Looking for the Ultimate Homestead Cow ???

Hi Dan,

I once looked into Red Polls. They seem like really great "Ultimate Homestead Cow" type animals. The primary problems I see with them for me have to do with their rarity. There are a few people with Red Polls in NY but they are not milking them as far as I can tell. Like I said I want to start with a heifer CALF. Its the same problem I run into with Devons or Dexters. The folks who have them promote them as great family cows but rarely if ever use them as milk cows and if they do they keep the calf on her so they can leave if they want. That means they don't want to sell the calves till they're weaned. A calf thats been raised by its mother is in general a lot wilder and spookier than a bottle calf. Plus she'll be a lot bigger the first time I put a yoke on her. My main reason for focussing on dairy breeds or dairy crossbreds is because I can buy the calf and bottle raise her. I don't think I can find a Red Poll heifer calf within a couple hours drive of Binghamton NY. I sure as heck can find my choice of dairy and dairy cross calves.

Actually I'd never heard of Norwegian Reds until I started reading some of your posts. I looked at your farm website and you have some really beautiful cattle. I really liked the looks of the Norwegian Red crosses. You sure get a variety of color schemes when you start crossing Jerseys with stuff. The brindle cows are really neat. I think you might be a bit far away from us, I did a Yahoo maps driving directions to your town and it was something under 7 hours.

I'm hoping to find something a bit closer as this is still pretty good dairy country. How much do you sell a NorwegianRed cross heifer calf for? Just out of curiosity.

Well the year is young yet.

I love these types of conversations and most time you get as many different answers as you have people posting. The nice part of it is each one is correct, for that individual. Isn’t homesteading great? :haha:

I have to say for me my perfect homesteading cow is a Jersey for milk and a baldy for beef but that’s just me. I’m also really found of the shorthorn dairy breed if you want a single dual-purpose cow and I have a beautiful six month old heifer that I plan on breeding to an Angus when she’s old enough.

This year I’m planning on growing my small herd by adding a couple of Short Horns heifers and hopefully a couple of Herefords and then I’ll be a happy man.

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This is an interesting topic to me too... Had first been enamored with the American Milking Devon; yet in seeing the real problems inherent in trying to keep a breed from such a narrow genetic base, have just about decided that it would be just asking for the same problems that have been reported here.

There is another dual purpose breed that I have not heard mentioned here yet; and there are some 3 million of them world-wide - you may wish to visit this site, and there are links to some people who actually raise them, with names, addresses and numbers to call or write:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NormandeCattle/

Go to the "links"- click on 'The Association'
then on 'Members Page'

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I hadn't really looked at how far away you were. lol Pittsburgh is only three hours from here...I keep forgetting how wide PA is.

The first N.R. breeding bull we kept was a polled Brindle. We actually still have some semen left from Myrher (the Norwegian red we initially used). It takes a special gun for breeding though, so we haven't used it except for those inital four breedings.
I think my favorite colored cross would have to be Bjork because that deep brown turns almost purple in the summer sun. Too bad she has two extra teats, and is not bred yet. :no: We are having trouble settling those older heifers. Jason is their last chance.

I have no clue what dad would sell a heifer for. He doesn't like selling springing heifers or young heifers because he doesn't want to sell an animal that won't pan out for the new owner. An animal can look gorgeous as she is sacking up but then fall to pieces in such a short time.
I can ask what he would sell one for and get back to you. But with so few replacement heifers each heifer is very important to the future (if we have one).
You saw the list of animals we have...pretty short huh? lol

I think the Norwegian Red breed is interesting and I love what it is doing with our Jerseys. It is great seeing the calves born to Jersey sires and our crosses. You never know for sure what color they will be. So far the color scheme of the dam has decided the color of the offspring (except in Slicker and Ilse's cases).

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Roseanna
Morning Mist Herd
Journey's End Jerseys
Jerseys, Jersey/Norwegian Reds, Beef, Boers, Nubians & crossbreeds

Dad said it would depend on the dam. He would charge the same as a registerable heifer calf. He said around $125-$200, if he were selling them.
This is all hypothetical, but it was interesting to find out what he would charge.

My uncle has a pair of Jersey oxen that have worked out very well. Timmy and Niagara are around eight years old now. Jerseys are what were used as oxen in this hilly area.

