bill sent me on my way and after driving a few miles to our farm I spent the next 2 or 3 hours mowing the worst of our weeds and seeded out grass. Just before I headed back to The Storks farm to return the tractor I let it die on me and had to try and jump it, remember, the alternator doesn’t work. Well, my 1500 truck wasn’t getting the job done so I ended up hooking it up to a battery charger over night and taking it back in the morning.

I couldn’t believe how it changed the look of our Bermuda pasture to have them cut down. There is actually a solid sod forming and by cutting it all off even it made it look so much better. Where I wondered if we even had any Bermuda, we’ve actually got tons of it!

I also mowed down one edge of a pasture that is mostly volunteer Foxtail grasses. They looked pretty, all seeded out but when you walked through it you could see that there was actually alot of bare ground at the ground level. I’m hoping that it will now be encouraged to fill in with the alfalfa, clovers and other grass seeds that we sowed more recently. I’m happy to report that we do have some new grasses germinating. They are either the MaxQ Fescue or more Orchard grass. There is also alot of oats that are reseeding from the oats that we planted in the spring as a nurse crop.

Now that we have a few more cows I’m looking forward to seeing how much better the pasture will look with faster rotations but the true magic will happen in a few years when we get closer to our total capacity.

-Once again, I wish I had pictures for you but I keep forgeting my camera.