Scenic drive

This morning we went to pick up Romeo, the bull/steer we recently had butchered, at the meat-cutter's facility. Here's the meat, packed in totes and crates in the back of the car.

The butcher lives waaaaay up a hill above a river. We had never been to this particular neck of the woods before, and immediately fell in love with it. I didn't think to take photos as we drove up, but I took a few on the way down. This is some random and distant outbuilding with some hay bales in a field that made us wish we could move there.

Here's a view of the river.

Can you see the road way down there?

The road wound through rocky and very steep hills.

The hills appeared crumbly, and Don said they're probably basalt.

For this reason, it didn't altogether surprise us to see a gravel pit at the top of the hill where things flattened out.

We agreed it was an incredibly scenic excursion to pick up the meat.

Meanwhile, this is our property, photo taken from a neighbor's place. The barn is on the left (the metal roof is shining in the sun), and the house is on the right tucked behind a row of trees.

Here's a closer view of the house, what little of it is visible.

And that was our scenic drive.

Romeo's new home

Our steer Romeo has a new home as of this morning: The freezer.

Romeo got his name from being born on Valentine's Day last year. However when we castrated him, it was under hasty and pressing conditions (we didn't yet have the calf pen built, so had to cobble together a pen made of hay bales and smuggle him in without his mother noticing). Bottom line, the banding wasn't as complete as we'd hoped. Romeo grew into a bull

Despite his attempts whenever a cow or heifer went into heat, none of the ladies ever fell pregnant, so that was good. He was shooting blanks, but he was still shooting. And, since Romeo's attitude was getting more and more bullish, we knew it was time to take care of that.

So this morning we got him into the pen on the side of the barn without much trouble. Once there, however, Romeo decided to wrench the gate off its hinges and get out into the driveway so he could schmooze with the girls over the fence.

Fortunately we were able to re-hang the gate and lure him back in without much trouble, and then I stood guard for an hour until the butcher showed up. It was a good thing, too, because let me tell you, Romeo was acting like a bull the whole time.

Even as I type this, the butcher is finishing up the job (bleeding, gutting, skinning) before taking him to the meat shop where he'll hang for ten days or so. We'll have the meat back in about two weeks.

Yeah, it's a lot easier to keep a bull in a freezer than on the hoof.

The price of beef

The price of beef has been on everyone's mind lately.

According to the USDA, the average price of beef jumped from $8.40 per pound in March to $10.10 by December 2025.

A number of recent articles reflect these concerns:

• Food inflation in America

• RFK Jr. Urges U.S. Ranchers to Ramp Up Beef Production

• The cost of this grocery staple is nearing record highs — and Americans can't get enough

• U.S. Beef Cow Cycle Low Set To Deepen, Keeping Steak Prices High

• Beef Prices Surge As Drought, Aging Workforce Shrink U.S. Herds

• Drought And Costs Shrink America’s Cattle Supply: Beef Prices To Stay Elevated

• U.S. beef industry in crisis: Record prices, shrinking herds and mounting pressures on ranchers

We haven't bought beef in decades since we raise our own, so I wasn't familiar with what kinds of prices people are facing. So in late February, I stopped at the beef department of our local grocery store ... and was appalled.

Ball-tip steak, choice grade, $9.99/lb., $13.24 for the package:

Beef top sirloin, $11.99/lb., $9.83 for the package:

Rump roast, $5.99/lb., $20.73 for the package:

It is for these reasons, among many others, that we're aiming to have one animal a year in our beef pipeline.

Unlike our last homestead where we often had 15+ animals, here we don't have the room to raise more than a handful of cows at a time, preferably fewer. We have limited grazing, so we must accept the fact that we're feeding (or supplementing) our animals the majority of the year.

We butchered two animals recently: Filet in August, and her daughter Mignon in February.

