Mind the Bollocks! This Herd's Got Balls.

When I am a farmer responsible for animals of my own, I will try to the best of my ability to give them the life they'd prefer to live if they were wild. Putting beef and dairy cows on pasture is the most important move towards this, a move away from the unnatural crowding and containment of feedlots and the unnatural feed that goes with it. Keeping my own breeding bull would be another step in this direction; allowing the bull to live with the herd a further step still. There is one more practice, however, which is not widely questioned but deserves to be. Castration.

We castrated a couple weeks ago, I it shook me more than I expected. Granted, I have a new baby boy, so I may be particularly sensitive at the moment. Still, the truth is I found castration more disconcerting than slaughter. There is something honest about slaughter -- predators kill, and as farmers we fulfill the role of predators, a role which has an analog in nature -- but castration, on the other hand, is mutilation. No farmer wants to call it that, but that's what it is. Predators may mutilate their prey, but only because they're not perfect hunters. Can we aspire to be more perfect farmers?

In Biodynamic terms, a bull which is castrated cannot fully express his bullness. He becomes a steer. Maybe he can fully express his steerness, but it seems to me a steer is just a bull with no balls, which, by definition, is a bull not fully expressed.

This morning, with work cancelled due to flooding, I jumped down a research rabbit hole and spent hours investigating dual-purpose cattle breeds or the possibility of raising dairy boys for beef, and in the process I discovered that raising young bulls to slaughter is not only possible, but eminently justifiable. It's not even a fringe idea. They do it in Europe.

I'll back up a step. I was researching dual-purpose breeds and dairy beef because I am designing a herd as the core part of a farm that will provide both meat and dairy for 25 members. The subscription would run for 40 weeks, providing a quarter cow per member (2 lbs. beef per week), a half-gallon or gallon of milk, and 1 lb. of cheese weekly. I wanted to figure out if it would be better to raise separate beef and milk herds, or a single dual-purpose herd. Either way, I was designing the ultimate integrated herd.

Three objectives for the efficient biodynamic herd

1. Balance milk production with meat production for 25 members
2. Keep the herd in as "natural" a state as possible
3. Avoid castrating

Mind the bollocks

"Bollocks" /ˈbɒləks/ is a word of Anglo-Saxon origin, meaning "testicles".

Apparently, there is little to no difference in flavor if bulls, or bullocks as they're technically called between 12-24 months of age, are slaughtered when a little bit younger than usual. This is 24 months at the oldest, though most experts advise between 16-20 months. Not only does the meat taste the same -- if a bit leaner -- but bulls put on weight 15% faster than steers. They convert feed more efficiently. On the management side, you'd think a bunch of bulls penned together would be dangerous to each other or the farm, but apparently behavior problems are minimal if young bulls are kept apart from the cows and their pens aren't too small.

You don't want the young bulls with the cows once they approach sexual maturity, anyway, or they might mate with their moms. So, then I got curious -- what do young bulls do in a "natural" environment? I looked into their wild relatives.

As it turns out, a feral herd of once-domesticated cattle live on the grounds of Chillingham Castle, in England. The young bulls live with the herd of cows and calves until they approach sexual maturity, at which point they split off into small bands of two or three young bulls. The herd will occasionally tolerate an older male among them year-round. The American bison behave in a very similar way. The takeaway from this is that it is perfectly natural to isolate young bulls from the herd, as long as they have the company of each other.

This is beginning to seem like a win-win.

As for the dual-purpose breeds, I think the primary argument for using a milk breed and raising the calves for meat is that you don't have to milk as many cows. Dual-purpose breeds, producing less, would take longer to milk. That said, I only need 3-4 milk cows for the dairy needs of 25 members, and I'll need 7 heads of beef per year to produce a quarter cow per member as well as a couple of quarters for the farmers. That means we'll keep 3-4 cows in addition to the milk cows to produce the requisite beef. They don't have to be a milk breed.

So, here's my idea for an efficient, Biodynamic herd

First of all, I want Jersey's (or Guernsey's or Brown Swiss) for milk, but, recall, I only need 3-4 milking cows, which includes at least one at any given time that's not lactating.

My other 3-4 cows will be Angus or another beef breed that puts weight on quick on pasture.

I will keep a Jersey bull with the herd, and he will sire calves with all 7 cows. 3-4 of them will be pure Jersey calves, and the others will be Jersey-Angus. Angsey. They will have the ol' hybrid vigor, and probably put on weight quite a bit better than pure Jersey. However, they will have the Jersey's propensity for marbling, which is another apparent win-win: Jersey's rank higher than any other breed for the quality of the marbling in their meat. They just don't produce very big cows.

My goal, however, is good meat. The quarter cows don't have to be huge.

