raising Dexter cattle for beef: everything you ever wanted to know

hi I'm Pete and welcome to just a few acres farm today I thought I would take a few minutes to talk about our cattle which are Dexter's and we absolutely loved this breed but first let me tell you how we got into raising them it was a matter I guess of informed happenstance we we were starting to farm it was our first year trying trying to get the farm up and running and we visited a friend's house John and Karen McQuillen and they had a handful of Dexter's and I walked out into their pasture and walked right up to one of them and just loved the cows attitude friendly manageable size and so I went home and did some research on the breed and found that they met everything that our farm wanted in a beef cow Dexter's are a small Irish breed they've been around for a long time the raising them for beef is suits our market we're in a market where people don't want to buy a three pound steak they want a three quarter pound steak you know so small frame breed works out well when you cut it for that the breed has a great temperament they're smart but the really important things to us are they finish really well on grass and the flavor of their beef just can't be beat we knew that our place in the market was for a hundred percent grass-fed beef grass grown grass finished we knew we wanted a cow-calf operation where we raised the mom cows we have the calf's rate on the farm we grew out the calves we send them to market or in the case of heifer calves we keep them for breeding so it seemed like the perfect breed for us in my opinion one of the best things about dexter's is their temperament they're friendly and they're smart both of our Bulls were raised with a lot of hands on from the breeder and as soon as we enter the pasture they come up for a scratch if they're dangerous at all it's just because they're playing you know they may head buck a little bit prudence can I get some video of you come here lady they're just such a great friendly breed this is prudence and she's one of my favorites she's smart she's a good mom and this is orden one of our bulls see he's coming for a scratch and to check out the camera raising beef cows on a small 45 acres farm such as ours is a difficult business proposition cattle take a lot of land and of our 45 acres we only have about 30 that's dedicated to pasture the rest is forests and in our actual farm buildings so 30 acres of arable land dexter's are really efficient on grass we have a herd of about 30 right now and that 30 on 30 acres gives us plenty of grazing in the summer and allows us to have enough overgrowth or overstock of pasture to make hay to feed them through the winter so our business plan was this to have 30 head 10 brood cows or mama cows that get bred every year 10 year lings which are cattle that were born last year and were growing out and then 10 calves every year with that distribution we would wind up with 10 beefs to bring to the butcher every year in turn to sell at marquette raising beef is a lot different than other farm enterprises now in our farm we've got chickens and turkeys and pigs as well as the beef cows and we found that for the chickens both egg-laying and meat chickens and the turkeys the payback is very quick you pretty much get your money back within six months plus whatever profit you make pigs are a little longer six to seven months to grow out then you've got to sell them beef is the longest and when we started out we knew that beef would take probably seven to ten years to recover our initial investment costs and then start coming back to profit the farm we had to build fencing we had to buy hanging equipment we had to build housing this barn was here but the barn I'll show you in a little bit we had to have built because we ran out of hay storage space and space to store hang equipment inside so it's a long term investment but I could never imagine having a farm without beef cows I grew up on a farm that grew beef cows we always had cows around here when I was a kid when I was in high school so to me beef is kind of the heart of the farm even though it's not our biggest profit maker right now so how do we feed our cattle well right now they're eating hay and we went to making round bales this year because there were just too many square bales for my wife and I to handle as the operation grew our decision to go to round bales from square was purely a matter of our energy level last year Hillary and I made 3,500 square bales I have a kicker on the bale or so we didn't have to load the wagons but we had to unload them and stack them by hand and it was just Hillary and I with a little bit of help from our middle daughter Grace and after that was over we said we just can't do that we're not getting any younger so I bought a round baler this year and it cut down the work so much we put a spear on one of the tractors loader frames so we can lift and maneuver the bales and now it's just me doing hey you know there's no real manual labor required it was a big change for us and we're glad we did it so here it is at the end of October and they're eating hay because we caught up to pasture growth about three weeks ago so here's the cycle the way it goes from spring till the end of the year around April we turn the cows out onto pasture and the cows will get all of their nutrition from grazing from April through we like to say November although this year we brought them in a little earlier once they're in they go to a winter pasture which I'll show you and that's really just an exercise yard a fresh-air yard it's not meant for grazing they come in the barn here to eat hay and we feed them hay from that October November period right through to the next April now even though we feed round bales we feed them inside quite often you'll see round bales being set outside in these round bale feeders these metal pipe contraptions I don't like the hay to get rained on I think it leads to more waste it also really trashes the field when you're feeding hay in a concentrated place like that so we feed hay in the barn and for 30 head of Dexter we're talking about one five by five round bale every other day so they're eating half of a round bale per day pretty efficient breed like I said now when I was a kid growing up on the farm AI was the way that we bred our cows in