Calves and grass and barns, oh my

We wrapped up calving on April 13 with one last heifer calf I named Jessica Rabbit, then began rotating the newly-expanded cow herd on spring grass on April 26th.  Hopefully next year it will be the other way around, and the calves will be born on tall spring grass to mothers that have grazed for a month or more already.  It worked out fine, though, with six healthy calves born unassisted and no complications.  Two heifers, 4 bull calves.  A good start for the beeve inventory.

April whipped by, with all the livestock caretaking activity.  Now May is nearly gone too, having been filled so far with spring cleaning and preparations for visitors come to help build a little horse barn.  Now the barn building is in full swing, so I need to close the calving chapter here and get back to regular posts, to document what’s going on right now.

Sigh.  Wish I had a ghost writer to log on here and post for me some days.  I post Facebook status updates regularly because they are so quick and easy, but they aren’t the same as journaling here.  So we’ll work on that.

Today is my 52nd birthday.  I hope to get a couple of roof panels on the pole barn with the able assistance of my barn-building buddy, sister Linda.  The weather’s cooperating so far, so off we go…

More later.

First calves

As another farmer-blogger put it recently, if you haven’t seen me here much, it’s because I’m busy beyond belief, spending most of my free hours running as fast as I can to stay ahead of Spring.  Indiana Jones racing madly down the cave tunnel just a hair’s breadth ahead of the rolling stone ball – that’s kind of what it feels like.

No sooner had I pulled taps and stacked sap buckets, then the calves started coming.  Yes, I got the cow herd moved to a dormant grass paddock first, as I had outlined in my transition plan.  Thank goodness!  And so far, there are three healthy bull calves scampering around their moms and aunts, lending a definite air of Spring freshness to the farm.

Arrivals began the day before St. Patrick’s Day.  Counting back on a gestation calendar, that means these three cows were bred in early June.  That was long before I arrived on the scene, and who knows what condition they were in – obviously good enough to cycle and conceive.  The great mystery is how Bruce the (nearly) infertile bull and his unknown-aged son out of god knows which cow, were able to breed more than three cows in this motley herd.

I say more than three, because there at least two others “bagging up” and showing other signs of impending parturition.

I should have gotten the vet out to preg check them in the fall.  Next year I definitely will, but I didn’t really count on too much fertility going on with this bunch this year, between the poor condition of both the cows and bulls when I found them, and the extreme heat.  I’d separated them into two herds as soon as I turned them out on my pastures, to allow the girls to recondition, but  June and July breeding activity was not in my control.  (I will aim to breed later, for calving on green, growing grass.)  But it must have happened, because I got calves.

No complaints here, though.  All three births were unassisted, wee-hour events in fairly good weather on good clean pasture.  All three moms are taking good care of their kids.  There’s some udder conformation issues with one, and a late-gestation prolapse occurred with another, so I am not sure if all of the new momma’s are keepers.  We’ll let them raise their calves and see how they do.  But these three boy calves represent a marketable inventory of grass-fed beef in 2015, if I’m able to raise them to adulthood in good health and with steady growth.

After many years of planning, learning, and waiting, we’re in the cattle business, raising a calf crop, at last.

Planning the transition

Yet another first for me this year on the farm:  transitioning from winter to spring.

While I’m thankful for the short and mercifully mild winters here in south-central Kentucky, it does keep a beginning grazier on her toes.  Seems like we just moved the cows and yearlings to their winter feeding paddocks and now, it’s time to build a strategy for getting them transitioned back to rotational grazing, in concert with what will soon be growing grass.

The trick, as I see it, will be holding them in hay-munching mode long enough to let the pastures get a good start, all the while trying to avoid undue damage to the soil where they’re parked.  Just where to put them, and when, to accomplish this is what I’m bending my brain around this week.

The five youngsters pictured above are not really a huge problem where they are, and they’ll probably stay in their fenced acre or get rotated onto the short stockpile around their sacrifice paddock in increments, until it’s time to join them up with the big girls and move the entire bunch onto fresh tall grass.  They are lightweight and by feeding out their hay in various spots, I’ve been able to conserve the turf in their paddock pretty well.  It lies underneath a layer of trampled hay, which adds carbon and will virtually melt into the surface once the temps rise and microbial activity begins; but most importantly, it is not altogether mud.  A little compacted, lightly pugged in places, and definitely in need of tillage and seeding renovation, but in reasonable shape.