The efficiency in this herd comes from the fact that I only need one breeding bull, a Jersey, rather than a Jersey and Angus bull. That saves me 3 acres, and I can keep the whole herd together as one, except for the bullocks, but I'll get to that in a moment. This compromises some on efficiency because we will be managing two herds for some of each year, but if we had separate beef and dairy herds, too, that would give us a total of three.

And an extra boon: Jersey's are small, Angus are big, which means we can keep the bull as long as he lives because he won't get too heavy for the Angus girls.

The herd as a whole will be about 30 animals -- 7 mama cows, 7 calves, 7 yearlings, 7 beef (or replacement heifers), and 1 bull. This amounts to a little over 20 Animal Units (1 A.U. = 1000 lbs.), which will require about 40 acres of pasture.

As for the bullocks 

I will remove the boys from the herd at 12-15 months of age, before they exhibit any serious sexual behavior. They will be walked away in pairs to a separate pasture area of about 8 acres which is fenced with heavy, bull-proof fencing material. There they will live, going around in their separate rotation in their little band of 3-4 young dudes until the fateful day they meet their maker, balls and all.

* I have worked with a farmer who kept his breeding bull with his herd year-round. Many would advise against this on the grounds that it's better to keep him apart except for a month each year, to ensure calves are born in spring. This farmer's calves are born when they are born, and everything works fine. For my purposes, I think I would keep the breeding bull apart, with the bullocks while they're around, and by himself when they're not. This is not ideal, but in a system where I'm not castrating, it's essential that the bullocks be slaughtered at a precise time, and if they're going to keep them together, we need to make sure they are born at the same time and slaughtered at the time. We also need to compromise with reality here -- a slaughter unit can only come to the farm so often, and you want them to do more than one animal when they're there.

Paleo Permaculture reply on land use and grain cropping systems

Comment I posted in regards to paleo permaculture, on a blog post at robbwolf.com:

As a farmer, I need to point out a couple missing inputs in this equation. Don't get me wrong, I found your article because I'm very interested in the idea of paleo permaculture, but for rigor's sake:

(1) The square footage per bird you give does not include the growing of grains for feed or the land necessary to let them range freely. While wildly variable, a standardized metric for free-ranging birds might be 12 per acre, which comes out to 3,600 square feet per bird. Growing the feed you need for 12 laying birds might take 1/3 of an acre, which is 1,200 square feet per bird of grains, corn, and legumes, and about twice that if you get rid of the corn and use predominantly cereals (wheat or barley). It would take the same space and poundage of feed for 100 broilers, which means you could eat about 2 per week.

(2) You neglect fertility requirements. Vegetables and intensive staple crops like corn, potatoes, and sweet potatoes require far more in the way of compost and minerals than extensive crops like grains do. Wheat is the hungriest cereal, but even it requires less fertility than "garden" crops, and barley, rye, and oats require far less than wheat.

(3) Grains have traditionally had their role on integrated subsistence farms. We can graze most grain crops at least once (with animals) when they're young and flush and still get a good yield. Animals can clean up the crop residues, and munch undersown clovers after the crop's been harvested. Straw is a useful farm material as mulch, animal bedding, or even for building or roofing.

I think a paleo permaculture homestead -- or even farm -- is a very cool idea, but it does not necessarily lead to a smaller footprint on the land. What is true is that you do away with the processing difficulties around grains, and when it comes to being a homesteader, that processing time is no joke, nor are those tools cheap which make it easier.

I think the ideal paleo approach would involve cows or other grazers, because you don't need to grow feed. Moreover, pasture is the perfect rotation with intensive garden land -- 4 years in pasture, 4 years in garden. But that, again, requires a lot of land, about 2 acres per full-grown cow. You get about 300 lbs. of consumable meat per cow when all is said and done, which should be more than enough for one person, but you need a big freezer to keep it in.

I hope this furthers the discussion. These numbers are all very rough because in reality they vary by climate, soil type, water access and so on, but they are pretty solid middle-of-the-road figures.

A Sunday Morning 5-Acre Homestead Fantasy, Right Here Where I'm At

I frequently dream about buying the little chunk of the farm that our trailer is on. It is approximately 5 acres with plenty of water seeping out all over it. It is inclined to the Northeast, meaning it gets little afternoon sun and little sun when the sun is very low in the winter. I know from moving the cows through here that the pasture is of fairly low quality, especially later in the season. All that aside, though, I like to imagine the homestead I would make if I were own it.

Perimeter of property

You can see our trailer on the left side, little white thing

It is about a 5-acre chunk, sloping to the East. The middle area is fairly open, and there is about  an acre of flattish land or so in the middle. There's a nice grove in the NW corner, and a bunch of gorgeous old cedars, maples, and a spruce along the Eastern side, down by where the swamp begins. It is bordered by the swamp along the eastern line, the road along the south and west, and a perennial creek along the north. The middle is pretty sunny, so there is maybe an acre of potential planting space, but it's also the best pasture.

