The Herd

As a fellow cattleman I would assume it is safe to say that you all enjoy looking at other people's cattle. I know I always enjoy the opportunity to get into an old pickup truck and bounce through a field while hearing about which cow had her calf on the coldest night of the year, or which cow is as tame as a dog until she has her calf and then you better not be within 50 yards of her calf unless you are prepared to deal with the consequences. Then there is always the nosy/greedy girl in the bunch. She will have her head in the window looking for a bucket of feed.  Every herd is different and has it's own personality as a whole. I know not all of you have had the opportunity to make it to ESF to see our herd. I have been trying to take some pictures that way I can share the herd with those of you eager to see our cattle.

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We have a very basic commercial cow/calf herd. We want our herd to be a good representation of the average Kentucky producers herd. We currently have 89 momma cows and they were broke into two different breeding groups this summer. The black cows were bred to our Charolais bulls, and the colored cattle were bred to Angus bulls. This was done with the goal of creating a more uniform group of feeder cattle that should be Black/BWF/Smokes.

Now before you start to comment on how terrible this pasture looks, let me just tell you that this is not a pasture. This is a stand of forage crab grass that we established this summer in one of our winter feeding areas.  The cattle busted through the fence the night before this picture was taken to get into this new stand of grass that was about 12 inches tall. They loved the stuff and it didn't take them long to eat if right down to the ground. We gathered them up right after this picture was taken.   As a matter of fact, remember what I said about those greedy cows? It can sometimes make life a lot easier.

We figured we could try to capitalize on the greedy girls in this group since we didn't have any horses saddled at the time so Greg just hollered a few times and got their attention.

Then he rattled an empty bag to get them through the gate.

And then a few cubes to keep their attention and we simply "drove" them back to the field they had come out of. Having greedy cows definitely has its advantages!

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