What can be said about the simplicity of a cow eating grass? We see it almost every time we go for a drive out in the country. It’s what they do. Eat grass…all day…every day. When we first moved into this house in 2021, before we even had our own cows, there were some cattle in the neighboring pasture across the street. I took so many pictures of those guys, even had a favorite bull #15! He was my buddy. But the thing that made me giggle the most was to hear them yanking up the grass and chomping. In the noise of the city, noise of work, noise of life…I had never heard a cow eat. It’s so quiet here, you can literally hear the sound of a cow eating grass. Sounds silly, but to have the ability to hear something so mundane and so random was actually peaceful to me. I would sit on the front porch in the dark of night, and I would listen the cows eating grass. I loved it then. And I still love it now.
We have our own cows now. 13 of them. Our homestead is pretty large by homestead standards, 18 acres. But it’s pretty small for farming cattle. We only have about 10 acres of pasture broken up into 5 different paddocks, around 2-3 acres each. You can imagine that cows eat a lot of grass, really fast. One 1,200 pound cow can eat about 30 pounds of grass a day or about 11,000 lbs of grass in a year. I won’t get too mathy here, but that means one cow would need about 40 acres of grass to feed her for the entire year. Clearly, we don’t have that. So, in order to keep them fed throughout the growing season we need to let the cows chomp down on one paddock while the grass in the other paddocks recover and regrow to be ready for the next round of feeding.
When we rotate into the next paddock, we need to fertilize the pasture the cows just left. But guess what…the cows did that for us already. They left their own fertilizer behind. So Rickie attaches this janky little homemade contraption (basically a large piece of cyclone fence weighted down by cinder block) on to the back of the 4-wheeler and he uses it to break up and spread out the manure patties all around the paddock. Just add sun and rain, and we have a decent recipe for greener, thicker, more lush grass.
Now You Know: Bloviating about Bovines
Tiny trivia tidbits to tuck into your pocket
Girls
Heifer–A young female bovine that has not yet given birth to a calf.
Cow–Once the heifer gives birth to a calf, usually at about 2 years of age, she is then called a cow.
Boys
Bull-An uncastrated male bovine. Generally raised for breeding purposes, not meat.
Steer-A castrated male bovine. Generally raised for meat.
Cattle
Herd-Put them all together in one pasture, and you have a herd of cattle.
Head-Cattle are counted by the head. On our homestead, we have 13 head of cattle in our herd.
This is a system that works pretty well, and many farmers use this approach to feed their herds. But to be honest, we are running out of space. Like I said earlier, the cows eat a lot of grass really fast and we have gotten to the point where our paddocks are almost overgrazed before the next area is fully ready for the next round of feeding. We will be able to get by this year, but cows make babies, so that means we are adding new cows every year to grow the operation. We will have to seek out additional land options (i.e. leasing) to facilitate the space needs for our growth. This is exciting and daunting at the same time for me. Exciting because we are growing in the right direction. Daunting because leasing means expense. We are in a great position to trade labor for expense, but the unknown of just exactly how much expense we are talking about here makes me pause just a little. BUT…this homestead is all just one grand experiment. We research, plan, negotiate, communicate, make friends, and it all comes out in the wash. I have said it before in a previous blog post…We can’t do this on our own. We need the experience and knowledge of those who have been doing this for a lot longer than we have. We are very fortunate to have made friends in this community who are willing to help guide us and are eager to see us succeed and Make It On The Homestead.