We would always have more than enough water here, and would swale the land to control seepage. A couple of dairy goats and their edible kids could be moved around the pasture and periodically graze the willows and alders in the swamp. We would have coppice groves for goat fodder. We could keep a pig and feed it on household excess, and extra corn. Some dual-purpose ducks and or chickens for eggs and meat. We could shoot a deer every year.

The acre of garden space would grow corn and beans and vegetables. 1/10th acre of beans and chickpeas, 3/10 acre of corn and cereals, and 1/10 acre of vegetables should be more than enough for the whole year. The remaining half-acre could be used for herbal leys for the livestock. We'd dig out the many rocks from this acre over time and stack them to make paddock walls.

Among the coppices we'd grow our fruit trees, nut trees, fruit bushes, nut bushes, and useful plants for stakes, posts, and fuelwood. We could interplant nitrogen-fixers for coppicing, such as black locust, among the fruits and nuts, with the added benefit that the goats would love the branches.

We'd have the place set up real nice with certain tent pads kept away from the animals under the cedars so we could have a summer pig roast and invite all our friends for a long weekend every year.

We could replace the trailer with a nice little wood-heated home, or a newer trailer, with a woodstove, a carport, and a shop/garage.

It would be cold and dark and damp in the winter, but in the summer we'd harness the high sun and bright mornings to grow what we needed, even if our yields were lower than they would be in the open or on a south-facing slope.

"Design Your Life," a class

A course on how to live the life you want to live. How to create your own alternative. How to march to a different drummer without losing the beat. Life Visioning. Strategies. Tactics. Skills. Systems.

Readings:

Pirsig, "The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (Quality)
Csikszentmihalyi, "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" (Flow)
Aristotle, concept of Eudaimonia & Umair Haque at HBR (Happiness)
Sections from Early Retirement Extreme

Division of labor between Home and School

YOU take care of drilling the basics: reading, writing, math.
I teach them how to integrate it and apply it in real-world settings.

And the obvious thing: a class which critically engages the notion of self-sufficiency

What does it mean to be self-sufficient?

Have people ever been self-sufficient?

Is self-sufficiency a goal worth striving for?

How do we become more self-sufficient?

What does self-sufficiency look like in modern America?

Can we be competent at everything?

What are the economic trade-offs associated with being a generalist vs. a specialist?

Is there a happy medium?

Reading List: 

Helen and Scott Nearing, "The Good Life"
Gene Logsdon, chapter on Amish from "Living at Nature's Pace"
Elizabeth Gilbert, "The Last American Man"
Thomas Thwaites, "The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch"
William Coperthwaite, "A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity" (?)
Something about the biodynamic "whole farm organism"
Thoreau, "Walden"
Something about the Open-Source movement
Marcin Jakubowski's curriculum for K-Ph.D. education
Bland and Bell, 2007, "A Holon Approach to Agroecology"
An Indicator Framework for Assessing Agroecosystem Resilience
Jane Jacobs, "The Nature of Economies"
Thomas Jefferson's Agrarianism

The Renaissance Man Ideal

Apparently Aldous Huxley wrote:

Know something about everything and everything about something.

I do believe this is an identical goal to my own,

Jack of all trades, master of one.

And this is what I come down to being interested in: being a renaissance man! Here we develop systems thinking, integrative intelligence, abstract thinking, intution, and so on, by saturating oneself with information while practicing constantly. We develop a person that can approach any problem with a diverse set of experiences and thus creative, novel, or "emergent" solutions. He or she is capable, response-able. He or she knows enough about things in general to be able to learn any new thing quickly. By exploring the lay of multiple geographies, one comes to develop an intuition for how geographies function, what the laws are that govern them, how they behave and tend.

Jacob Lund Fisker, in his book Early Retirement Extreme, identifies seven fields in which a person can develop him or herself. These are:

physiological
economical
intellectual
emotional
social
technical
ecological

He provided two illustrative graphs:

A specialists skill set

A Renaissance man's skill set

The original Renaissance ideal of a polymath believed a man should:

• Be able to defend himself with a variety of weapons, especially the sword. 
• Be able to play several musical instruments.
• Be able to paint and output other works of art. 
• Be forever interested in advancing knowledge and science.
• Be able to engage in debates regarding issues such as philosophy and ethics.
• Be a skilled author and poet.

In a school for Renaissance men and women, we might teach:

• basic fitness and meditation (discipline for body and mind)
• gardening or farming (for ecological intelligence)
• a craft such as woodworking or website design
• the scientific method
• money management
• communications, including presentations
• generic problem-solving and analysis

and encourage students to pursue, on their own time:

• a sport or martial art
• music, art, graphic design, poetry, dance, or other "fine" art
• an advanced subject such as higher math or science or literature
• debate

And these meta-subjects:

• strategy and tactics
• critical thinking and analysis