Hello, and start up question.

[Hillside Ben]

Thought I'd say a quick hello and introduce myself.
My name's Ben and I'm living in Cardiff at the moment. I farm Sheep, Pigs and Poultry on mostly rented land around Cardiff. My wife and I are in the process of buying some land and I'll be on the hunt for a couple of Dexters to start us off. We sell everything directly to customers via a box scheme, )lamb, pork and eggs) We're looking forward to adding beef too.
So I wondered, if any of you made the choice to go into Dexters, rather than taking over an existing herd, What would you do differently starting off? What should I be looking out for/avoiding?

[Saffy]

Look at all types of Dexter carefully before making your decision, listen to what people have to say about their favourite type of Dexter and take your time picking the type that you like best. Whatever you do do not buy the first ones you see!

Learn as much as you can about conformation. There are plenty of animals to choose from so choose good ones. An animal with a good straight back, well made legs and feet and a good udder, should last much longer and need less foot trimming, less help to get the calf to suckle etc over the years. So it is worth getting good stock for many reasons, not just for the show ring.

Stephanie

[Rob R]

Hi Ben,

In addition to what Stephanie has to say above I would also tie that in with looking at the kind of conditions your potential stock are kept in and how similar are they to your own land/planned feeding regime. Dexters are a hardy breed that can do well on marginal land but there is a lot of variation in both size and type with some bred to do even better on improved grasses and/or a bit of hard feed but they won't necessarily do as well on an unimproved hillside. Are they kept outdoors year-round or winter housed? Are they wormed regularly or do they have some natural resistance?

With hindsight I'm not sure I would do much differently, although I would do things differently now but that is only because my situation has changed since I first got Dexters - I started with virtually no land, moving them around small areas of unwanted grazing - orchards, poultry paddocks, horse paddocks, around buildings etc.

Perhaps one thing I would do would be to make more of a long term plan - and then acknowledge that things don't always go to plan! (So make a contingency). If your plan is to do this full time as a job, rather than a hobby, make realistic predicitions about the scale and resources that you'll need to put in to achieve that, including the level of income you'd hope to achieve. Also bear in mind how much time it currently takes up for you and whether it is even possible to scale up to that level.

As far as breeding goes, have a clear goal as to the type of Dexter you'd like/need and try to source stock accordingly. Pay particular attention to bulls, as they are easy to change with plenty of choice on AI, but if you're planning on hiring a bull the choice might be severely limited, so check out your options well in advance. Also think carefully about the timing of calving, which will depend largely on your own resources and logistics - that is much easier and cheaper to change when you're starting out than later on (we started out on year-round, then went to Spring & now have some calving in late Spring/early summer and the rest in late Autumn/winter).

Now I'm on a roll I have thought of another change to my plan - the short leg gene. I started with 3/4 foundation cows carrying the short gene. If I started today I would not buy any short legged stock, as I also kept a bull that was short and it just added an extra level of complexity to breeding that wasn't necessary. Dexters are still small cattle without it and it doesn't bring anything to the table that can't be achieved through regular stock selection and breeding.

[Duncan MacIntyre]

I wish this board had a "like" button as facebook, because both the last contributers have given very good advice. Take note of every detail.

Duncan

[Tim Watson]

Hello Ben,
May I add to the above, the health of the herd.
We recently learnt the hard way about not checking the health of incoming stock so, I would ask to see the medicine book for the stock for the last 12 months. I would also get a vet to take bloods, which I would be prepared to pay for, and check for IBR, BVD, Johnes, and Lepto. If there are calves at foot I would have them checked for Coccidiosis. Providing all of this is clear (making it a condition of the purchase) I would go ahead. This means you should have healthy stock to start with.

[Tim Watson]

Ben, Also meant to add, if you are getting stock from more than one place, keep them separated for 3-4 weeks as a quarantine. Once you have yr herd set up do the same thing for all incoming stock.

[Hillside Ben]

Brilliant. Thank you all.

Great tips and advice.

I'm not looking for the cattle to be my sole income, they'll be another product we can offer. Alongside our current pork, lamb, and egg boxes. They will have to pay their way though. I guess initially I'd like to have 2 or 3 a year going to the abattoir to help fill our gap when we don't have lambs going. We'll build the herd as we build the business and our land up, or if there's insufficient demand we'll scale them back and concentrate on what we're already doing.

Loads of useful advice and ideas on this forum though, when you read through the topics.

