Down on the farm: We Brought The Bull Home

There’s not much going on down here on the farm these late summer days other than the routine everyday chores – moving the cows, milking goats, feeding chickens… Oh! And making a ridiculous amount of pickles.

One thing is for sure: we won’t starve this winter – even if all we eat is pickles and beef.

Speaking of beef, in the interest of continuing to have plenty of beef, we brought our bull home for fall breeding a week ago.

See, we have this arrangement with some friends where they keep Johnny most of the time, and he breeds their cows, and then we bring him home to breed our cows during a specific window. They like Johnny, and we like not keeping him isolated most of the time, so it works for all of us.

When we sent him away early this year, he was just a little guy – wooly in his winter coat but still small and immature. If you didn’t look closely, he didn’t look much different than one of the cows. Not very manly at all.

Well, that’s changed. He’s still not fully grown at nearly three years old, but he’s definitely bullish. Now you can look out over the sea of red bovine and say, “Yup, that one’s a bull.”

Interestingly, he’s not, nor will he ever be, a massive bull by industry standards. Aside from having stellar grass-fed only genetics, one of the reasons we picked him was his small projected size.

Relatively short legs and large rumens (bellies) are oft-overlooked qualities in the beef industry. I’m not sure why breeding for height is so popular, but the rumen size issue is straightforward.

Grain doesn’t take up as much space as does grass in adequate amounts. We grass-fed producers don’t care for wasting time feeding long legs. When you’re sending your beeves to a feedlot to get fat, those things don’t matter.