The Case for the Cross Bred Homestead Cow

Every Homestead is unique. And every Homestead has unique needs. One thing we all likely share though is the desire for self-sufficiency. This desire of self-sufficiency often includes the family milk cow and the family beef cow. From the milk cow we are able to provide amazing products such as milk, cheese and butter to our homes. And from the beef cow, meat for our tables. What we don’t often talk about though is the thought process behind what it takes to actually get going with these things. While we don’t have to replace the family milk cow every year, we do have to replace the family beef cow. This concept is what led to the creation of our Foundation Dual-Purpose Cross line of cattle.

At Rocky Bottom Mini Farm, we breed our Registered Mini Jersey Bulls or our Mini Highland Bull or other beef breed bull to our Registered Mini Herefords or Mini Jerseys to create the Mini Dual-Purpose Cross! A thoughtful and intentional cross breed with a true dual purpose. I can’t understand why there aren’t more of these amazing little cows out there! This has created what, in our opinions, is the perfect Homestead cross. By choosing one of these two specific breeds, a combination of milk and meat, you end up with a cross bred cow that is the perfect combination of each allowing for the best of the benefits from the two lines.

When a family chooses a Mini Dual-Purpose Cross as their family cow, this opens up awesome possibilities in the coming years. While she produces milk for your family’s table, she will also produce a calf for the next year. On our farm, we currently have 2 registered Mini Jersey Bulls that are collected for AI for our cattle to be bred back to, and in the coming year, we will also be adding to our collection of mini beef breeds of bulls for that same purpose. When ready to AI your Mini Dual-Purpose Cross Cow, a homestead can choose whether to breed back to a Mini Jersey bull giving a 75% Mini Jersey calf and thus a more dairy heavy calf, or can choose to breed back to a Mini Beef Breed bull giving a 75% Mini beef calf and thus a more beefier calf. With this, the question becomes each year:

What does your family need?

Milk or meat? A replacement dairy cow or beef for your table?

Sending a full-size steer to the butcher can be costly and produces an extremely large quantity of meat that is often more than a family needs thereby overwhelming freezer space with a large butchering bill. Sending instead, a mini steer to the butcher, is a much smaller bill to pay and produces generally enough meat for a family of 4 for a year depending on your consumption and use. We love this combination for that reason! Each year we butcher a miniature sized steer for our table which has served us extremely well!

In all of my research a great article that I have found was entitled, “The Case for the Dual-Purpose Cow” by Tammy Marr of SpiritGrove Farm. We absolutely love the information Tammy shares in her articles and truly appreciate her permission to link these amazing articles here in our blog (thank you again, Tammy!). I have included the link to a couple of her articles below. We highly recommend reading these articles and discovering the additional research provided therein. The information presented in Tammy’s article is phenomenal, well thought out and researched. I would be unable to articulate such amazing information combined with the years of experience Tammy offers so instead of reinventing the wheel please follow these links and read first hand what only the amazing knowledge and experience of someone like Tammy has to offer. In Tammy’s articles, she discusses combining a mini hereford and mini jersey. We love that cross or crossing with a mini highland that shares many of the same benefits as the mini hereford with an equally wonderful, flavorful beef. To us, this is a very similar cross, carrying the same qualities.

We hope you enjoy her research and articles as much as we did and hope that it can answer many of your questions as it did for us.

Still have more questions, feel free to reach out and message me! I am happy to help where I can and if I don’t know I have resources to turn to so together we can find an answer!

Have a blessed day guys and happy farming!