chippie":e3perouc said:
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One thought about your pond. A well and water trough is better for the animals. Many people fence their ponds to keep the cattle out of it. Some cattle will stand in the water, poop and pee in it and basically make the pond a very nasty place. We have a friend who has a fine pond with catfish. His cattle do not have access to it.
I concure. I have 20 ponds on my property. (one for every pasture and field that can be grazed) The cows have access to all but one pond, that is the closest one to my house. That one I just had rebuilt with the work completed just a year ago. I have stocked that pond and that one is mine for recreation. The cows are fenced off of that pond with an electric fence. They will make a mess out of the pond. They will stand around on the pond dam, and break down the dirt, and muddy up the shore line, and use the pond as a bathroom. However, if your cows are always being rotated like mine are, they are only on a pond for a couple weeks out of the year. That give the ponds the rest of the year to settle out and firm up and so forth.
However the winter lot will hold the cattle for three months. The two ponds in that lot are wrecked beyond repair, and I sure wouldn't be interetested in eating any fish from those. One of these days I am going to get motivated to putting in a large concrete slab and a stock tank below the largest pond for the cows to drink out of, then there will be another new fence going in.... around that pond.
One other benifit of not having the cows in the pond in the winter is avoiding them falling through the ice looking for water. If they have a stock tank they are used to drinking out of with free flowing water, they won't go looking for harder to get to water below a frozen pond.
chippie also":e3perouc said:
Whether or not you can graze 'year round depends on your grasses. We live on the Texas Gulf Coast near Houston. Our grass goes dormant in the winter even though it is short sleeve weather. We plant wheat and feed hay. We don't have a lot of cattle (7 head and four calves), mostly horses (12 head). We do not have a bull. My husband breeds our cattle AI. We have always lived on our farm and because of that, all of the cattle and horses that we have owned over the years have been gentle because of the kids. A bad attitude guarantees a quick trip to the auction barn.
That sounds like great advice to me. All my mean tempered cows get wheels under them pretty fast. I don't mind a cow that's motherly with a new born, in fact I expect it, but the mean streak need to go away when the calves are a month old.
chippie then":e3perouc said:
It is a good idea to wait until next year to get your stock. That will give you time to get everything set up and in place. When we bought this place 17 years ago, we owned it a year before we moved onto it. It had been farmed and we had to start from scratch. One thing that helped us was that we had storage buildings and a small barn that could be moved (WW Stalls w/ roof). We built a larger barn (50' x 48') with pens in the back....
I concure.
It's nice to have things ready to go before moving in the livestock. I have done that with my chickens. ( just a hoby chicken rancher, about 30 bird for my own enjoyment) I spent a full year with constructing the brooding house, and chicken yard before I got any birds. I remember my dad doing it backwards with his hog operation.... and I think it sure would have been easier to had the facilities in first before the hogs.
