Tanning and Bottle Making

[Burkhardt]

12 hours ago, chuck123wapati said:

yup cattle ranching is done differently even here in the US. it is really dependent on how much natural feed they can get on the land they have to use that created the different methods long long ago.

Beef cattle in your part of the country may be different but it ain't how they do it in the Midwest. Of course the word heifer is misused with cattle but if they have females that keep producing calves they keep breeding them. The farmer would go broke if they only bred them once. If half of the calves were male and you ship them all out and just keep the young females you'd go broke. That's why they ween them in the fall so the mothers can regrow the calves over winter.   Any farmer will tell you heifers have birthing problems after that they keep breeding them till they don't get pregnant then they go to slaughter.

[Klara]

10 hours ago, Sheilajeanne said:

Klara, the translator won't translate bouvard either, but the word you're looking for might be un bouvillon for a castrated male. In English we say steer.

"Broutard" commes from "brouter" - to graze - because they mostly stand around in a field and eat (in (South?) German they are called "Fresser" which means the same), but I guess yes, they'd be male, so steers or bullocks. 

[Sheilajeanne]

A heifer is a young female that hasn't yet had a calf. Once she's calved, she's just a plain old cow. 

Oxen are different from steers. They are allowed to reach their full size as males before being castrated. They are MASSIVE animals! 

From what I've seen, most male dairy calves are castrated by banding, at as young an age as possible. The farmers don't want to deal with the aggression that comes when they get bigger, and banding the calf is something the farmer can do without a vet's help.

[chuck123wapati]

16 hours ago, Sheilajeanne said:

I know for a fact that my uncles kept most of the steers until they were fully grown (about a year). Once weaned, they were turned out to grass. (Giving the calves their milk was one of my favourite jobs when I visited my uncles, and helped with the chores.) I asked what they did with them after that, and the answer was, 'we veal them'. So, evidently young cattle can still be sold as 'veal' at that age, just not milk-fed veal. I know how big these animals were, as I was with my uncle when he was loading some of them on a truck to take for slaughter.

Of course, weather and the market would help determine how long the non-milk producing animals were kept. Both uncles had all registered stock, so the heifers not needed as milk cows would still sell for a good price to other dairy farmers. If the pastures were not in good shape due to weather, I'm sure the steers were sent to market sooner than usual, to avoid having to feed them hay.

The trend now is to ship the calves to a feedlot at about a week old. And that's quite controversial, because a lot of them get sick from the stress and die, because their immune systems aren't fully developed yet.

Both references from Canadian sites.

Veal means the meat of a bovine animal that has the maturity characteristics set out in Schedule I to Part IV and a carcass weight of 180 kg or less as defined in the Livestock and Poultry Carcass Grading Regulations established under the Canada Agricultural Products Act. Any carcasses not meeting the "veal" definition must be labelled as beef.

 

• So that they will constantly give milk, dairy cows are artificially impregnated every year. After a nine-month gestation, calves are routinely taken from their mothers days, or sometimes just hours, after being born.
• Male calves are sold to veal farms at auction and will be slaughtered at about five months old, while females will eventually become dairy cows themselves. These young females will never be nursed by their mothers, however; all of their milk is destined for human consumption.

[chuck123wapati]

7 hours ago, Burkhardt said:

Beef cattle in your part of the country may be different but it ain't how they do it in the Midwest. Of course the word heifer is misused with cattle but if they have females that keep producing calves they keep breeding them. The farmer would go broke if they only bred them once. If half of the calves were male and you ship them all out and just keep the young females you'd go broke. That's why they ween them in the fall so the mothers can regrow the calves over winter.   Any farmer will tell you heifers have birthing problems after that they keep breeding them till they don't get pregnant then they go to slaughter.

yup and available feed is the reason, you can look at the United states on google earth for the best image. Where the Midwest ends and the west begins you will see a distinct color change the earth goes from pretty green to desolate brown. That big brown brown area is where the wild west happened and where farms stopped and ranches started. Why because there was little water and even less fertile soils. After the civil war broke assed men, now known as rootin tootin cowboys would gather wild Spanish cattle and herd them out into that big dry brown area, about a 1/3rd of the US, let them feed on what little grass there was then herd or after the railroad was built ship them back to the Midwest to feed lots which btw were invented at this time to fatten up those range cattle before sale for slaughter. Why because the Midwest has plenty of good feed while the west doesn't.  So out here where i live there is a marked difference between ranches and farms and a marked difference on how raising cattle is successfully done. There is little green pasture land to do both, winter cattle and graze cattle in the summer. It was and still is a very precarious business out here. one bad winter or one dry summer could make a rancher sell off most of his entire herd no matter what age they are. You folks in the Midwest can easily feed a cow forever for free and let it have as many calves as you want.

 Its amazing as i write this i realize the picture in each of our heads of a cows life. i see them daily out in a vast desert wandering miles through sagebrush and sand feeding on what little they can find while some of you may have a much different picture of cattle lazily standing around grazing in rich succulent grass. ya gotta love the world as it is.

[fredk]

From leather bottle making to castrating beeves

what a load of bollocks!

 

Just joking. Some of the words we use for livestock come from old Anglo-Saxon, some from Norman-French, and in the US some from Spanish-Indo

When I see the bullocks being gathered in a field, getting ready for the slaughter houses, I think; thats a lot of burgers and a lot of leather, I wonder where that goes

[Burkhardt]

5 hours ago, chuck123wapati said:

yup and available feed is the reason, you can look at the United states on google earth for the best image. Where the Midwest ends and the west begins you will see a distinct color change the earth goes from pretty green to desolate brown. That big brown brown area is where the wild west happened and where farms stopped and ranches started. Why because there was little water and even less fertile soils. After the civil war broke assed men, now known as rootin tootin cowboys would gather wild Spanish cattle and herd them out into that big dry brown area, about a 1/3rd of the US, let them feed on what little grass there was then herd or after the railroad was built ship them back to the Midwest to feed lots which btw were invented at this time to fatten up those range cattle before sale for slaughter. Why because the Midwest has plenty of good feed while the west doesn't.  So out here where i live there is a marked difference between ranches and farms and a marked difference on how raising cattle is successfully done. There is little green pasture land to do both, winter cattle and graze cattle in the summer. It was and still is a very precarious business out here. one bad winter or one dry summer could make a rancher sell off most of his entire herd no matter what age they are. You folks in the Midwest can easily feed a cow forever for free and let it have as many calves as you want.

 Its amazing as i write this i realize the picture in each of our heads of a cows life. i see them daily out in a vast desert wandering miles through sagebrush and sand feeding on what little they can find while some of you may have a much different picture of cattle lazily standing around grazing in rich succulent grass. ya gotta love the world as it is.

Just watched a video last night from a farm in SD last light that the spring they had hay numbers that were huge. Rest of the summer was as dry as a popcorn fart. Had to put the cattle out on corn stocks early for feed and now they got hammered by snow and had to buy hay for extra feed. Another place I watch videos is a couple hours south of me had to mow the hay and leave on the ground because they had so much and didn't have more room for it and they sell a lot of it.