We TRAPPED that Spooky Cow!

Her persistence has paid off – it’s finally time to trap that spooky cow of ours!

We nicknamed this beef steer Spook since the very day after he arrived at our farm he “spooked” and jumped the fence. We spent several hours and called in quite a few favors from our neighbors and friends to wrangle this guy back up. For whatever reason this Angus steer is not as friendly as the Charolais X Angus we had last year and our daughter, Riley, is just plain scared of this animal. She’s been clamoring for months that she wants to “trap that spooky cow” and her day has finally arrived.

The beef steer has a processing date in early December, and about a month before slaughter we like to pull our cattle out of the field and finish them in a controlled setting. Doing it this way allows us to carefully monitor what our beef eats and prevents them from getting into something that could adversely affect the taste of the meat (like a patch of wild onions in the spring). Since we only run one beef steer this is a great method for us, but of course if we had a large herd we wouldn’t be able to do it this way. In the future if we’re fortunate enough to keep two at the same time it may prove to be more difficult but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Once the beef steer was put up in the barn we moved on to another task that the kids enjoyed helping with: mulching the blueberry bushes. Blueberries like acidic soil and pine needles make great mulch that over time will lower the pH of the soil to a level that blueberries love. It’s a great way to repurpose a resource that’s readily available on our farm (the needles fall from the tree in the fall) for a need that we’ll get to reap the rewards of in the spring.

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