The cow paddock, however, has had enough impact, since they are so much heavier and there are more of them.  After these past few days of moisture I hate to walk through it and I can’t bring myself to take pictures of it, although as cattle feeding areas go around here, it’s only a bit soggy.  It has layers of leftover hay from feeding piles distributed very evenly all around, and the very highest sections afforded fairly dry conditions  up until this last bit of precip, but now it’s all wet all over, and with a couple of the ladies due to calve soon, I want them up on terra firma.

So yesterday I dropped the partition line across their enclosure, letting them back into the section where I’d first fed them back in November, out of the round bale feeders.  Roped off and left alone, the soil there had finally drained and dried out pretty well, and enough grass was still left around the perimeter that the girls ran around clipping off the remnants like they hadn’t been fed in three days, ignoring the piles of hay I’d already tossed down.  Good hay just can’t hold a candle to green grass, no matter how short it is, for a cow.

That rested acre will give them some clean dry ground for a few days, in case miss betsy decides to calve, and buy me some time to get the 5-acre First Pasture set back up for a quick, minimal-impact rotation through the month of March.   There’s a short stockpile left on it that they will enjoy very much and I’ll keep feeding hay and move them on before they have a chance to graze it too close or pile on too much manure.  Then I expect the grass will have broken dormancy by the time April is upon us, and I’ll have to figure out a holding pattern for the herd until forage growth is well above the post-emergence stage.  Nothing sets a sward back faster than being bitten too soon, and I don’t want to get ahead of the grass growth in the sequence of rotation.  Better to wait and feed hay a few more weeks, and let the forage bank build.

So the little herd may end up back in their winter feeding paddock for the first part of April, as it will have drained and dried by then and can wait another few weeks for my Rotavator to get here for the renovation festivities.  I haven’t decided what sort of crop or forage mix to plant there; still strategizing best use of that heavily fertilized couple of acres.  It’ll get lightly tilled (not plowed), worked into a seedbed and be ready to grow forage annuals or perhaps a patch of oats, millet, or even feed corn.  The Big Experiment continues.

I’d love to hear how other grass farmers transition their livestock from winter feeding (or grazing, if you’re doing really well) to spring pastures.  Despite the wintry look of this morning’s snow-covered dormant pastures, green grass is on the way, and I am planning for it.

Catching the southern sap run

Yes, Virginia; you can make maple syrup in Kentucky.

Provided you have sugar maple trees, of course, and the temperatures start see-sawing from cold at night to warm during the day at about the right time of year.

This is it.  They have.  And after helping my friend and neighbor tap his trees, and watching how he boils the sap down to syrup, I jumped in with both feet, catching the last half of the southern sap run.  I put out 30 taps on the 12th of February, and have been hustling ever since to tend the buckets and boil the collected sap in between all the other winter chores and projects.

Which should explain why it’s been a few weeks since I’ve posted here.  Been busy.

I’m not complaining, though.  Fresh maple syrup is good stuff!  Yes, it takes a lot of sap, and a lot of effort, to make a pint of syrup.  But once you taste your very own, crafted from the juice of your own sweet trees, you’ll agree every bit of work is worth it.

Not many folks around here do this.  Even my elderly neighbor, whose grandfather owned this farm, has never tasted Kentucky maple syrup.  That really surprised me.  But the Burgess clan in Russell Springs has been making it for years, and showed me how they do it, which was all I needed to inspire me to go find my own sugar maple trees and get them tapped and running, even if I was a little late and missed the first big flow.  Next year I’ll be ready from the start.

Having seen the functionality of boiling down 40 or more gallons of sap at a time in a 2′ x 4′ stainless steel evaporator pan over an outdoor fire, I went ahead and bought my pan this year, pricey as it was.  Then I tracked down a description of how to build what they call an arch for the fire, out of concrete block, and set that up too.

It rocks.

