Meet Estelle!

Estelle

When I first started researching having a dairy cow at home I stumbled across Dexter cows and fell in love. They seemed to be the perfect cow for our homestead. They are naturally small (rather than a bred down miniature of a full size breed), have a gentle personality, aren't known to be fence pushers (a good thing since we only have a 3 wire fence around our pasture), produce a high butterfat milk (about 1 1/2 - 2 gal a day), don't need as much food, and are also really tasty as beef cows.
I've been keeping my eye on craigslist for them ever since I got interested in them just to see what they went for and how often they popped up around here. I also looked into breeders so I'd have an idea where to go if I couldn't find one on craigslist when the time came. As I posted before I had come to the conclusion that the cow was going to have to wait. I was thinking about where would we milk it, where would we keep the calf, what shelter would it use, etc and it just got overwhelming. I mentioned to Wolf that it was going to have to wait and listed the reasons and he said that shouldn't be a big deal and started listing off answers to my worries. As I have a habit of, I was perusing the farm ads on craigslist, just to see what's out there of course, and saw a dexter here and there going for $3000-5000! And some of those weren't even bred! That's WAY out of our price range. We're not looking for award winning here, just a nice family cow. Then the week before last I came across an ad for someone downsizing their Dexter herd to focus on their heritage pigs. She had a 3 and a 7 yr old cow that were both pregnant for sale. She wanted the exact price I had budgeted and set aside ($1200). I couldn't pass it up. Little Owl and I went out to visit them and they were very sweet and mellow. Even their bull just hung out next to us wanting scratches. We decided on the 3 year old.

Today we went to pick her up and bring her home. She loaded beautifully into the trailer with a little grain incentive. She did a MUCH better job than our horse, Nevita, did! When we got home we opened the trailer and she walked out and after a few seconds of looking around, she decided to walk into the area we wanted her in. We have her in the goat area for now (the goats are locked in a smaller subsection of their area for the day). She's obviously not fully comfortable or relaxed yet but that's understandable. All the neighbors horses had to come running and converse with our horses about the new animal.

She's due to calve in late April / early May so stay tuned! Our next step after she's a little more comfortable is to halter train her. We need a way to let her on pasture yet bring her in at night so we can milk in the morning. I don't think we'll have a problem with it, she's pretty mellow, but who knows. Wish us luck!