other words artificial insemination we had a breeder come and we looked for the cows to be in heat and then the breeder would artificially inseminate them we tried that with our Dexter's when we first started out and we had loads of problems mostly in detecting the heat they could go into heat at night you wouldn't see the standing heat sometimes you wouldn't see any signs of heat at all in fact we went to such great lengths to detect heats in our cows that we actually put a wireless camera out in the pasture so that we could watch them whenever we were inside and still we had no luck we called the inseminate er he would come when we thought they were in heat you know they would you couldn't tell that whether they were bred or not because you didn't see their heat so we lost at least a year where we'd miss cows heats and turned out they weren't bred the next spring so after that we said well jeez you know this is too stressful we want to grow our herd and AI is it working we bought a bull our first bull was Titus who is just a magnificent bull and he does a great job at heat detecting it's pretty much his only job here he's always checking all the cows to see if they're coming in heat we knew that we couldn't sustainably grow our herd with just one bull so a few years after we bought Titus we bought Orden who's a dun Dexter and he's kind of our second bull for us breeding season is July in August that way we have calves the following April and May after mud season is over when the grass is growing nicely to provide lots of nutrition for the mama cow and her calf to do that we have to make sure that the Bulls don't breed the cows at the wrong time the last thing that we want is a calf in February when it's cold and snowy and windy terrible idea and it's happened here before so we have to keep the Bulls separate from the cows and important times of the year so let me go through that in your cycle starting out in the winter as they are now they're all together the whole herds one Bulls cows heifers calves they're all together they'll stay this way until the cows go out to graze next April when the cows and the calves and the yearlings go out to graze the Bulls will stay in the winter pasture and have access to this barn for feeding hay that way the Bulls don't breed the cows too early so time goes on the summer develops and the cows have their calves in the end of April and May out on the pasture the Bulls are in here Bulls are kept separate from the rest of the herd until late July or early August when we have to do the biggest operation of the whole year which is dividing the herd for breeding so we look at our pedigrees of our cows and we figure out which bull we want to breed which cow or which heifer then we have to bring them all back in to the barn in the winter pasture keep the Bulls separate in another pen while we're doing that and sort the herd so some of the the cows and heifers will stay in here the barn and the winter pasture while the rest gets split off and sent back out to the summer pastures once we've divided the cows and the heifers then we bring out one bull at a time and put it in with a kit with the cows and the Hepper is that it's assigned to so at that point we have two herds that are split which is difficult on a farm like this because they're always within eyeshot of each other and there's nothing more frustrating to a bull than to see a cow or a heifer in heat that he can't get to so our winter pasture is fortified it has woven wire cattle fencing around it four foot high with a hot wire on top it's pretty much foolproof the posts are closed the posts are big and one bull and his herd stays in here and the other Bowl his herd stays out in the summer pastures so that division is a complicated thing they stay this way for at least two heat cycles which for a cow is 21 24 days someplace in that range and we watch them during that time to mark when each cows bred then the herd can come back together and they stay that way until the cycle repeats itself the following April now when we got to a certain size where we said well we have enough greeting cows we don't need to keep all the heifers that were born and we're going to send them off to the butcher it added an extra layer of complication because now we need to keep those heifers separate from the Bulls the last thing that we want is for a 7-month bred heifer to go to the butcher that's a well-developed calf so we have to keep the heifers that are going to the butcher separate from the Bulls so now at times we have three different groups that we have to divide our cattle into and so once in a pen in the barn ones in the other pen ones out in the summer pasture and the ones that are in the pen here have access to the winter pasture so you see it gets more complicated the more the herd grows and every step of the way we've had to build the appropriate infrastructure and kind of figure out our way of doing it because if we were a 300 acre farm we would have all be set up for that you know we'd send the but one bull and one who's heard over the hill where he couldn't see the rest of the herd and it would be a lot easier but when you're working on such a tight amount of space it gets really difficult I want to talk a little bit about her dynamics every animal on the farm has a pecking order and cattle are no exception we see it mostly when we're dividing and recombining the herd because then the pecking order gets disturbed Gordon is knocking around the camera so if when we separate the Bulls they tend to do a lot of head-butting and that's how cows and bulls establish dominance they have pushing matches and the cow that wins is the one that pushes the other one backwards and this between two head of cattle can go on for a day and they're absolutely exhausted at the end of it but this is how they establish their pecking order we see it a lot with the Bulls they test each other from time to time because who knows pecking order could change between the two of them we see this with our boss cow every hurt has a boss cow a boss female we we lost our boss cow a couple years ago she wouldn't breed back so she went to the butcher and there was a big competition to see who the neck out was and we thought it was going to be one of our older cows Sally who has nice large horns and she has seniority in the herd but she