But did I mention all the work?  From daily tending of sap buckets, hauling 5-gallon collection buckets through the woods to the road, to filtering the sap, then cooking it once enough is collected, an all-day (and sometimes all-night) endeavor – we’re talking hours and hours, folks.  Then, it has to be finished inside on the stove, boiled to 7 degrees above the temp of boiling water until it turns to syrup, and the little bit left in the kettle gets jarred up.  Lots and lots of work.

The final product, however, is amazing.  Not always crystal clear, unless you buy the fancy filters to strain all the sugar sand out; but maple flavor to make your head spin.  Nectar of the maple trees.  Made by the pint, so don’t think for a minute this is a money-making enterprise, but:  Kentucky maple syrup.  Enough perhaps to last the year and send a little to family.  Makes me feel wealthy as a queen.

Ice, ice, baby

This past Friday morning we woke to a world covered in a thin layer of ice, just as the guessers had predicted.  It made the roads treacherous, prompting school cancellations and late business starts throughout the area; even so, there were a lot of people that had to drive on it anyway, for whatever reason, and by all accounts it was a wicked slick morning on the roads and highways.  My driveway entrance looked like a little parking lot when I got back down from morning feeding, with a half-dozen cars waiting for the salt trucks to come by so they could make it up Wilson Hill.

I was thankful that the only driving I have to do for my job is in a 6×4 Gator up a dirt road to pitch hay to the cows and let the ducks out.  Even my little rough road was cloaked in a sheet of ice, so we slipped and slid a little, and I kept my speeds down with a foot on the brake, especially coming downhill.  I remembered to take my camera with me and tried to capture a little of the magic of the frozen moment.

The forest was beautiful, a palette of steel grays, dusky blues, muted mauves and ochres.  All the branches brushed with silver glistened and sparkled against the dark trunks.

The cedars and pines were tipped in white and drooping gracefully.

Cows, heifers and steers had icicles dangling from their ears and ate their breakfast on ice-covered ground.

And the sunrise up on the pastures was breathtaking.

Temps hovered right around freezing all day, so the ice lingered anywhere it wasn’t salted or walked on or shoveled.  I cleaned off my two porches and the walking bridge across the creek using a hoe to chop and shatter the thin sheet of ice into chunks that could be scraped and swept aside.  First time I’ve had to do something like that in a long, long time.

Tonight we have a high wind advisory and thunderstorm watch, wild weather riding in on the approaching cold front.  I’ve spent the day lashing down hay, equipment and firewood tarps, putting away loose objects, and generally buttoning the place up for heavy rain and 40-mile-an-hour gusts.

It’s currently 70 degrees outside, and the shop’s concrete slab floor is sweating.  Too warm for January.  We’ll welcome the return of the cold air.

Farm roads, ditches, culverts

We are just over a month past Solstice and already I can tell the days are getting longer, allowing and encouraging more outside work, as weather permits.  Just a week ago I spent a couple of hours cleaning out the restored culvert inlets and ditches on the road up to the hill pastures, following a heavy rain event that washed bushels of fallen leaves downstream to clog anything that impeded the water’s progress.

During our working visit June of 2009 Bear spent days unearthing four neglected culverts along the road up the hill, buried under years of accumulated washout and filled with roots, rocks and impacted dirt.  Drainage ditches and culverts are critical elements of a sustainable dirt road in hilly rain country.  A good road has enough culverts to divert runoff every hundred feet or so, and is graded to angle into the slope so the water flows down a ditch into the culvert, instead of choosing its own course down a tire rut, unimpeded for long stretches, a destructive earth-moving force where you don’t need one.

There is still a day of road-grading to do, once the leaves are all scooped up, to restore the proper drainage path of rain water into the roadside ditch, rather than the road’s ruts, which is just starting to wash out the road.  Two years ago I spent several days on the tractor regrading the steep sections and encouraging the water to flow in the crease between road and hill, into the culverts and away from the road surface.  It is time to do that again.

Of course, I’ll need just the right temperatures and lack of precipitation, so that project may wait awhile for all the supporting elements to coincide.