Filet was an older and tougher animal (10 years old at the time of butchering), so we literally had the butchers turn her entirely into ground beef, with the exception of as many cube steaks as he could produce. This is the receipt for Filet's processing costs:

Mignon was two years old, prime butchering age, and we had the butcher give us the full range of cuts. This is the receipt for Mignon's processing costs:

As you can see, the butcher charged us about $1/lb for processing (a bit less for all cuts except cube steaks, which cost a bit more). Total costs for both butcherings came to $1255.45. Also, we paid the dispatcher (the fellow who comes to our place to dispatch the animal) $160 for each dispatch, a total of $320 for both animals. This brings the total butchering costs for two animals up to $1575.45.

Since I'm currently working on our taxes, I had the opportunity to tally up how much we spent on hay last year. It came to a total of $2500. Divided by five animals (Filet, Mignon, Romeo, Maggie, Stormy), that averages out to $500 of hay apiece. (Clearly this isn't an exact science since some animals are older and eat more, some are younger and eat less, but whatever.)

So add $1000 in hay costs for both Filet and Mignon. Now let's double that for the two years we've had Filet and Mignon, for a total of $2000 in hay costs. This brings the cost of raising the animals to $2575.45.

Let's go back even further and include the purchase price of Filet and Mignon, which was $1500 for the two of them. That brings the overall costs to $5075.45. [NOTE: I made a math error and incorrectly tallied this as $4075.45 earlier; these figures have now been corrected. Sorry about that!]

Between both animals, we got a total of 1319 lbs. of beef in various cuts. This gives us a total cost of $3.85 per pound of beef, for everything from lowly ground beef to premium steaks. Less than four bucks a pound.

When we picked up Mignon in February, we had 11 crates of meat.

This filled our spare freezer almost to the brim. (This is why we have back-up power sources for freezers.)

As we were packing this meat away, I took a couple of T-bones and prepared them for us for lunch. It was melt-in-your-mouth delicious, definitely "prime" grade. With the blessing of this much abundance, we can be generous with friends.

Romeo and Stormy are the next animals in our beef pipeline. We'll put Romeo in the freezer next year, and Stormy the year after that. The cost of raising them is even lower because we didn't have any initial purchasing costs, and both their breedings were free. That could conceivably bring the per-pound cost for them down quite a bit. Meanwhile Maggie will be producing more calves. Her upcoming calf will be a heifer, but thereafter we'll select for steers, which we'll raise for beef.

The blessings of a homestead.

Cow in the freezer and milking woes

Early in the morning on August 18, a mobile butcher came in and dispatched Filet, our eight-year-old Angus cow.

Filet had been earmarked for the freezer since we got her. She was a former range cow and was still, even after having her for 18 months, extremely stand-offish. Not aggressive, just not friendly. As an older animal, we knew she wouldn't be worth much more than ground beef (and tenderloin!).

For the actual dispatching, we had her corralled in this "chute" on the south side of the barn.

The animals are very familiar with this chute – it's usually open – so Filet experienced no stress or anxiety when we shooed her in around 5:45 am Monday morning. I didn't milk Maggie that morning, either, but just left Stormy (Maggie's calf) out of her pen for the night. Don and I shooed the rest of the herd into another pasture (including her six-month-old calf Romeo) until the deed was done.

Who was stressed and anxious in the days leading up to the slaughter was ME. I don't like killing things anyway, but there was also a LOT of residual stress left over from our last home, where we had a bunch of cobbled-together and often ineffective methods of confining animals before the butchers arrived, and several times animals escaped. Ug, I hate burchering days.

This is the first time we've had an animal butchered here in our new home, using the services of a new (to us) butcher. The actual dispatching is done by one party (an independent mobile dispatcher) and the hanging and cutting is done by a butchering business in a nearby town.

Since the mobile dispatcher lives just a short distance away, we asked him to drop by in advance so he could look over our setup and make sure everything was satisfactory.

You never met a nicer fellow than this dispatcher – knowledgeable and professional. He assured us the setup was fine. The plan was to drop Filet, bleed her out, then take the carcass to the butcher shop, where it will hang for 10 or 12 days before being cut up.

