Circle M Farm

This weekend we picked up our two bottle-baby calves for the spring. Adorable! And one has blue eyes, the first I’ve ever seen on a calf. So of course, his name is Blue. The other, a sweet delicate reddish boy, is named Brownie.

This little darlin’ has big blue eyes and an even bigger voice! He kept us up all night mooing for more milk.

Brownie has ears like a bunny and a tiny delicate nose.

Every spring and fall we go to our dairying neighbors and buy two baby bull calves to bottle and raise for beef. At roughly the same time, we send the two eldest steers in the pasture off to the butcher. So we always have six or so steers of varying ages. Blue and Brownie will spend a month or so in tandem hutch-pens while they’re still on milk and then go to join the big boys in the fields, grazing for about 18 months before feeding us. In the meantime, we’ll thoroughly enjoy their sweet personalities, clumsy lumbering antics and gently lowing voices. They’ll enjoy fresh grass, a nibble of corn each morning, sunshine, and room to slowly roam throughout their days. And, of course, a vigorous daily scratch under the chin. There’s nothing I like more than a warm heavy cow face laid on my shoulder while I administer a brisk neck rub.

We are particularly excited about these calves, because they came from a nearby dairy that primarily grazes, unlike most that keep their cows confined in large free-stall barns. This dairy also forgoes daily antibiotics and hormones, which should make the transition to living on our farm easy for the calves, since we use neither. We are just thrilled to have discovered a local source for such healthy calves.

The breeds are new to us, and we are anxious to see how they grow. Blue is a Normandy and Brownie is an Ayershire. Both are ancient breeds, the Ayershire from Scotland and the Normandy from France, better suited to free-ranging than the modern Holsteins generally available in our area. We’ll see how they do. So far we’ve experimented with Holsteins crossed with Angus and Hereford, pure Angus, pure Holstein, a new American breed called Bulingo, and the very pretty Brown Swiss. In 18 months we might have some sense of what we are doing here at Circle M!

Blue and Brownie have moved into these little hutches right next to the house, which will make the pleasurable task of bottle feeding that much easier.