Avoiding the sale yard

  click   Apple Gully Farm 
          

Our rare new addition- the small one

  The rural adage advises -   never give a name to anything you plan to eat, so our cattle have always had numbers- a letter for the year of their birth and a number to correspond with their parent, their mother that is. We have B2 and over the years she has produced calves CB2, DB2 and currently we have EB2. Each year the calves are weaned some more successfully than others, they learn to love grass, they fatten up and they're shipped off to market.
  
Depending on

• the rainfall
• the quality of grass
• the degree of sunshine
• the local economy
• the rural economy
• the global economy
• the weather in Russia or South America
• the current exchange rate
• the el nino/ la nina index
• the changing fashion for wagyu to angus burgers

and  any number of other variables, we just get a 'market' price.

We sell  our cattle for a cents per kilo rate. In the past we've received anywhere from 196 cents/kg to 100 cents/kg  for 350 - 450 kg animals.

That's right  $1.96 - $1.00 / kg.  
Compare that with the price you pay in the butcher shop or super market.

On a small holding it's hard not to get to know your stock animals, there will always the noisy one, the sociable one, the boof heads, the shy ones. So when they're loaded onto the back of a truck and trundled down the road there is a twinge of regret about their life and the fact that you have got to know them.
After a few years of this pattern we decided to try a new idea. And so was born the germ of an plan to go smaller. Like strawberries and tomatoes, certain breeds of cattle have been bred bigger over the years because big has always been better. But like the hollow, tasteless giant strawberry and the brilliant red but brick hard and tasteless big tomato, the bigger cattle have a limited appeal on smaller acreage and gourmet palates.

Compare the size - mini and regular

And what about the fact that it's OK to get to know your animals, to appreciate the welcome you receive when you walk into the paddock and to realise that though it takes a moment or 3 they do recognise you,  as the chatterbox starts bellowing and the sociable one ambles forward of the herd for a quick scratch.
Don't forget that above all cattle are ever willing lawnmowers with the added bonus of being enthusiastic fertilizer producers and they beat sitting on the slasher going round the paddock for hours on end.

We settled on miniature Herefords, a smaller but rarer version of what we already have because we know they can manage on our native pasture. They aren't too fussy,  they just have to inhale a blade of grass to put on weight.
First came the bull from up north, then the cows from down south, their diminutive size means four of them fitted into a double horse float with room to spare.

Miniature Herefords might seem small by today's standards and they have had their ups and downs - literally. Back in the late 1700's they were large plow pulling oxen from the Welsh border region, later they were bred to be chunky fatty animals providing not just beef, but tallow for the candle trade,  as the electric light took off so did a taller, leaner sized Hereford, no one needed or wanted fat any more. The popularity of smaller cuts of meat and small acre farms has helped reshape the Hereford yet again.

Horns - now you see em

Because they are quite rare we are planning to breed up our numbers and so avoid the truck to market option.  A smaller area can carry many more minis, an important factor when it comes to calculating your rural rates bill.  They are also excellent limited edition compact lawnmowers and out door companions to people like us on small farms.

Now you don't

So far there has only been a slight hiccup, miniature Herefords come horned, not polled which means to be born hornless. Because they will sometimes run with horses it was decided that the horns  would have to be shortened. Such indignity-- but they are forgiving creatures and forgetful too.
Horns -- what horns I don't remember them.