To say it went smooth as silk is to only hint at how easy it was. This morning Don and I hit the corral about 20 minutes before the butcher was due to show up (which he did promptly at 6 am), shooed Filet into the chute and shooed the rest of the livestock into the sacrifice pasture. It took five minutes and no one was the slightest bit alarmed.

The mobile dispatcher did the job with one bullet. Don (who was out with him) said Filet dropped like a rock and never knew what hit her. In other words, extremely fast and humane.

Naturally this leaves Romeo (and Mignon, her yearling calf) bereft of their mama, so there's that. Romeo is six months old, so plenty old enough to wean, but we wondered how he would react.

The first day, he didn't even appear to notice she was missing. Here's Romeo and Mignon, just hanging around in the sacrifice pasture below the barn.

In fact, except for a few bellows here and there, Romeo has done absolutely fine. It's been over a week now, and he doesn't appear to miss his mama at all.

Interestingly, the whole dynamic of the barn has changed now. Filet was unquestionably the alpha cow. To be honest, she was something of a bully to the other animals, including our Jersey Maggie. Now Maggie, as senior animal, has stepped into the role of alpha, and she's much nicer. In short, things are a lot calmer at the feed box.

However (and on a homestead, there's always a "however"), Romeo has found a major way to be obnoxious. He's discovered Maggie has milk. And since almost all Jerseys are what we call "universal donors" (meaning, very generous with their milk), he's been diving for the udder the moment I release Maggie from the milking stall each morning.

Here Stormy (Maggie's calf) is on the left, and Romeo is on the right.

This morning, I overslept a bit and didn't make it out to the barn until about 6:10 am. Stormy, of course, was locked away in the calf pen, but Romeo was avidly slurping away on Maggie. I got Maggie into the milking stall (forcibly locking Romeo out – he wanted to follow!) and settled down to milk Maggie.

I shouldn't have wasted my time. Poor Maggie had been drained dry. I barely got two ounces and just gave up. I released Maggie from the milking stall, then released Stormy from the calf pen. Both calves immediately dove for Maggie's udder, but Romeo had taken everything. Even Stormy didn't get her breakfast.

Okay, new plan: We're going to have to keep Romeo away from Maggie at night. We can't lock him in the calf pen with Stormy because there simply isn't enough room. (Remember, we had to shoehorn the calf pen and milking stall into a very tight corner of the barn.)

A fall project Don wants to accomplish before winter is to build an awning on the backside of the barn to give the animals extra space and shelter over the winter. We've decided to build a holding pen for Romeo into this awning space.

But that won't help for the immediate time being when it comes to milking Maggie. Filet has been gone over a week now, and this is the first time Romeo beat me to the milk, so to speak, probably because I overslept. I guess in the immediate, I just need to get out to the barn earlier and beat him to the faucet.

It's always something, y'know?

The end of the "Bossy" call

For years -- decades -- we called in the cattle using our universal cattle call, named after the very first cow we ever owned: "Bossy bossy bossy bossy BOSSY!!!"

We didn't use it often, just when we wanted to call the animals from one side of the property to the other, and they always answered it. Younger animals learned from older animals what the call meant.

On Wednesday, I used that call for the last time. I called our remaining three cows into the feedlot, closed the gate, and conveniently left for errands in the city while the mobile butchers, Potlatch Pack, came to put them in the freezer.

Two cows and a heifer went into the freezer in early July. One heifer (on the hoof) went to some friends. That left three remaining animals (two cows, one heifer) to meet their fate on Wednesday.

It's bittersweet, folks. Bittersweet.

No more animals at the feedboxes.

No more animals scattered in the pasture.

But it's all part of our plan to move. It would be almost impossible to take livestock with us, particularly since we have no idea where we'll be moving to. Once we settle in a new place, we'll populate it soon enough with bovines.

