We’re confident enough of our “mob grazing” experiment that we’ve installed electric fencing around the perimeter of our two major pastures.  In two days, Duane Ard (foreground) and Ira McDowell stretched just about a mile of high tensile wire, three lightning grounding systems and two new energizers.  We’re now supplying about 12,000 volts to most sections of the farm. We’ll attach movable, temporary, polywire to the main line and create small sub-paddocks of less than an acre.  The idea is to put maximum cow weight—briefly—on small sections of pasture, which ensures even forage consumption and maximum trampling effect.  If we get it just right, the cows eat about a third of the grass,…

…for the Winter to come?  They say this was the earliest snowfall since the Civil War or, as folks around here call it (joking, sorta) “The War of Northern Aggression”. The cows don’t mind eating through the snow; we’ve seen them nose down almost a foot.  And they’re always amused to see what Wooz is wearing to stay warm and dry. We have mixed feelings about winter.  We like snow for the moisture it packs into the soil just before the ground freezes.   And if it melts, as this surely will, the runoff is much slower than in a rain, so we retain more water. On the other hand, ice…

One of the necessities, when you start late as we did, is to pick every brain you can find.  In developing Thistle Hill Farm and our beautiful herd of Devon I don’t think there’s been a well-known name in cattle, pastures and nutrition that we haven’t read, heard and cross-examinationed. But Dr. Dick Diven of Colorado was probably the first to have a major impact.  He was certainly the first one I can recall saying it doesn’t make sense to feed grain to cows.  Now Dick was coming at it from a cost perspective.  In fact, while other consultants develop fancy names for what they preach, Dick’s was simply “Low-cost cow/calf…

….if you’d just moved out from the city and awoke one morning to find four bulls on your front lawn? Well, if you knew anything about cattle, you’d think “thank God, they’re Devon”.  But our new neighbor, Mike Campagna, fresh from Alexandria, Virginia where he’s a real estate appraiser,  was up close and personal with cows for the first time in his life.  But Mike was cool, he remembered that the previous owners had a dog exercise yard behind the barn, so he just opened the gate and said “here boy”. Our Devon are pretty cool, too.  They just ambled in and settled down to some top quality horse hay…

…and they’re from heifers who did the job like they’d been having babies for years.   T3 in the top picture and her bull calf were interrupted at breakfast….X3 has milk on his lips just like in those advertisements.  Devon are known for their high quality milk and that means healthy calves as well as quality meat. Little X2 wasn’t going to let anything interrupt her very first breakfast!  She’s less than an hour old and that all-important first drink is colostrum, packed with the anti-bodies that give her all the immunities to protect her in her vulnerable early weeks.  We love to see a new one jump right up and…

….Carolyn Lumb and her husband, Alan, of Markham, Virginia.  The Lumbs entered the drawing for the 8-pound standing rib roast from Thistle Hill at the annual Hume Day event in late September. This will be their first time sampling pure, grass fed Devon beef from Thistle Hill and we look forward to their reaction.  From the look on the faces of the family dogs, it would appear they think they were the real winners.  That’s Wooz on the right making the presentation. We’d like to admit now that the acceptance of our beef has exceeded all our expectations.  Our freezers are bare (like the proverbial shoemaker, we have no beef)…

Here’s a scoop just for readers of our website! We’ve been told that the two Devon associations in the country have agreed to merge.  The presidents of NADA and ADCA met at the Atlanta airport for seven hours and hammered out the details of the agreement.  Final action would require a vote of the full memberships, but the rank-and-file of both organizations have long supported such a move. The plan, worked out by NADA President Jeff Moore and the ADCA’s Jeremy Engh, would allocate eight seats on the new board to NADA; four to ADCA.  Eventually, the distinction would be expected to blur. NADA split from ADCA six years ago…

We never fail to be moved by the birth of new calves so this is an emotional time of the year at Thistle Hill.   Not only are we witness to one of God’s miracles but we get to see the results of breeding decisions we made almost a year before. The little one in the foreground is X64, a heifer calf.  In the back is a brand new bull calf, X31.  Both are probably by our new herd bull, Carolina Hobo.  I say “probably” because these two were right on the line between the time nine months ago we took Watson out of the pasture and put Hobo in.  It will…

As we hoped, the wandering heifer from the previous post was back this morning…just across the fence from her herdmates.  She was still skittish, but we easily walked her back into a pen and from there into the right pasture.