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Roseanna
Morning Mist Herd
Journey's End Jerseys
Jerseys, Jersey/Norwegian Reds, Beef, Boers, Nubians & crossbreeds

There is a fellow about 25 miles from me who has a large herd of purebred Normande cattle. It is my understanding that he sells many of them to dairy folks with Holstien herds to help them increase butterfat and for better beef carcasses from their steers without reducing the size of their animals.

The Normande cows grow to 1200 to 1500 pounds, and average somewhere around 14000 pounds of milk at a little over 4% butterfat.

To me it still seems that they are a bit heavier, and give conciderably less milk than a Milking Shorthorn, but I can see how they may be used to breed up a Holstien herd in the area of butterfat and beef qualities.

It is said the Normande butter, from cows fattened on grass in Normandy, France, is the best in the world.

They are neat to look at.

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“It is tedious to live, it is tedious to die, it is tedious to c**p in deep snow”
Old Norwegian observation

Hi JIm,

Do you know someone in Missouri that you buy your short horns from? I am interested in some short horns. I live down in southern Missouri. Thanks,

Deb

What a great thread!

3 questions arise for when reading this thread. I hope someone can answer them.

1. How many beasts do you need to have before the dual purpose idea moves in favour of two separate breeds. I know If I have only one cow, the dual purpose argument stands, but if I have 7 cows, needing 2 for milking and the rest for beef, would I start looking for 2 breeds, a beef and a milking breed? (no need for "Depends what your after", Im happy with a generalisation or see what Im after below).

2. If I chose Red Poll as my dual purpose stock, could I cross them to a Red angus for beef offspring and/or to a Jersey (or other) for milking offspring?

3. Dexters? Same as question 2. Can I cross to a lowline (minature black angus) for beef, and is there a cross for milking given the small size of the dexter?

Cant wait for your answers. My dreaming about homesteading is 12 months from a reality, and Im so keen to learn as much as I can in the next 12 months so as to make good choices from the beggining. I have a specific interest in producing milk for cheese making and beef for prime cuts (I read about a breed that produced less rump but better prime cuts? cant find the name now).

Cheers
Raphael in Australia

Great thread – enough to motivate me to register.
My interest the past few years has been the single all-around family cow. If you want maximum production, I suppose you would want specialty cows – beef or dairy. However, when bred to high production, there are problems. I had a high-producing Jersey and dealt with mastitis, udder edema, etc. If you don’t feed them right, the high-bred cows can have problems like milk fever, ketosis, etc. You can’t always just reduce feed to get less milk, because their genetics push them to produce beyond the food supply.

Perhaps a dairyman knows how to prevent and treat such things better than I, but I didn’t want to deal with it. It doesn’t take too many vet bills to make the milk pretty expensive.

I also didn’t need several gallons of milk daily. I just wanted enough for a family of five. I didn’t want to be in the calf-raising business as a use of extra milk. I didn’t want to sell milk, as it isn’t worth my time. So, I ended up throwing a lot of milk on the garden. And of course, the more milk the Jersey made, the more she ate.

I then tried a Dexter, but I apparently got a poor milk-producing line of cow. She was also skittish, and may have been holding back.

Anyway, I decided to try my current experiment, getting a heifer that is a cross between a Jersey and lowline angus (called a Jerline). The lowline gets the size down and makes for beef, while Jersey increases milk supply. I bred her last fall to a miniature polled hereford. Her calf should be pretty beefy. Of course, the big question is how much milk she’ll give, as genetics are somewhat random. If she doesn’t give enough, I’ll probably breed her to a miniature Jersey bull (herd near here) and hope for a ¾ Jersey heifer.

About that bull, they call those Jerseys miniatures but they aren’t that small – supposedly just the size Jerseys used to be 40 years ago. I don’t want an animal that is freakishly small as some miniatures are. Looks like my Jerline heifer will end up around 43 or 44 inches tall. She is very gentle, almost annoying at times as it’s hard to get her to move.

Like other posters, I’m not a fan of purebreds, whether cows, dogs or whatever. Crossbreeding is good for health and hybrid vigor. And the crossbreds are usually cheaper. I paid a fraction of what fullblood lowline heifers cost, though I still paid too much.