But in the meantime, the feedlot gate remains open. Why close it?

Sigh.

Friday roundup

Goodness, I have been utterly scatterbrained this week. It's been busy, yes, but that's no excuse for the absolute blog silence. Apologies to all my loyal readers!

So here it is – Thursday – time for our "Friday" Roundup. These, as you recall, are so we can all check in on what steps we've taken, big or small, to inch us incrementally toward greater preparedness (regardless of what day it's posted).

Here's what we've done in the past couple of weeks:

• We butchered five animals last Wednesday.

We were getting way too crowded – not just at the feed boxes, but also too many for our property to easily support. Now we're down to ten animals, a far more manageable number. We're not expecting any calves this year either, since we currently don't have a bull.

• In anticipation of sorting out which animals to butcher, Don built another "airlock" gate. We're putting in fences and gates across critical pinch-points on our property to assist when we need to sort out animals.

We tested this latest "airlock" when shooing the animals not getting butchered down to the pasture for a couple of days. One of the targeted animals escaped, but since she couldn't get past the airlock, it was a simple matter to get her back where she needed to go. As Don and I lose our farmhands (the girls), we need to come up with ways to work smarter, not harder; and airlock gates serve that purpose.

• After the butchering was done, Don took advantage of the livestock being down in the pasture to clean up some more of the muck underneath the feedbox awning. We didn't want the livestock in the pasture for more than a day or two, since the grass is just starting to emerge and we don't want it trampled or eaten down too early; so after a couple hours of scooping poop, we closed the gate and brought the animals back up from the pasture.

• I planted seeds indoors:

• 25 cayenne peppers
• 25 basil
• 10 Brussels sprouts
• 10 broccoli
• 18 tomatoes (6 large, 12 paste)
• 10 red bell peppers

The broccoli and Brussels sprouts are just starting to come up.

It's always fun to watch an infant plant push upward.

• We picked up the four hazelnut trees we ordered and paid for last fall.

For some reason I expected these to be a lot smaller than they are, so I'm delighted they're already at such a height. Unlike the walnuts we planted last May (and may take as long as 15 years to produce), hazelnuts should bear a crop much more quickly.

Hazelnuts (sometimes called filberts) and walnuts are the two types of nuts which will successfully grow in our area. Having a permanent source of plant protein (nuts) is a valuable addition to our farm.

• It's been raining an awful lot, precluding much work in the garden, but I got a bit of a start at weeding some beds.

I noticed this little guy...

...at the edge of the pond...

...keeping a sharp eye on Lydia.

• One of our pear trees, which bears prolifically, had two large branches growing out at awkward angles.

These would get so heavily-laden with fruit in the fall that we had to prop them up with tomato cages.

So I sawed off these two large branches, and nipped off a few smaller branches growing at odd angles. The result is a much nicer-looking tree.

• I've been admiring the birds we've been seeing:

Quail:

Western kingbird:

Robin (possibly my favorite bird):

Killdeer:

The spectacular mountain bluebird:

• We ordered two pounds (!!) of flower seeds, specifically a species called lacy phacelia.

These flowers were among the mixed seeds we planted in the orchard last year.

The bees went absolutely ballistic over them.

Come to find out they're extraordinarily heavy nectar-producers. They're also friendly to cows (some farmers even plant them for grazing). We're planning on sowing the mounded hillsides of nasty clay dirt that was piled when the pond was dug. This will not only stabilize the slopes, but provide endless food for the bees.

• I'm working on the talk I'm giving on May 6 at the Northwest Preparedness Expo in Prosser, Washington. This is put on by an nifty church-based group called the Lower Valley Assembly whose purpose is "to promote the advancement of self-reliance and security within the Lower Yakima Valley in accordance with the laws of nature and the commonly held Judeo-Christian principles by which the United States of America was founded." Hopefully if anyone's in the area, you can attend the expo.

That's what we've been doing around here. How has everyone else done as far as preparedness?