Beef Farming Information? Answer Only What You Can.?
Do beef farmers actually do the slaughtering, or do they send them off to be killed? Do beef farmers often do dairy farming as well? How much land is needed for a small herd (100 cows, or so)? How do farmers herd the cows to, like, the barn, and other places? A tractor? Do farmers grow the feed, or do they buy it? Thank you!
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All but recreational use of the cattle are sent to the slaughter house.
Typically all cattle have to be sent to a FDA/USDA inspected facility to have cattle slaughtered.
If we want to butcher our own steer, we can but we can’t sell the meat that we do the butchering on.
100 cows needs at least 200 acres to roam. To herd 100 cows takes 4 people on foot and one to operate the gate. Well trained cows sometimes need less people to herd them. You can draw them in with ear corn or hay too and then only need one or two people. Some guys who have cows roaming thousands of acres use atvs, trucks, tractors and helicopters to herd them. Depending on the operation, some farmers raise their own feed ingredients and some rely on a local feed mill to supply the ingredients.
Beef farmers on the scale you have mentioned very seldom if ever slaughter their own cattle. "Beef farmers" are seldom involved in dairy farming because of the large amounts of labor needed to operate a dairy, however dairies often sell their excess animals as beef. A "small" herd of 100 head can require anywhere from 200 acres up to as many as1000 acres or more depended on location ,soil ,and annual rainfall. Cattle are generally herded with horses, atv, trucks or a combination of these. Generally in the mid-west a portion if not all supplemental feed is raised by the farmer or purchased locally. On larger operations in the west suppl mental feed is purchased and shipped in from other locations.