For now, as I can, I am laying dense grade aggregate on the portions of permanent pasture lanes I’ve established that have begun to demonstrate muddiness from either traffic or low-lying topography.  It is a slow task, one that may take me all winter.  Until you drive across sodded ground repetitively, you don’t know how it will hold up to vehicle traffic when rain events are factored in.  My little gator, with its balloon tires and relatively light weight, isn’t a rut-maker, but the tractor is.  So until I get an initial layer of roadbase laid on my driving lanes, the tractor only crosses fields in the mornings when the ground is frozen.

Like this morning, when I moved two large round bales of hay from where they’d been stored to where I am forking hay out to feed.  I looked at the 10-day forecast and realized I only had one more below-freezing morning before rain will likely set in, followed by a warming trend.  That means mud.  That means, no driving the tractor up there.  So, I moved two bales of hay this morning.  All good.

My current pile of aggregate is frozen solid, so between rain and freezing temps the roadbuilding endeavor is much delayed.  I’m fine with that, as it’s slow, monotonous work, and it would drive me crazy to do it too many days in a row.  There’s always firewood to split, cows to feed, ducks to butcher, and a kitchen to paint.  Spring and house guests will be here before I know it.

Beef in the freezer

Several weeks ago I made the decision to cull one of the little steers, after seeing symptoms of conjunctivitis return to his eyes yet again.  He’s had multiple antibiotics treatments since the outbreak began in September, and had appeared to recover each time but was apparently still hosting the bacterium and was, thus, a carrier.

Back in early December the other steer in his age cohort and one of the heifers had started squinting and holding an eye shut with drainage down the face, so I got antibiotics into them fast and they cleared up fine.  But I knew one of the animals in that little herd was hosting the bug and reintroducing it to the others.  I think it was this little weakling steer.

This little guy started out underweight, and has always been a picky eater, apt to lose interest on even the best grass hay while all the other youngsters dug in with gusto.  Picky eaters can have a hard time getting enough to eat in a herd situation, so my conclusion was his nutritional support wasn’t steady and high, leaving his immune system slightly compromised and unable to build a strong resistance to the bacterium.

All these calves had a rough start anyway, having not been fed well during their crucial development months and practically starving when I got them.  If I could have isolated him and fed him separately from the others, he may have shook it finally and not re-infected anyone else.  But I don’t have the facilities for that, nor do I want to raise “special needs” livestock.  They either do well as a group on forage, or they go somewhere else.

So, this little steer went into the freezer.

I didn’t have any beef in there anyway, and I missed deer season, so I asked my good friend Ben if he would be interested in teaming up to slaughter and butcher a 300 – 400 lb steer, and he was.  I could have taken it to the processor but we were both interested in learning the skill of turning a living, breathing meat animal into food for the table, so we agreed to share the work and each take half.

By the time I’d recovered from my Christmas cold, we had one more week of near-freezing temps before the guessers were predicting this current warming trend.  Just enough time to get him dressed out and hung for a few days, then cut up before the mercury went above 50.  So we got our heads together, got the ball rolling and did it.

He’s the first Bear and Thistle beeve; a little young, so his flavor wasn’t as developed as the 24-to-36-month sale beeves will be, and he hadn’t had a finishing period on “ice cream” grass to pack on the pounds at the end for marbeling and tenderness, but delicious all the same, and a bonus to have a freezer full of beef.

There aren’t a lot of people doing this anymore, killing and cutting up their own livestock for their family’s table.  It used to be common, especially here in the country.  Now, Ben and I could honestly say we were probably the only people in Taylor and Russell Counties that were killing and cutting up a steer that week.  Of course, it was a lot of work!  And messy.  And I’ll admit to deferring on the kill shot and the throat slice, though next time I’ll bring my own rifle and bowie knife and do them myself.  It helps to see it done first.  Thank you, Ben, for getting that part done and showing me how.

We hooked the steer up to a single-tree and lifted it with a truck winch to the rafters of a horse stall in their barn.  First lesson learned was, a steer stretched out is much longer than the deer they had hung in that same spot, so we ran out of vertical room and Ben had to readjust the hoist arrangement.  Anything larger would need a sturdier, taller place to hang.

