Met a man this weekend at our dove shoot, that is doing something interesting. His family used to be in the diary business in NE Ga til about 2000. This dude who is a grandson of the original owner, has turned their 600 acres into a tourism site and a palace for the organic/ grassfed types to buy meat and milkk from. He has a sunflower patch and holds a sunflower festival each year, Has an 8 acre haunted corn filed maze, and has a pick your own pumpkin patch. He's planted grapes and set up a winery. Converted the big dairy bran into this winery and has music events and rents it out for weddings. He sells dairy goats and goat milk, meat goats and meat sheep. He sells free range eggs and free range turkeys. and he sells fresh, raw milk, sorta. In Ga, you can not sell raw milk to the public, but you can drink your own. so, these boutique diairies have it set up to where you buy a cow, and they board it milk it for you. Being within 45 minutes of the NE Atlanta suburbs, this business is thriving.
Anyhow, back to the original topic of this thread. This diary had been a Brown swiss diary. Years ago,m he started using Braunvieh bulls, He said the resulting heifers milked just as wel as the Brown swiss, and the steer calves sold for more as they were a little more "beefy". He was breeding these BS/Brau heifers to a Jersey bull, then breeding them back to Braunvieh bulls for the 2nd calf on. This year he bred 12 of these BS/Brun heifers to a Brahma. He did 6 with a grey and 6 with a red( whatever the AI guy had in his tank), to see what kind of calves he will get. He hopes those steers will sell a little better than the BS/ Brauns do, and he will sell the heifers as well. No need in retaining them for milking. The first ones will calve in spetember and the last in November. I made a deal with him to buy the heifers at weaning at 6 mos old. Dunno if he plans on leaving them on a cow or put 2 or 3 on a nurse cow, or just feed them all bottles from milking their cows.
@Caustic Bruno , what do you think of this cross? IMO, they should do as well as the Brahma x Jeresys. Hoping there will be 6 at ;least of the 12 born heifers. I will be able to pick them up when the last one turns 6 mos old, so should be able to get about 6 at one time. I will be able to get pics of them way before then, of course, but I should be able to sell these for $700 if I have a place to go with them when its time to pick them up. I have no idea what it would cost to ship them to Texas. It may be cost-prohibitive for that few head.
Anyhow, back to the original topic of this thread. This diary had been a Brown swiss diary. Years ago,m he started using Braunvieh bulls, He said the resulting heifers milked just as wel as the Brown swiss, and the steer calves sold for more as they were a little more "beefy". He was breeding these BS/Brau heifers to a Jersey bull, then breeding them back to Braunvieh bulls for the 2nd calf on. This year he bred 12 of these BS/Brun heifers to a Brahma. He did 6 with a grey and 6 with a red( whatever the AI guy had in his tank), to see what kind of calves he will get. He hopes those steers will sell a little better than the BS/ Brauns do, and he will sell the heifers as well. No need in retaining them for milking. The first ones will calve in spetember and the last in November. I made a deal with him to buy the heifers at weaning at 6 mos old. Dunno if he plans on leaving them on a cow or put 2 or 3 on a nurse cow, or just feed them all bottles from milking their cows.
@Caustic Bruno , what do you think of this cross? IMO, they should do as well as the Brahma x Jeresys. Hoping there will be 6 at ;least of the 12 born heifers. I will be able to pick them up when the last one turns 6 mos old, so should be able to get about 6 at one time. I will be able to get pics of them way before then, of course, but I should be able to sell these for $700 if I have a place to go with them when its time to pick them up. I have no idea what it would cost to ship them to Texas. It may be cost-prohibitive for that few head.