Dairy calf for meat?

Thanks for the advice! Great option!

If you choose to slaughter your calves at a small unfinished weight like this then you must communicate with your customers about the type of cuts they will get. If they are expecting a heavily marbled ribeye with a fat cover they will be disappointed with the meat from the 5 weight calf.

Double Post

When I was growing up Holstein was the only beef we ate.

I swear my mom had drop-calf "radar". We would come in for breakfast after chores on saturday morning and served up with the bacon and eggs was the announcement we were going out to the dairy to see if they had drop calves. We usually paid $50.00 each for them. Sometimes the dairy workers would cut them for us, typically they got rotated in with the goats and the sheep at banding time.

We always brought home two and they got goats milk (milk replacer if the goats were running lean) then out to pasture with a little cob supplement. Then just before butchering they came in to dry lot on alfalfa hay and cob with a little corn oil on it.

We never knew that it wasn't the best stuff on Earth. My mom now has her own cow a French dual purpose breed I can't remember the name of and every spring she goes and gets two drop calves to help keep Betsy milked out.

We started raising our own beef about three years ago. We have 2 holstien X jerseys a full jersey. We LOVE it. MUCH better than store bought. We corn feed them the last three months to put weight and marbeling on them. LOVE it. The steaks are small but they are fantastic. I do think I like holstiens a little better since you get more back on a 2 year old. But jersey beef is wonderful.

I didn't know this! Very neat! Good to know that a drop calf can keep a cow producing milk. So she just lets the calves nurse so she doesn't have to milk as often?

Making note! Thanks!

I agree. We sold it as rose veal, not beef, and were very clear about what we were raising and selling. I sold them all to people who have bought pigs from me and they were all aware that they were my test group. They loved it. It's lean, and the cuts are small, but it has a lot of flavor and was incredibly tender. You also get a lot of ground meat vs cuts, but the hamburger is excellent also. It's very smooth-textured, very juicy. It's sort of the softer texture of pork with the taste of beef.

It's also a very manageable amount of meat. I've heard many stories of people who bought a side of beef, didn't like it, and then had to get rid of 300 pounds of meat. A quarter came out to 50 pounds of packaged meat. That has actually become an unintended selling point as people would rather have 50 pounds, use it up, and get more than have a big freezer full of meat that lasts them a year.

that's what I call Baby beef with the milk cow pumping it with lots of milk and me pampering it with grain and pasture . my brown swiss x angus calf would grow to 5/7 hundred pounds after drying the cow off for the year . a little extra grain and the calf gos to the butcher not overly fat yet tender and flavorfull . this yealds plenty of beef for me to last the whole year . this was fairly common practice on many small farms with family milk cows that did not want to overwinter a beef cause hay was in short supply

My kids have been eating jersey beef their whole life and would think that grocery store steaks were weird tasting.

We put them on grass and forget about them for a year or so and then pour the grain to them for 60-90 days before slaughter. (Or until the Mrs runs out of hamburger in the freezer!!!)

__________________
Francismilker

"The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much" James 5:16

Jersey is our beef of choice. We think it's the best tasting meat we have ever
raised. And we have tried almost everything normally available.

Comment: NEVER trust a Jersey bull. Most cattle have been draught breeds at times, and that takes good nature, and it's stuck with the breed. Never trust a bull, but some of them are nice-natured until they snap.So are Jerseys, but they snap about four times a day, on no predictable timetable. Jersey cows are the sweetest sweethearts you could imagine, but it averages out. Jersey bulls have the attitude of a cut cobra with a Roman candle up it's cloaca. They're a bull, so they're big and strong enough, but they're Jerseys, so they're small and nimble. A Jersey bull could - and would - dance a tarantella or a cucuracha (or a hornpipe) all over you within a second or two off having the impulse flash through what passes for his brain. Never leave a Jersey bull uncut unless you intend to breed him lots, and then build Fort Mudge and lock him in.

On the other hand, most other breed bulls are just big pussy-cats ninety-nine percent of the time. Their particular breeds have been used as draught animals, that means good nature by unrestrained animals was a must, and it got passed on. Our (non-Spanish) ancestors weren't idiots. If two oxen from the same sire ran amok, then that sire wasn't likely to produce any more offspring. Still never trust them because they're bull rather than oxen, and they're no more capable of rational thought than a body-builder on 'roids; but they can be sweeties. Be reasonable about it, and you can grow bulls a long time (even if not all the time) with the aim of making them meat. They produce magnificent flavourful dark lean grass-fed beef, able to absorb a lot of water, and are favoured by smallgoods manufacturers because of it.

As for raising dairy calves for beef, economic conditions change a lot. Three or four years ago (and it may happen again) dairy bull calves were maybe five dollars each at half-a-week old. It made a lot of sense that no-one seemed to see to buy eight, kill the shakiest, have two of them die, and slaughter the rest one-by-one. The youngest you got fifty pounds of veal, a calf-skin you could use like fine buckskin, and a lot of cartilagenous bones to make magnificent soup or stock. Older ones were heavier. Six months later, repeat. A year's worth of veal for eighty dollars. Can't see how people missed it.

So watch out. The pattern may repeat, even if the degree of sheer luck doesn't. You can cash in on the growth of bull calves rather than steers, keeping them whole six months longer may save you six months more of growing-time, but never ever plan on keeping a Jersey bull entire if he's not going to be used for breeding.

We have an 18 mo old Guernsey steer we'll have butchered next year. It's our first experience raising one up from birth. I wish we had something ready for the freezer right now.
This year we had an angus and a guernsey heifer and are thrilled about both but could have used another male (we do have one more pregnant angus).
Funny thing is, I had someone contact me about buying a guernsey bull calf this year. The potential buyer commented that having someone interested in a potential herdsire would guarantee me a heifer. Lucky me we had a heifer.
I'm looking forward to our guernsey meat next year and getting to the point that we never have to buy meat from the store again. We are there with pork and poultry.