This was the first time for both of us to skin and eviscerate a bovine.  We had a couple of books to guide us, and our past experiences field-dressing deer, but mostly we learned as we went, working together to remove the hide and carefully releasing the body cavity contents.  I can say this much:  it is easier to field dress a deer, or even an elk.  Cows have so many stomachs!  I had withheld fresh hay since the day prior, but his system was still very full and very heavy.

Getting ready to gut

We pulled out the liver, heart, and pancreas, and removed the rest in one big heap.  Then we finished pulling off the hide, dissected the tongue from the head, and it was time for me to get back home to do evening chores.  Ben and his folks cleaned up, disposed of the guts, blocked in the carcass with hay bales, and we made a date for the following Tuesday to do the butchering.

Removing the liver

That gave it 4 days to hang, or dry-age.  Normally you want to dry-age your grass-fed beef for two weeks.  The older animals have more collagen in their tissues, which needs the enzymatic activity of aging to break down and tenderize.  I was hoping this young steer – I can only estimate, but I think he was just under a year old – wouldn’t need as long an aging period.  Anyway, 4 days was all we had of sub-40-degree daytime temps, so that’s what we got.

Hanging and chilling

Butcher day started early.  I’d already loaded my maple butcher-block-top work bench into the back of my big truck to take over, along with two boxes of tools and miscellany, and a couple of coolers of ice.  I arrived at 9 am, and we hustled on over to the barn to split the carcass so we could transport the halves over to Ben’s basement where we would do the cutting and wrapping.

Again, this was the first time for both of us to cut up an animal of this size.  Books and illustrations make the cuts look simple and easy.  They are not.  We’ll need to do more butchering to hone our skills, and I’ve ordered an instructional DVD to help with identifying the anatomy sections and where the major cuts are made.  It was confusing at times, but we persevered, telling ourselves that even gooned-up cuts can be made into ground beef.  We cut a lot of great-looking roasts and steaks out of it, though, despite our lack of skill and experience.

Lean grassfed bottom and top round roasts

The hand saw I bought did not work as well as it should have – it seemed bent, and the blade wanted to drift sideways in the cut, which bound it up and made sawing very difficult.  We used an 18-volt battery powered sawzall with ultra-sharp 9″ blade to split the spine, and it worked well for a lot of the other bone cuts, too.  I was disappointed in the hand saw performance.  And of the three knives I knew I needed – a boning knife, a long cutting knife, and a meat cleaver – I only had a boning knife.   I used a vegetable chopping knife as a cleaver which worked, but the blade was not intended for whacking through bone so it sustained damage.

Cutting rib steaks

I will add to my arsenal of knives soon.  Good cutting tools are essential to this craft.

From start to finish, it took us a little over four hours to cut 220 lbs of beef carcass into steaks, roasts, ribs, and burger meat.  I finished cutting up my round roasts the next day, as well as boning out and grinding about 25 lbs of meat, most of which I made into hamburger patties.  Of great value to both of us were the many large bones left over, as well as trimmings, to simmer into stock.  My final tally of edibles that went into the freezer looked like this:

15 steaks -   13 lbs
9 roasts   -   28.5 lbs
Ribs        -   9.5 lbs
Brisket    -   5 lbs
Ground beef   – 12 lbs
Hamburgers   – 38    (5-oz patties)
1 lb stew meat
9 large packages soup b…ones
3 large packages meat trimmings for stock
5 lb liver
1.5 lb heart
1 lb tongue
12 oz sweetbread
I must admit, I don’t yet know what I’ll do with the heart, tongue, brisket, or pancreas (sweetbread).  But I’ll figure it out.  They are all good-looking pieces of meat.  The hamburgers are some of the best I’ve ever eaten.  Delicate flavor, just the right amount of fat.  Absolutely gourmet.  Steaks, the same.  Not as marbeled or flavorful as an older beeve would provide, and smaller too; but so, so good.

I already have a couple of good sausage recipes I’ll grind up more of the round roasts to make.  It is a great feeling, a joy, in fact, to have filled my freezer (and that of my friend) with a bounty of grass-fed beef from a steer that needed to be culled, having done all the work ourselves and knowing exactly what we are eating.  Not a project to undertake lightly, but not excruciatingly difficult, either.   In fact, I thought it was a whole lot of fun, and I’m looking foward to doing it again – when I have room for more meat in my freezer!