Measure Twice, Cut Once

When we first moved to our homestead we wanted to have a milk cow and meat goats. After doing a little research into livestock we found that to start with it would be best to first go with cows and when we had better fences we would add goats and sheep.

Why Dexter’s? We have been great fans of the heritage breeds movement for sometime and we knew that we would be picking one of the older breeds, so that narrowed down the search. We first wanted a Kerry cow but we couldn’t find very many of those - a bit too rare. The next runner up was the Dexter, a very old Irish breed. There are a number of breeders here in Canada and one of them lives just up the road in Colinton, Allan and Rita Nelson are the breeders we purchased from, and they have been breeding Dexter’s for over twenty years.

Our first visit to the Nelsons was all we needed to make up our minds on which cow breed to go with. The Nelsons have never milked their Dexter’s but they have sold some that are being milked. The Dexter’s are one of the most gentle little cows you will ever handle. As we walked through the herd of fifty or more cows we picked out one we wanted for a family milk cow. Once we got home we decided to buy two cows, and selected another from our short list of potential cows. When Allan delivered them a couple of weeks later our herd of two had already grown to three, and not long after they came to live with us in their new home we had our first Dexter calf born on our homestead.

Our milk cow had never been milked before and so I was in for a bit of a rodeo. Now I had help in the past with breaking range cows to milk on my sister’s ranch - she ran Simmentals. After some time with a very good rope and two well-anchored posts they all made not bad milk cows. My Grandfather had always just cut out one of his Herefords to milk and so I felt I had the knowledge and experience to take a three year old range cow and make her into a gentle loving family milk cow. Well there was no rodeo, she took to milking right off - she has a bit of an attitude but she loves her rolled oats and she has only kicked me the one time (and that was my fault). It turned out that getting two of them was the way to go; we milked one (Nicky) and put both calves on the other one (Tilly).

Tilly raised two big calves that first summer and we had all the milk and cream we needed, in fact - more then we needed.

We were very happy with our Dexter’s and still are, we now have ten of them in our growing herd. In the fall of the year when we purchased the first two, we also leased four cows and a bull from the Nelson’s and had them for over a year. From that we got two calves – it was a calf-share lease so we kept half of the calves; we chose heifers. So this summer we have our two cows Nicky - the milk cow, Tilly - the nurse cow (one of her grandma’s could raise 4 calves at a time), Brownie and Blue - they are for meat and are big steers now, and four heifers from last year. The two cows also each had a heifer calf this spring.

The herd is growing fast and we have sent the lease cows and bull back, now we need to get our own bull. We will be looking for a nice little Dexter bull later this summer to add to our herd. One thing we have learned with Dexter’s, and the Nelson’s did tell us this, don’t try chasing them. The way to handle Dexter’s is to call them; once you have them trained to come to your call they will follow you anywhere. My Dexter’s aren’t very big most of them are around 39 to 42 inches at the shoulder and weigh around 600 lbs but they are perfectly proportioned, they are classed as a tri-purpose breed: meat, milk and draft. I just love to be out walking among them watching them graze or lying in the sun chewing their cud. I’m very happy with them and would not trade them for any other breed, however I have thought of getting a few Highlands to go with them.