Beef Cattle, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 1

Beef Cattle: A Primer

Understanding the basics of cattle evolution, biology, and behavior can provide valuable insight into selecting the right cattle for your farm and caring for your new livestock. Here's a brief history of cattle and an overview of cattle types, breeds, and traits.

Beef Cattle: The Basics

For hundreds of years, people have bred cattle to develop characteristics that were best adapted to a particular climate and purpose. Eventually, this resulted in distinctive breeds of cattle, each with a distinctive palette of physical traits. Today, a cattle buyer can choose from a wonderful array of color, build, size, growth rate, and potential meat and milk production to fit cattle to the farm, the climate, and the purposes of the owner.

Although not all cattle are created physically equal, they do share general behavior characteristics. Cattle sense the world differently than we do. They eat different foods and digest them differently. Understanding how cattle operate is key to knowing what to expect from them, what they will like and won't like, and to getting them to do what you want them to do. Understanding and working with cattle's natural behaviors will result in calmer, healthier animals. You may want to look at Temple Grandin's books on animal handling as they provide insight into animal behavior. Also, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA) provides a wealth of information on everything from marketing to work safety training.

Due to their size and strength, humans decided early on to raise cattle for their meat instead of hunt them like smaller animals.

Beef Breeds

Until the middle of the eighteenth century, cattle were tough, multipurpose animals that were not selectively bred for any specialized purpose. Differences in their sizes, colors, and builds were simply a result of groups' being isolated from one another in remote settlements. Then in 1760, Robert Bakewell, an Englishman, began the first known systematic breeding program to improve the uniformity and appearance of his cattle. The results were published in 1822 in George Coates's Herd Book of the Shorthorn Breed, the first formal recognition of a cattle breed. Other breed herd books soon followed, and as the concept of breeding for a specific purpose spread, cattle were divided into two main categories: those bred primarily for milk production and those primarily for beef production. Even the original dual-purpose Shorthorn breed has now been split into Shorthorns for beef and Shorthorns for milking.

DID YOU KNOW?

Three breeds of cattle possess the attractive and very distinctive "Oreo cookie" coloring-black except for a broad white band around the middle: the Dutch Belted, the Belted Galloway, and the Buelingo. The breeds differ from each other, however, in their other characteristics and in their uses. The Dutch Belted were a prized dairy breed in the United States until about 1940, while the Belted Galloway, probably descended in part from the Dutch Belted, is primarily a beef breed. The Buelingo is a uniquely American beef breed developed during the 1970s and 1980s by North Dakota rancher Russ Bueling, primarily from Shorthorn and Chianina genetics.

More than five hundred breeds of cattle exist in the world today, although only a few are common in the United States. Milking Shorthorn, the ubiquitous black-and-white Holstein, and the rarer Guernsey, Brown Swiss, Ayrshire, and Jersey make up the six primary dairy breeds in the United States. There are several other minor dairy breeds, as well. All dairy breeds produce excess bull calves, most ship as veal but many are raised for beef, and plenty of beef operations are built on dairy calves.

Hereford cattle, with their familiar white faces, red bodies, and white markings, have been the backbone of the U.S. beef industry since a few decades after their arrival in 1847. Black Angus, first brought to the United States in 1873, are now almost as numerous as Hereford; while that breed's offshoot, Red Angus, established its own breed registry in the mid-1900s. These three breeds, along with the Shorthorn, Scottish Highland, Dexter, Devon, and Galloway breeds, are the major British breeds of beef cattle, so designated because they all originated in England, Scotland, Ireland, or Wales. In general, the British beef breeds are smaller, fatten faster, and are more tolerant of harsh conditions than the continental breeds.

Herefords have dominated the U.S. cattle industry for more than a hundred years and have a well-deserved reputation for being docile and easy on the feed bill.

The continental breeds from Europe are generally larger and slower to mature but offer a bigger package of beef to the producer. The most common are the Charolais, the Limousin, and the Saler from France; the Simmental from Switzerland; and the Gelbviehs from Austria and West Germany.

In the United States, new breeds have been developed that tolerate southern heat better than do the European imports. The famous Texas Longhorn, which pretty much developed on its own from Spanish cattle brought over by colonists, provided the starting foundation for American ranching. The American Brahman was developed from indicus-type imports and then was crossed with different European breeds to create the Santa Gertrudis, the Brangus, the Beefmaster, and several other uniquely American cattle breeds.

This sturdy Charolais heifer has a big frame and will produce a lot of beef in a single package.

Highland cattle, one of the three major British breeds, are a generally smaller breed that fatten faster and tolerate harsh conditions better than other breeds.

When well cared for, any breed of cattle will produce good beef. Look for a breed suited to your climate and pasture type and, if the income is important, to the prospective buyer of your beef. Auction barn buyers and finishers will have definite preferences. Most important, get something you like, such as the Oreo cookie markings of the Belted Galloway, the shaggy look and big horns of the Scottish Highland, or the gentle disposition of the Hereford.

Cattle Biology

Cattle are ruminants, members of a class of grazing animals with four stomach chambers adapted to digesting coarse forages other animals cannot utilize. Consequently cattle-as well as sheep, goats, and deer-can make use of land too rough, rocky, dry, or wet to grow crops for humans.

Cattle pick their meals by smell and taste, then graze constantly, adding to the first chamber of the stomach, the rumen. Because they have no front upper teeth, just a hard pad, they tear the grass instead of biting it. (This is also why cows don't normally bite people.) Watch a cow grazing, and you'll see her grip a bite of grass between the pad and the lower front incisors, then swing her head a little to rip it off.

The long muscular tongue, as rough as sandpaper, is useful in quickly conveying grass to the back of the mouth for minimal chewing and mixing with saliva. The tongue is also used for grabbing grass, for licking up those last bits of grain, and for a little personal grooming (although cows aren't flexible enough to reach around too far). Copious amounts of saliva-up to fifteen gallons a day for a mature cow-moisten the grass so it slides easily down the throat. Let a bottle-fed calf suck your finger, and you'll be surprised at how strong, rough, and slimy that tongue is.

Cattle are ruminants, which means that they have four stomach chambers: rumen, reticulum, omasum, and abomasum. These chambers help cattle digest coarse forages other animals can't.

Once the rumen is full of pasture grass or hay, the cow will lie down in a comfortable spot and, mouthful by mouthful, burp it all back up again. Because she initially swallowed with little chewing, the cow now brings those huge rear molars into play and takes the time to grind up the grass into a slimy pulp before swallowing it again, this time into the second stomach chamber, the reticulum. Chewing her cud, as this process is called, takes eight to ten hours each day and involves up to forty thousand jaw movements.

From the reticulum, the ABC (already been chewed material) moves into the omasum and next to the abomasum, the true stomach, then down the intestines. What's not absorbed comes out the back end. Because a cow's diet is high in fiber and fairly low in nutrients, an awful lot comes out the back end, ten or twelve times a day, for a grand total of up to fifty pounds of manure every twenty-four hours. When the grass is young and lush, the manure is almost runny, like cake batter. When cows feed on mature pasture or hay, the manure is drier and more solid.

ENDANGERED BREEDS

Of the hundreds of cattle breeds adapted to an enormous range of climates and conditions throughout the world, many are now endangered. The American Live-stock Breed Conser-vancy lists eighteen breeds in the United States that need help to survive. On the ALBC "critical" list, defined as breeds that have fewer than 200 registrations each year, are the Ancient White Park (above), the Canadienne, the Dutch Belted, the Florida Cracker, the Kerry, the Milking Devon, the Pineywoods, and the Randall. On the "threatened" list, with fewer than 1,000 U.S....