Beef Cattle: Keeping a Small-Scale Herd for Pleasure and Profit

Your hands-on reference to raising beef cattle!

• Choosing a breed, purchasing, and bringing home your first cows
• Required facilities and constructing fencing and shelter to protect your herd
• Feeding and nutrition to keep your cattle healthy and maintain weight
• Safe handling, including holding pens, chutes, and training your herd to follow you
• Recognizing disease, how to prevent and treat it, and when to call the vet
• Breeding your herd, caring for pregnant cows, nurturing newborn calves, weaning, and more

Few things are as satisfying as raising livestock for food, or to simply graze and fertilize pastures as "nature's lawnmowers"!

Beef Cattle: Keeping a Small-Scale Herd is an excellent easy-to-follow introduction to raising cows. Seasoned handlers and beginners alike will benefit from this colorful guide, packed with essential information necessary to purchase and maintain a small herd of beef cattle—from meadow to market.

While managing her own hobby farm in Wisconsin, author Ann Larkin Hansen shares her expertise in all things farm. In this comprehensive guide, Hansen corrals the hobby farmer into the world of cowboys and cowgirls, stating, "Beef cattle are as much at home on the hobby farm as they are on the range."

This practical primer begins with the basics, from biological traits and behavior to life cycle, helping you choose the breed that's best for your farm. Then, it describes exactly what's needed to maintain a herd of cattle—the four Fs—fencing, feed, fields, and facilities.

Given the expense involved in the maintenance of cattle, any farmer will welcome Hansen's sound and sensible advice on buying the right cattle, whether steer calves for meat or breeding stock for building up a herd. The buying chapter helps you focus on what to look for when selecting cattle; how cows, heifers, and bulls are priced; where to purchase; and how to get cattle to the farm.

Feeding cattle is a complicated topic, and Hansen breaks it down into three basic components that every aspiring rancher needs to understand about a nutritious diet: pasture, hay, and grain. With directness and clarity, she explains the ins and outs of grazing, selecting ideal foodstuffs, using salt and minerals, and maintaining good weight on the herd.

With helpful tips and full-color photos, you can rely on Hansen's expert advice to learn the fundamentals of handling cattle, including herding, loading, and transporting, as well as how to spot symptoms of common cattle diseases and keeping cows healthy through preventive care, vaccinations, parasite control, and veterinary assistance.

If you want to breed your livestock, Beef Cattle includes a chapter on pairing cows and heifers, artificial insemination, the care of pregnant cows, calving, caring for the young, and weaning calves. The final chapter, "Marketing and Processing Your Cattle" is for hobby farmers looking to get beef processed, grade meat, and sell the final product.

Sidebars of fun trivia, stories from farmers, and useful advice appear throughout, while a comprehensive glossary of over 100 terms, an appendix of health issues, resources of useful websites, books, and periodicals, and a detailed index complete the book.

Learn everything a small-scale farmer needs to succeed, and produce hormone-free beef for your family and friends, with Beef Cattle!

"A great, easy-to-read book for people who are getting started raising beef cattle. I really like the emphasis on using cattle to improve the land and encouraging people to preserve rare breeds."
—Temple Grandin, Associate Professor of Animal Science, Colorado State University

Ann Larkin Hansen is the author of The Backyard Homestead Seasonal Planner, The Organic Farming Manual, The Electric Fencing Handbook, Finding Good Farmland, and Making Hay; coauthor of A Landowner’s Guide to Managing Your Woods with consulting forester Dennis Waterman and master logger Mike Severson; and coauthor with her husband, Steve, of Maintaining Small-Farm Equipment. She has been a journalist for more than 30 years, specializing in organic agriculture and sustainable forestry. A homesteader and a small-scale organic farmer, she lives with her family on a farm in northern Wisconsin.