When we were dairy farming, we bred our cows, keeping the heifer calves to replenish our herd, and selling the bull calves. Once in a while a heifer couldn’t, for one reason or another, get bred. That one would be raised until she could be butchered.
Because the heifer was younger, her meat was very tasty, with dark red hamburger. The hamburger was used for hot dishes, in spaghetti sauce, chili, hamburgers on the grill with fried onions, barbecue, tacos — I mean the variety was endless.
We instructed our butcher to take cuts of meat including T-bone, ribeye and filet mignon. A meal like that could be $50-$60 at a restaurant. Some of the menus at establishments don’t include a price, simply noting “market price,” which I can’t blame them. They have costs to cover.
Before we sold our dairy cows in May 2016, we had bred them all with Angus bulls to establish our Black Angus herd, which we had intended to raise to augment our income.
After the cows birthed all those Black Angus calves, we re-bred them with Holstein bulls, which increased their worth when we were ready to sell the entire herd. It was a process that took a couple of years.
Our first herd of Angus were tame and manageable. I’d bottle-fed them and eventually weaned them off the bottle, introducing them in time to their powdered-milk formula in a pail. Scratching their foreheads, I’d talked to them as I scooped grain and fed wafers of hay, gradually getting them off milk and onto water.
My point is, I was physically interacting with them consistently. This first batch of tame animals were sold, and eventually purchasing a bull, they were bred naturally and pasture-raised basically on their own. Popping out calves, the mamas took care of their young stock themselves. My husband fed them surplus haylage, and their water was on the barnyard. Not having much personal interaction with them, they began to become more and more skittish.
After we’d dealt a while with Black Angus, we discovered we weren’t cut out for this feisty breed. Plus having a bull on the premises was especially concerning. We’d previously always used artificial insemination.
When we sold all those animals, we were left with the dilemma of not having an animal for our consumption. We did not want to resort to buying meat from the store, so we started looking for a farmer who’d consider selling us an animal, and precisely a Red Hereford, staying away from those plucky Black Angus.
One day we were meandering on our side-by-side on county roads and discovered a farmer with a beautiful herd of white-faced Red Hereford’s grazing on the slope of a pasture in their backyard — a beautiful sight.
“Hey, let’s pull in and ask them if they’d wanna sell one,” I encouraged my husband.
Turns out, the timing was perfect. They were going to take their herd in to market within the next couple of days. We picked one out and they promised they’d keep that one back for us.
“How much does it weigh?” we inquired.
“Oh gosh. I don’t know.”
My husband had the idea of taking our truck and empty trailer to the Embarrass Feed Mill, drive up on their scale and after loading up the animal, come back to weigh it again, taking the difference as the weight of the animal. The farmer considered that to be a very fair way of figuring out how much the animal weighed.
The people at the feed mill are very accommodating. We get our pig feed mixed there and are familiar with their friendly helpfulness, so graciously they sort of let us “borrow” their scale.
Getting there with our Red Hereford in tow the thought crossed my mind I hope he’s not too big. We wanted one about 600 pounds or so. The farmer wanted $3 a pound, which is about the current going rate.
When I was in sixth grade, we periodically had height/weight measure days. I dreaded them. I was quite pudgy, loved to eat and always looked forward to my mom’s hearty meals with gusto. They worked hard and needed the fuel.
When it was my turn to step on the scale, I’d hold my breath, thinking irrationally, that holding my breath would make me somehow lighter. It didn’t work.
Laughingly on the way to the weigh scale, I told my husband maybe our Red Hereford would hold its breath. (He knew my sixth-grade story.) It didn’t, coming in at 650 pounds.
So now we have a little red who is settling in nicely for a number of months with the Holstein heifers my husband tends for our nephews. We’ve dubbed him Roy, the white-faced Red Hereford, and look forward to a juicy hamburger or a grilled steak.
(“And your livestock and the wild animals in your land I give you for food.” Leviticus 25:7)
Kay Reminger was born and raised on a dairy farm, and she married her high school sweetheart, who happened to farm for a living in Leopolis. Writing for quite a few years, she remains focused on the blessings of living the ups and downs of rural life from a farm wife’s perspective.