Friday, April 25, 2008

Heifer Calves

Since our last update, a new opportunity has come our way! We will be raising "replacement heifers" for a local dairy farmer. We will pick up calves from his farm when they are two days old, bring them to our farm and feed and care for them until they are 6 months of age. At that point we will take and sell them back to the farmer we got them from. This allows him to free his facilities and his time to concentrate on the milking herd.

We picked up our first two calves on Wednesday night. We will be bottle feeding them twice a day for a few weeks before we start the weening process. Also, we'll start taking all newborns from now on. When we are fully "up and running" we will have somewhere between 10-16 calves and up to 40 cows here at a time! We will also raise 1-2 bull calves per month to sell to a friend who will raise them for meat.


We are very excited and learning a lot! They kids were skeptical at first and were fearful of getting bit, but are now comfortable and very excited to see the "baby cows".