Raising Your Own Beef Cattle For Beginners

[Music] hi welcome to the Big Bear homestead so you want to get started in beef cattle will stick around because we're going to tell you what you need to know [Music] hi and welcome to the Big Bear homestead I'm Jason and this is your first time visiting our channel we'd like to say thank you we'd also like to invite you to go ahead and hit that subscribe button and don't forget to bail we would appreciate it well today we are going to talk about what you need to know when it comes to starting a beef herd or getting your first beef steer to eventually raise to put into your freezer okay so you're getting ready to get into beef you may be looking at getting us steer to be able to raise to be able to put in your freezer or you may be thinking business-wise you may want to start a beef hurt now most folks when they're starting into beef they buy steers yes I understand yes heifers can be cheaper but the thing with steers is is their demeanor is usually a lot calmer so there won't be any jumping fences or running through fences or trying to get with another herd that may be close by you don't have to deal with any of that steers also grow faster and put on the muscle mass and the weight faster than your heifers will so what do you need to look at when you're assessing a calf to know whether or not that calf is a good buy or not alright so we're moving into beef we're ready to go start to purchasing calves what do we need what do we need to know up here so we make a good buy well one of the first things that you need to know is to leave the pure breeds alone the 100% Angus the 1% Hereford don't even don't even go there there's no reason for you as a homesteader to really want to get into the registered Angus or the registered Herefords there's no reason for that unless you just really want to do that but you're gonna have a very small market and your expense to profit ratio is going to be very very small because they're gonna be very hard to move at the prices that you're gonna have to charge in order to turn a profit plus you're also going to have to spend a longer amount of time to get those animals to butcher wait your cross be breeds where you have part Angus part her furred like your black baldies those guys they're easier to move on the market whether it's selling them at the sale once they reach butcher weight or whether you're selling them yourself as grass-fed beef because at the end of the day beef is beef and your consumers they want the best how do you say it Moo for their moolah anyway so it's going to be a lot easier for you to be able to sell your cross breeds because you won't have to charge as much to try to be able to turn a profit like you would if you're using a registered Angus so what are some of the things that you need to look at at the calf at the sale barn or at the guy's farm that you went to that you found on Facebook alright so you're at the sale barn or you're at this guy's farm the who's selling camps what do you need to look at at that calf to make sure you're getting a good buy well the first thing you want to do is you want to make an overall look at the calf you want to take a real quick look at him look at his eyes is his eyes sunken in or they were they supposed to be his ears are they moving around are they up and perky or is he just got a droopy down like Eeyore if those two things are good look at his coat how does this coat look is it shiny is it full is it patchy then the next thing you want to look at the most important thing you want to look at is the frame of the cat now I'm gonna put a card up here for our website once you guys to be able to go to the website there's going to be a chart that's gonna help you with this now what this chart is is you take the measurements from the hip the back hip to the ground that measurement will give you the type of frame that that calf has now at the sale barn or even it the guys house that you found via through Facebook or your local market bulletin they're not gonna let you pull out a tape measure so what you need to do is take a look at that chart and see about in inches where this chart says that you need to be and then get yourself a reference point like most folks when they're measuring distance they use football fields so hit yourself a reference so that way you can use height whether it's like a tee post or a tree or something like that then once you get that you want to find the medium frame build of a calf of the cow the reason being is you don't want one that's really short it's got really short legs you don't want him now he will grow fast but he'll tend to get too fatty he'll end up put on a lot of fat versus a lot of meat you don't want a really tall one because the opposite will happen you can take him forever to put on the weight and be able to put on the meat the other thing that you want to look at when you're looking at the calf go ahead and start to look at the development of their muscle tone now these calves behind me these are cross spreads between a beef bull and a dairy cow so they have a mixture of both traits so they are a little bit harder to be able to run these standards by but this guy that's right here standing in the water trough he's got good traits of both but as you can see he does kind of look all fatty but his rumen is just now developing and so it's working overtime but he has good muscle tone he's got good coat his eyes are where they need to be they're not glassy and he moves his ears around to help control the flies that's a good healthy cat I thought it's fitting to kick water on me anyway those are the things that you need to take and to look at when you're buying your first calf all right the very last thing that we're going to talk about is personal preference okay it's going each person's going to be different with this I'm gonna give you my opinion and you can do with it as you wish the last thing to take into consideration is the age of the calf now when you're at the sale barn you can pick up what they call day old calves means the calf's are only about a day old they've been most of those calves are coming from dairy farms so they could be 100% dairy breed or they could be a crossbreed like the calves behind me now the problem lies with day-old calves is yes they're cheaper you can get them for a fifty to a hundred bucks and you're thinking yeah it's great but here's the problem you're gonna have to invest in a bottle you're gonna have to invest in a colostrum replacer you're gonna have to invest in milk replacer if you don't have a dairy cow or the access to a nanny goat on your homestead and you better have two or three nannies goes for as much as these guys are going to eat you're gonna have to purchase all of that plus with a day old calf you're gonna have to keep him penned up and you're gonna have to put bedding down because if these guys get wet at a day old they'll catch pneumonia quick and then you're in for a world of world of trouble because then it's gonna be a fight now on the flip side of it if you get a month old or a two month old calf yes you'll pay a little bit more upfront you'll pay anywhere from two hundred to five hundred dollars maybe even more depending on the the what the price is going for for beef at the time but most of those calves will be more of a beef breed they have been with mom they've gotten a lot of the colostrum overall they'll be a more healthy calf and easier for somebody that's just starting out to raise to butcher weight now you'll also be able to put these calves and pretty much right on the grass you shouldn't have to supplement them too much you may have to a little bit but then they're gonna be just like these guys here that won't cooperate and stay down here for y'all to look at them they're gonna be on grass and you can start moving them around on pasture so it's all about how much time and investment you want to put into this if you want to obligate yourself to having to bottle-feed a calf twice a day and monitoring about five to seven times a day going out there to check on him to make sure everything's okay and watching him like a hawk then go ahead and go for the the day old calf if you're just getting started into this though to be successful I would say make the larger investment for the month to month old cap it'll save you a lot of heartache and a lot of frustration in the long run alright so that just about does it for this video on getting started with beef cattle I hope you guys found this video informative and helpful so that way you can make an informed decision when purchasing your first calf if you have any questions whatsoever please leave them down in the comments and we'll get to them as soon as as soon as we see them well that about does it don't forget to check us out on all of our other social media Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest all those coming by the big bear homestead and like always have a nice day [Music] you

Channel: Big Bear Homestead

Views: 320,235

Keywords: Raising Beef Cattle, things you need to know when buying a beef steer, Raising your own beef cow for beginners, Things you need to know when buying your first beef cow, Raising your own beef cattle for beginners, things you need to know when buying a beef cow, buying a beef cow for beginners, Raising your own beef cow, Buying a steer 101, How to get started with beef, buying a steer for beginners, Buying my first beef cow, what to look for when buying a beef cow, Buying a beef cow

Id: Cj_-xHcIV_U

Length: 12min 0sec (720 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018