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West Michigan | Good Morning!
Hi I Talked on here a couple days ago about trying custom dry cows for a dairy farm and from what I've heard from a couple people it wouldn't appeal/help their operation any way. I was wondering what route we should try and take. As of right now we raise around 150 head of beef cattle and a couple hundred acres of cash crop and the rest being alfalfa we grow for two big dairy's. We have been having trouble finding beef cattle the past two years for a decent price that we can even consider. About 3 years ago we had a dairy we bought beef x Holstein calves from and worked out well. They milked around 5000 cows so they could produce more then we at the time were willing to handle still being new to the whole beef cow deal. But he sold the dairy and the new guy wants nothing to do with raising beef/Holstein crosses.
The past 2 1/2 years we have been struggling to find cattle. A lot of these dairy farms now just want to sell the calves when they are a week old for 300 to 500 bucks at the auction. We have paid 2.50 up to 3 bucks for a 300 pound calf in the last year and just can't do it anymore. We have been looking for a way out the past couple of months but just can't seem to find one. We are still fully equipped to handle 500 head of cattle. We used to milk around 450 cows back in 2019 just to give you a perspective of what were working with here.
We would like to stick with cattle being that we are fully equipped to take care of cattle. Would any of you have any ideas on what we should do. Around us the cattle market is driven by these large dairy's. In just a 20 mile radius there are about 5 dairy's ranging from 2000 to 5000 cows. We would like to try and offer possibly taking care of some of their cattle that are not producing milk at that current time like their dry cows and bred heifers.
We are open to any suggestions or ideas some of you might have.
Thank you! and appreciate any of the advice in advance. | |
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Life after Dairy farming
