Posted by Kathy Millar on March 03, 2004 at 17:39:33:
Looks like the weather discussion has slowed down a bit...so I though I would relate a conversation I had with an old friend I hadn't see in 20 years.
My friend and her then boyfriend had met at a agricultural college in the 70's. He had been farming all his life with his family on a mostly arable farm (dryland grains) and some beef cattle. When these two married they continued to farm and built up the old family farm to 3 or 4 sections of land and hundreds of commercial beef cattle - cow and calf operation plus conventional feedlot. One day, a few years back, they went to a forage seminar in the States and one of the speakers talked about pastures and pasture-based farming (as opposed to grain-fed).
Apparently the "light went on" and those two conventional farmers took a hard look at things when they got home and decided to make some big changes. Out went the feedlot and in came direct marketing. To further this, my friend's husband decided to go back to that same college and take the meat-cutting course. While in "class" one day, cutting up a carcass, he came across a really outstanding one and asked what breed it was from. Well, you guessed it, it was a Dexter.
The next step, then, was to locate some cows and a bull and gradually switch over from the usual cattle breeds to Dexters and they now have a nice little herd. They hope to get up to selling 60 a year and have been absolutely delighted with them. They feel the Dexter is perfect for grass finishing (absolutely no grain fed for any breeder either) and the cows are very good mothers. Their farm is located on the Canadian prairies, so the Dexter has to be good and hardy also to handle those below 40 temperatures. My girlfriend also commented how clever the cows were when choosing where to calve. None of the stock is registered but they certainly would qualify as "commercial"!
And that, boys and girls, is the end of my little story (can't you hear Dame Edna's voice??).
Kathy