So this is the thinking I’m into now. I suppose if you want large quantities of milk or meat, you may want to go with meat or dairy breeds. But for a single cow, I like the idea of mixing them. You could cross a large dairy and beef breeds for more production. A Holstein-Angus cross would give more milk than most families can handle. My brother has a cow like that and was told at the saleyard that her calf was the best they’d seen (she raised several others).

I like smaller breeds, as they’re easier to handle, don’t tear up the ground or fences so much, and you can have a herd of two to equal one large cow. Perhaps less efficient to handle two instead of one, but if I was into total efficiency, I’d just buy milk and meat.

In a perfect world one might have a house cow coming fresh every 4 months, or at least one every 6 months. This would require of course 2 or 3 milk cows. If one were to take a page out of Uncle Will from Indiana’s book, all of the excess milk would go to feed day old Holstein calves until they could be weaned sold to the grower down the road.

It seems that day old Holstein bull calves may be had from dairy farms for nigh nothing, milk fatted by the small holder, and sold for over a dollar a pound. (Unc is giving some pretty good advice here.) Any extra milk could be fed to hogs: for the market, or the home table.

If the homesteader bred their house cows to good milk stock, and then gentled the heifer calves, kept them to breeding age and sold them bred, trained them to the halter and to the single yoke; they would command a fair price to other homesteaders.

Doing all or some of these activities would get more mileage out of the house cow, and just maybe help the homesteader generate enough capital to offset feed costs.

Milk stock bull calves born to the crofter’s cows would be kept and fatted for the home table.

This is the direction we are heading at Wolf Cairn Moor, or at least we are trying make some of the right moves to get us there.

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“It is tedious to live, it is tedious to die, it is tedious to c**p in deep snow”
Old Norwegian observation

To be registered with the MiniJersey Registry a cow or bull must be under 42" tall at maturity, I believe it is.
It takes about four generations to get a mini Jersey from a full sized Jersey breeding to mini Jersey bulls.

I considered doing that with some of our smaller Jerseys (Simone was our first choice, she is shorter and has wonderful production and dairy form), but we would lose out on production every year and it would take four years of straight heifers to have a mini Jersey and the tiny sampling of mini Jersey bulls scares me. Though we are two hours away from the largest breeders iof mini Jerseys in the States. She has seven bulls and the cheapest semen available.

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Roseanna
Morning Mist Herd
Journey's End Jerseys
Jerseys, Jersey/Norwegian Reds, Beef, Boers, Nubians & crossbreeds

I am interested in Dexters for their size. It was very interesting to read about mini-Jerseys.

The price of Dexters are going up and I simply want a small milk cow, preferably without horns. (My brother is a Longhorn breeder and I know all the probs with horns so, discussing that with me will never change my mind)

I have found no one selling Dexters which aren't registered and expensive. Any advice?

expensive=950 for a just weaned Dexter heifer when I saw Jerseys at the sale barn go for 350 each for really nice ones with good bloodlines, last week.

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what is udder edema (mentioned by Dj a couple of posts ago) and what are the symptoms? I googled it ans it seems like it is always connected with mastitis. I'm curious as Corabelle has always had one quarter (her largest producing one) that doesn't necessarily go as flat as the other ones when I milk her. I know the milk is out, I can massage and strip it, but there is a fullness to it all the time. Google said it is more common in 1st lactators (which she is). I use the CAT test and she's never had signs of mastitis. Just curious. Thanks!

Udder edema happens when they first freshen, and is caused by congestion of the blood flow if I remember right. The udder is really puffy all over. I know that's not a real good description, but I can't think of any other way to say it. One of our Jerseys gets edema for a few days every time she freshens.
What you describe sounds like maybe the cow has had mastitis in the past and there is some scar tissue in that quarter.

oops, didn't read your post well enough, guess it isn't from past mastitis!

Edema is simply swelling in the udder. Can occur during mastitis but generally the affected quarter will be hard and warm to the touch.

Edema is quite common in cows sacking up to calve. If a cow has a lot of edema after freshening than massaging the udder will help bring it down more quickly.

Also, some cows naturally have meatier udders than others. Adeleine never looks milked out after she is done being milked. She has a very meaty udder. This can be caused by scar tissue but it is also genetic.

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Roseanna
Morning Mist Herd
Journey's End Jerseys
Jerseys, Jersey/Norwegian Reds, Beef, Boers, Nubians & crossbreeds

This was an interesting old thread

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