Tue Jan 18, 2011 10:52 pm
The Male Advantage...
- Out in the country, back in the old days, folks used to rely heavily upon their equines and bovines.
- Today, when you drive through the boonies in much of America (especially around here), you still see lots of horses and cows all over the place. So, as the Cornucopian paradigm collapses, and the people who stay out in the country lose access to all the petroleum-enabled niceties, they should be able to revert to the old ways pretty easily, right?
- Afraid not.
- You see, the horses and cattle populations in rural America today are strikingly different than they were a century or so ago. Draft horses and mules have given way to light riding horses bred for show and recreational activities. The family milk cows of old are few and far-between. The cattle in the roadside pastures are beef.
Not as interchangeable as you might think.
- When the tractor fuel and store-bought dairy get hard to come by (hyper-expensive, rationed, unavailable), resourceful folks are going to make-do with what they have available. Former hunter-jumpers and trail horses will be re-purposed for farm work. Beef cows will get milked... But the improvisers will soon realize that they'd be better-off with something closer to proper work and milking stock.
- But, by that time, the option of buying animals from far-away and having them trucked home may not be available. The demand is going to have to be met with stock bred and raised in the immediate area. Which won't be easy, with so few draft horses and family-type milk cows to breed from in many places.
- Fortunately, you don't need a full-blooded Belgian or Jersey to get a considerable improvement in doomstead functionality compared to common riding-type horses and beef cows. You can get it with cross-breeds, which means you can use the Angus, quarterhorse, Hereford, and Arabian animals that make up so much of the current populations to augment the draft and dairy breeding stock.
- Here's where the male advantage comes in... If you have a Jersey cow, and breed her to an Angus bull, you'll get one cross-breed calf per year. Half the time, that calf will be a bull, who is basically just a mediocre source of beef. So you'll get approximately one serviceable, half-breed milking cow every other year from your Jersey cow. If you're trying to help supply your half of the county with family milk cows, it's going to be very slow going at that rate.
- But, if you have a Jersey bull, you can breed him to dozens of Angus cows every year, half of whom will produce passable milk cows. On top of that, you can breed him to the few available full milk cows, producing more full milk cows and more full dairy bulls who can go on to be bred to the Angus cows to produce more decent half-breeds.
- While it'd generally be preferable to breed light stallions to draft mares, so as to allow the foals to develop in industrial-size wombs, larger quarterhorse and other "light" mares usually have no particular difficulty carrying and delivering draft-cross foals. And the same dynamic applies to horses as cattle here. A draft stallion can produce a lot more cross-breed work horses than a draft mare can.
- Problem is that, as with most farm animals, intact males already make up a small minority of each population. Since a stallion can service many mares, and a bull many cows, there has always been little reason to keep large numbers of breeding males around. And lately, with the options of trucking mares/cows off to be bred, and more recently, shipping semen in for artificial insemination, studs and bulls have gotten even fewer and farther between.
- So we're planning to use what time we have left before Cornucopian resources go kerflunk to try an set our farm up with a good draft stallion. Since quality draft horses are rare here these days, and studs even more-so, we're going to ship-in semen from selected out-of-state stallions for our good Belgian mares and hope for a colt. (If you want a really manageable and reliable stallion, there's nothing quite like starting from scratch.) With any luck, we'll be in a position to help seriously improve the local work stock in four years or so.
Starting with young'uns has always worked best for me.
- Although they are a notorious PITA, I'm also half-tempted to raise a Jersey bull, which would not only allow me to continue to produce full-blooded milkers from my own cows after the AI option goes away, but would also allow us to provide cross-breeding service to folks stuck milking beef cows.
.
- Today, when you drive through the boonies in much of America (especially around here), you still see lots of horses and cows all over the place. So, as the Cornucopian paradigm collapses, and the people who stay out in the country lose access to all the petroleum-enabled niceties, they should be able to revert to the old ways pretty easily, right?
- Afraid not.
- You see, the horses and cattle populations in rural America today are strikingly different than they were a century or so ago. Draft horses and mules have given way to light riding horses bred for show and recreational activities. The family milk cows of old are few and far-between. The cattle in the roadside pastures are beef.
Not as interchangeable as you might think.
- When the tractor fuel and store-bought dairy get hard to come by (hyper-expensive, rationed, unavailable), resourceful folks are going to make-do with what they have available. Former hunter-jumpers and trail horses will be re-purposed for farm work. Beef cows will get milked... But the improvisers will soon realize that they'd be better-off with something closer to proper work and milking stock.
- But, by that time, the option of buying animals from far-away and having them trucked home may not be available. The demand is going to have to be met with stock bred and raised in the immediate area. Which won't be easy, with so few draft horses and family-type milk cows to breed from in many places.
- Fortunately, you don't need a full-blooded Belgian or Jersey to get a considerable improvement in doomstead functionality compared to common riding-type horses and beef cows. You can get it with cross-breeds, which means you can use the Angus, quarterhorse, Hereford, and Arabian animals that make up so much of the current populations to augment the draft and dairy breeding stock.
- Here's where the male advantage comes in... If you have a Jersey cow, and breed her to an Angus bull, you'll get one cross-breed calf per year. Half the time, that calf will be a bull, who is basically just a mediocre source of beef. So you'll get approximately one serviceable, half-breed milking cow every other year from your Jersey cow. If you're trying to help supply your half of the county with family milk cows, it's going to be very slow going at that rate.
- But, if you have a Jersey bull, you can breed him to dozens of Angus cows every year, half of whom will produce passable milk cows. On top of that, you can breed him to the few available full milk cows, producing more full milk cows and more full dairy bulls who can go on to be bred to the Angus cows to produce more decent half-breeds.
- While it'd generally be preferable to breed light stallions to draft mares, so as to allow the foals to develop in industrial-size wombs, larger quarterhorse and other "light" mares usually have no particular difficulty carrying and delivering draft-cross foals. And the same dynamic applies to horses as cattle here. A draft stallion can produce a lot more cross-breed work horses than a draft mare can.
- Problem is that, as with most farm animals, intact males already make up a small minority of each population. Since a stallion can service many mares, and a bull many cows, there has always been little reason to keep large numbers of breeding males around. And lately, with the options of trucking mares/cows off to be bred, and more recently, shipping semen in for artificial insemination, studs and bulls have gotten even fewer and farther between.
- So we're planning to use what time we have left before Cornucopian resources go kerflunk to try an set our farm up with a good draft stallion. Since quality draft horses are rare here these days, and studs even more-so, we're going to ship-in semen from selected out-of-state stallions for our good Belgian mares and hope for a colt. (If you want a really manageable and reliable stallion, there's nothing quite like starting from scratch.) With any luck, we'll be in a position to help seriously improve the local work stock in four years or so.
Starting with young'uns has always worked best for me.
- Although they are a notorious PITA, I'm also half-tempted to raise a Jersey bull, which would not only allow me to continue to produce full-blooded milkers from my own cows after the AI option goes away, but would also allow us to provide cross-breeding service to folks stuck milking beef cows.
.
I may be gettin' old, But I've been fightin' DIRTIER LONGER!
