Hobby Farm Animals. Chris McLaughlin

      Selecting and Bringing Home Beef Cattle

      Attention to the basics of raising beef cattle will reap rewards in the form of a freezer full of homegrown beef as well as extra cash from meat and calf sales. Where cattle are common, so are the auction barns, truckers, and processing plants that make it fairly simple to buy, sell, and process cattle. Americans love beef, so there is a ready market for beef cattle.

      There’s another benefit to owning beef cattle: they can improve your land. This may come as a surprise, given the reputation cattle have acquired in certain quarters for overgrazing and destroying sensitive lands. But beef cattle are a tool, not a cause. The result depends on how the tool is wielded—just as a hammer can be used to fix a building or destroy it. Research and on-the-ground experience have demonstrated that, when properly managed, beef cattle can be a highly effective tool for restoring health to damaged grasslands and watersheds. On a hobby farm, well-managed cattle can continually increase the richness of your soils, the biodiversity and lushness of your pastures, and the water quality of your ponds and streams.

      Beef cattle will also enhance the view from your kitchen window. Every time I look out the window to see our cattle grazing the green slopes of our farm, hear bobolinks singing in our pasture, or prepare homegrown steaks for dinner, I’m glad we have beef!

      For hundreds of years, people have bred cattle to develop characteristics that were best adapted to a particular climate and purpose. Eventually, this resulted in distinctive breeds of cattle, each with a distinctive palette of physical traits. Today, a cattle buyer can choose from a wonderful array of color, build, size, growth rate, and potential meat and milk production to fit cattle to the farm, the climate, and the purposes of the owner.

      Although not all cattle are created physically equal, they do share general behavior characteristics. Cattle sense the world differently than we do. They eat different foods and digest them differently. Understanding how cattle operate is key to knowing what to expect from them, what they will like and won’t like, and how to get them to do what you want them to do. Understanding and working with cattle’s natural behaviors will result in calmer, healthier animals.

      Beef Breeds

      Until the middle of the eighteenth century, cattle were tough, multipurpose animals that were not selectively bred for any specialized purpose. Differences in size, color, and build were simply results of groups’ being isolated from one another in remote settlements. Then, in 1760, Robert Bakewell, an Englishman, began the first known systematic breeding program to improve the uniformity and appearance of his cattle. The results were published in 1822 in George Coates’s Herd Book of the Shorthorn Breed, the first formal recognition of a cattle breed. Other breed herd books soon followed, and, as the concept of breeding for a specific purpose spread, cattle were divided into two main categories: those bred primarily for milk production and those bred primarily for beef production. Even the original dual-purpose Shorthorn breed has been split into Shorthorns for beef and Shorthorns for milking.

      More than five hundred breeds of cattle exist in the world today, although only a few are common in the United States. Milking Shorthorn; the ubiquitous black-and-white Holstein; and the rarer Guernsey, Brown Swiss, Ayrshire, and Jersey make up the six primary dairy breeds in the United States. All dairy breeds produce excess bull calves that are raised for beef, and plenty of beef operations are built on dairy calves.

      Hereford cattle, with their familiar white faces, red bodies, and white markings, have been the backbone of the American beef industry since a few decades after their arrival in 1847. The Black Angus, first brought to the United States in 1873, is now almost as numerous as the Hereford, while the breed’s offshoot, Red Angus, established its own breed registry in the mid-1900s. These three breeds, along with the Shorthorn, Scottish Highland, Dexter, Devon, and Galloway breeds, are the major British breeds of beef cattle, so designated because they all originated in England, Scotland, Ireland, or Wales. In general, the British beef breeds are smaller, fatten faster, and are more tolerant of harsh conditions than the continental breeds.

      The continental breeds from Europe are generally larger and slower to mature but offer a bigger package of beef to the producer. The most