[Rob R]

In that case you will need to think very carefully about how much you spend on equipment and the like, as there will be added fixed costs of introducing a new species that will be harder to cover from a few animals and it can also have implications on your time eg checking & watering 40 sheep involves a similar amount of work to checking 20, but adding cows in & the amount of water they require suddenly goes up significantly, so if you're grazing any land without mains water that will need thinking about too. I've seen a few people start out with their Dexters thinking that they need all the crush, bale feeders etc only to find that the cows don't produce enough to justify it. Better to start out, IMO, without the expensive kit (which will allow you to spend more on decent stock) and buy this from the proceeds as & when they allow.

[Hillside Ben]

Yes I think you're right.
I did the same with the sheep really, we started off with only half a dozen and a ram a few years back, and built up from there. It's only this year I've earned enough off them to get a weighcrate in. I add a few hurdles and troughs each year. There's always fencing repairs to come out of what we sell too. But as the flock has grown so has our customer base so it's been an organic process really. (I don't mean we are organic)

I think my sheep trailer will be big enough to cope with moving a few dexters at a time.

We only really have one block without a good water supply. The rest are pretty well covered. The plan is to put an ibc in that one in the short term. But I'd like to get it connected up at some point, (there is a main near the gateway) We have ring bale feeders that the sheep use, will these be big enough for the dexters? My friends horse uses them by leaning in over the top.

Without a crush, what do people do about TB testing?

[debra wiltshire]

check with your vet...ours will not come out unless there is a crush...now we have bought one not sure how we ever coped with out one!

[Louisa Gidney]

Fortunately my TB test falls in early Dec, when the cows are housed in individual pens. They are tied on halters and use a hurdle to stop the back end swinging round. By the time the cattle are old enough for TB test, they have been halter trained.

[Rob R]

If you only have a few cows it's best to halter them for TB tests etc - I only got a proper crush last year, mainly because I was talked into it by a salesman (or rather I talked myself into it, to try and stop him selling me a headyoke).

A 'crush' can be homemade, it doesn't have to be one made by a livestock equipment manufacturer, providing it is secure - we used to make one out of a normal field gate (take a look at Stephanie's brilliant setup here. It does involve a crush but the gate that swings round to become her race is similar to what we used to do with the gate for testing. We had the 'head' end against a feed barrier so that the cow stuck it's head through and a 12ft gate gave enough length to connect the other end to the adjacent gate, with the cow 'crushed' in the resulting triangle), which had the advantage of being a squeeze crush for different sized animals, although it wasn't needed for the vast majority of cows - if they're used to being handled. The things I've used the crush for has been tasks such as castrating yearlings and (copper) bolusing, where restraint was needed.

[Jac]

Thought I'd say a quick hello and introduce myself.
My name's Ben and I'm living in Cardiff at the moment. I farm Sheep, Pigs and Poultry on mostly rented land around Cardiff. My wife and I are in the process of buying some land and I'll be on the hunt for a couple of Dexters to start us off. We sell everything directly to customers via a box scheme, )lamb, pork and eggs) We're looking forward to adding beef too.
So I wondered, if any of you made the choice to go into Dexters, rather than taking over an existing herd, What would you do differently starting off? What should I be looking out for/avoiding?

If I had my time again assuming I just wanted to produce boxed beef then I wouldn't bother buying stock to breed. If you start with a couple of empty heifers or steers to finish then you can always get out of it with minimum losses if it doesn't work out how you had hoped.

[Hillside Ben]

Rob R we used to use a similar set up, to what you probably had before your crush, for castrating when we were doing calf rearing in a previous job. It worked well but I always thought, I wouldn't fancy this with adult cattle. I'll speak to the vets and see what they'd be happy with like Debra said

Jac I had considered that. We do our pigs that way at the moment, no breeding stock, we just buy in weaners and finish them to pork weight. But because of the way I want to take the business I'd rather buy in some cattle and have control over what we're breeding and selling. Also I can control how our pork comes out by what I feed the pigs. But with grazing animals, I have the land I have so would like to start with and breed something that will suit it.
This might be a silly question to those that know, but is there a difference between, steer and heifer beef, either in terms of taste, texture or growth rate?

[Hillside Ben]

Just to clarify that last question, I'm thinking our ewe lambs grow much slower than our ram lambs, but the boars grow only marginally quicker than the gilts with the pigs. Just wondered if there's a big difference between the growth of heifers or steers, or any other discernible difference.