grasspunk

Part of renovating our cattle yards is the new hardware – barriers, gates and a cage de contention to hold cows steady for examination or insemination.

Getting the material off the low loader means putting the pallet forks on the tractor. Rev the engine to get the power in the hydraulic system and lift the half ton cage. It is all shiny with its zinc coating. That won’t last – it will soon get plenty of wear and tear.

And what a nice day for work.

Next we’ll install some of the barriers into the old barn.

A few days ago: snow. We had 12 days of cold with nights dropping down to –10 and days remaining below zero. But we had sun, which warmed the heart if not the water lines.

The snow has since gone. The grass wasn’t affected by the snow layer.

Legumes are springing up all over. For example, clover. And there looks to be a bit of a different legume sneaking in at the bottom of the photo. Maybe some lotier?

This paddock is called Sleepy Hollow after a sunken communal road that runs by it. It was grazed three times last year and had a fair bit of litter build-up. Over winter (and under the snow) this has been forming a nice thatch below the grass. I’m curious to see how well this paddock resists drought this year with this extra sponge protecting the soil.

One of the benefits of not using fertilizers is that the soil is a more welcoming place for life. More bugs, more spiders, more birds and best of all more worms. We have huge amounts of wormsign in the pastures as the little guys turn dead grass into fresh soil. The moss is getting covered with this new soil. The grasses are outcompeting the moss with these soil improvements.

Don’t forget the dung beetles.

The neighbors are hammering in replacement vine posts.

Some local pilot decided to buzz the farm. This is a lot less disturbing that the usual Mirage or helicopter gunship.

And a stop by the cows on the way back home.

After running for 20 minutes the tractor gave a sigh and decided to take a nap in the sunshine. It stopped on a spot with a lovely view and with a bale of hay still on the loader.

It was several degrees below zero (in Celsius-speak). This is nothing to brag about if you are a farmer from the midwest but rather cold for my Australian-bred fingertips. It was clear that the tractor was too cold to do any actual work. I decided it was the perfect time to go back inside and have another cup of coffee.

Kenny came around a day later to pick up a care package I brought from my trip up north and while he was over he could not resist digging into my engine issue. After poking and prodding he pointed to the fragments of ice in the fuel lines, the hemisphere of ice in the fuel filter and the lump of ice in the fuel tank. Since the tractor doesn’t run well on ice, I had a fuel problem. Tractor Cat helped Kenny out.

Now to complicate matters it might be more than that. We’ve been having nights down to –10 so all this ice could have formed after the breakdown, disguising a real problem. Any real problem is likely also cold related and caused by ice, so the current plan is to wait for everything to defrost then get the manic mechanic out to perform his tracto-magic.

The cowherd are laughing at the weather. [“Minus-ten? Hah, it is minus-twenty in the Auvergne where we are from! This Gascon farm is like Club Med!”] They have thick curly coats and are well bred for this. The biggest change with the snow is that they eat less of the grass and drink way more water since they are burning more energy to keep warm. They get plenty of hay. Now the snow is defrosting they are discovering all the grass they forgot to eat over the last week or so.

Most of the last couple of weeks has been very cold and sunny, which is pretty for the photo but cold for the photographer.

Legend the patou is still sleeping outside. We can’t get him to come in and sit by the fire. He has a job to do guarding the farm and he likes to do it, snowy or not.

If there’s one thing rural France has an abundant supply of, it is beautiful churches.

I was up on le Cher in the Centre to visit a Salers farm, one that has 200 mother cows on 320 hectares. This was a much bigger operation than the one we run. They get a lot of demand for direct sale of Salers beef but with the workload of 200 mother cows there’s no way to deal with direct sales too.

One of the things I was looking at was a bull for the farm. This farm keeps all their male calves intact (i.e. no castration, no steers). Bulls grow faster than steers and produce lean tender beef at a young age. This farm aims at 20-24 months but I have heard of other farms doing bull beef at 14-18 months. This is a quick way to get a return for raising your own calves.