was challenged by patty right here who's a much younger cow and you can see kind of has stubby horns patty beat out rose and patty is the herd boss now we see it all the way down the line when we bring the herd back together two yearlings that have been separated for just a few months we'll see who is a dominant so there's this head pushing competition up and down the line once this pecking order is established things are relatively smooth because each cow knows where it is in the order and the herds kind of at peace until the next time they decide to challenge each other what do we do medically with our Dexter's immunizations deworming dehorning castration which do we do we've never had a parasite problem with our cattle we send samples to Cornell to have them tested once in a while never had an issue with that so we don't deworm them we don't do immunization we've never had an issue with disease except for pinkeye especially when the flies are out in the summer and there's an old saying about pinkeye you can either treat them with an antibiotic and wait three weeks for it to clear up or you can not treat them with an antibiotic and wait three weeks for it to clear up and we found that's the case we do dehorn are Dexter's the traditional lines of Dexter's are all horned and just for safety purposes we've chose to dehorn them so every calf that we have here on the farm gets dehorned usually in the second day before it really gets its feet under it because they're out in the pasture when they're born and we can't catch it so we do cat both castration and dehorning and the second day of life they're quick we cut for the castration verses using an elastomer band system the calf seems to have forgotten about it by the next day we dehorn using an electric horn burner but before we do it we give the calf at analgesic and lidocaine shots so that they don't feel that pain when we burn the horns off and it's a reliable method we used to use horn paste the acid paste but we had mixed results it was messy sometimes it would get on their ear and put a hole in their ear and you know and sometimes it didn't work all the way and we get these kind of stub horns so the electric D Horner's worked a lot better for us do we ever have calving issues do we ever have to help the mom calf do we ever have to pull calves the short answer is no we've never had a calving problem here dexter's are known for easy calving typically we walk out in the morning and there's the calf and mom together we seem to have more calves at night do it then during the day it's rare for us to actually see one being born but we've never had an issue so the only thing we feed our cattle is pasture in the summertime and hay in the wintertime we do give a mineral supplement and for that we use a fur trowel a combination of fertile products we use a product called grazers choice which is a mineral supplement sometimes we feed kelp kelp gets kind of pricey and then we feed loose salt in a loose mineral feeder that we keep in the both the winter pasture and in sort of the what near the water tank in the summer pasture we have been experimenting with using protein lick tubs which come in two hundred-pound tubs they're mainly molasses with a trace mineral mix in them we found when we first tried them out that it improved the cattles coats made them shinier they looked healthier but the jury's out for us on that we're going to try them through the winter and and see what kind of a difference it makes what do we use for fencing we're minimalist when it comes to fencing I've seen cattle-fence ten six wire you know five foot high fences electrified we use a two wire fence and we use an expedient fencing system which is t-posts that we just drive into the ground two wires and T posts with brace corners and ratchets to adjust the fence tension all electrified by a pretty hot fencing unit that's the summer pasture in the summertime they're moving all the time to fresh grass and they don't really put a lot of pressure on the fence so two wires works fine now in the winter pasture when we have a lot of young calves coming in and we want to really keep them in this pasture we've gone to using a woven wire fence this four foot high with large wooden posts closely spaced and a hot wire on the top this is a good mom look she's got two calves sucking off her at the same time no attitude on weaning is this we don't we knaves we let their mom wean them for him the cow will let her calf nurse for ten to eleven months and as her due date approaches for her next calf she'll wean the previous year's calf herself and I think that's a lot better than pulling the calves away from the moms after four months there's a lot of farms do I sure do enjoy spending time with the cows almost as much as I enjoy eating beef and let me show you the beef that these cattle produce like I said we're finishing on grass but we're getting that nice marbling in the meat this is a t-bone steak there is a hallmark of grain finished beef that's what keeps the the beef moist when you cook it it's tender it doesn't have those qualities that grass-fed beef is sometimes knocked for it's not tough it's not gamey it stays juicy because it's marbled well so this is a t-bone steak rib steaks I love rib steaks same quality you have this dark-colored meat a lot of small marbling inside the meat good fat on the outside these are delicious I take grass-fed beef beef over grain-fed any day it's just the four is so much more intense particularly from the dexstar breed I hope you enjoyed spending some time with me and our dexter's today there's such a great breed and as you can tell I'd love to talk about them I'll see you soon

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 295,238

Rating: 4.9438667 out of 5

Keywords: Dexter cattle, Dexter cattle homestead, raising dexter cattle, raising dexter cattle for meat, raising dexter cattle for profit, dexter cattle breeding, dexter calf weaning, small livestock farm, dexter cattle fencing, dexter cattle breeds, dexter cattle dehorning, dexter cattle castrating, dexter cattle pros & cons, dexter cows per acre, dexter cows for meat, dexter cows for beef, how to raise dexter cows, dexter cattle grazing, irish dexter cattle, irish dexter cows

Id: JNCPdG8jSKI

Length: 22min 47sec (1367 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 01 2019