This guy was paying me close attention.

The downside of bulls is that you have to separate them from the herd if you want any control over your genetics or if you want your fences intact. So they have over a hundred bulls fattening in pens. This works well for the cooperative or auction market, but isn’t something we want to do for direct sale. We think good beef takes time and that steer beef, although slower to raise, will produce the best flavor. Still, this farm had a great setup for producing a lot of beef and making a profit.

Some of the two hundred mother cows are inside. Here they are eating at a cornadis, which is lockable so I can have a look at them. This is different from the attached cows at a lot of farms.

We’re thinking of adding another dozen young mother cows to the herd.

One of these things is not like the other ones! That’s a Charolaise in amongst the Salers. They are bigger and more muscular than a Salers but are slower to mature and have more birthing and fertility problems. And they don’t taste as good. They are probably the most numerous cow in France with the Limousine and Blonde following after.

It is the start of the spring birthing season so there were plenty of new calves. These twins were outside, but they had a little straw shelter to keep the wind off.

This little cross calf was born just before I arrived. Born curious, too.

About a year ago I visited a friend who has a big cow farm and helped him do his morning rounds feeding the various herds. The photos from this visit just surfaced and reminded me how slack I was in not putting them online at the time.

His philosophy is very similar to mine – grass, outdoor cows, low-equipment, low-cost – but his methods were inverse. His herd is divided into smaller herds and they each stay on their own paddock for a long period of time, whereas we run a large herd with the cows moving each day.

He has an agent buy the cheapest rustic calves he can get then has the same agent sell the finished animals on a year later, so he spends little time on that side of the business. His farming style is to spend as little time farming as possible. There’s a couple of hours feeding in the morning then he gets his afternoon’s free barring any fence maintenance. There are no mother cows.

This work ethic has left him fit, active and fast-talking. His accent is Norman so he’s not too difficult to understand. Farming out here keeps you fit: at the time of these photos he was 75.

Instead of using hay bales, he picks up the hay in a silage wagon and dumps it out into various sheds, one shed per paddock. There’s a hot wire out in front and each day of winter he manually forks hay out of each shed for the cows. Forget boot camp, hay forking is a full body exercise.

Instead of purchased hay feeders, he uses old steel wheels and bends out the spokes, welding them against another rim to create a feeder.

In the photo above you can also see some of his Gascon cows. There are all sorts on the farm but his agent works in the Ariège so the herd is mostly Ariège Gascons.

The tractor he uses most of the time is an old Deutz 2wd with a loader. He’s not losing much money to depreciation.

That day he had to move some cows down off a hill into a different paddock. He put a charge of ground corn in the loader of the Deutz and let the cows discover it. That’s a Charolais being bold in front with a lot of Gascons and some crosses behind.

Then he starts to back away, drawing the cows with him.

They trot after him as he reverses the tractor down the hill.

Then they see the feed trough and go running to it. Stimulus! Response! He dumps the corn in the trough to seal the deal.

After moving the cows it was time to head back for a cup of coffee. He does have a nice house.

To end the story I think he is retiring now at age 76. The chateau and farm might be up for sale.

Cold morning.

Patient cows.

Fresh lucerne hay.

Well-rested grass.

Watching the rollout.

Nom nom nom.

I visited the Aveyron again to check out some cows for sale. I’m in the market for some mother cows or first time heifers to be giving birth this spring and some younger animals for meat or motherhood.

Here is their cowshed in action. It is an old-style one with the chained mother cows and the evacuateur behind them. Still, it is light and airy and even the roof is insulated since it gets much colder in the Aveyron than in the Gers.

The heifers are in stabulation libre on the other side of the shed. These girls are between 7 and 12 months old.

There’s another visit to a Salers farm planned for later this week which will be a great chance to compare cow qualities and farming methods.