For a beginner starting with a small cattle farm scale is pretty much a good idea, especially if you have limited budget and resources. The opportunities of small cattle farm is lay on the development and managing their production efficiency. You need to increase your knowledge in order to have that efficiency so you can develop and manage your small cattle farm in a good way. To help you have a right information here are a few ways of how to develop and manage a small cattle farm. How to Have A Mini Cow As Your Pet is also a great article for you to read.
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Selecting Your Breed
It is important to develop and manage a small cattle farm by selecting cattle breed that suitable for your farm condition and climate. One of the reason why calving did not match your expectation is because the cattle has fail in climate adaptions. Cold tolerance, heat tolerance, even parasite resistance are few of the example of potential adaptation that the cattle need to face. Selecting the breed that match and could adapt on your farm condition and climate, will surely develop your cattle performance and reduce disease and health issue. This factor will also help you reduce your production cost.
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Perfect Timing to Slaughter
This practically aimed for beef cattle, in order to meet market expectation and selling your beef at the highest price. You need to know the perfect time to do so, this is part of how to develop and manage a small cattle farm of yours. When winter comes, feeding become expensive this resulting a high production cost for your cattle. To outsmart it, you need to slaughter the lightest cattle before they need to be fed for a second winter.
When the weather gets warmer, the grass will grow and feeding will become cheaper. This in contrast will need the heaviest cattle to be slaughter. When they reach the heaviest weight on the summer, they need to be done that time, because as the winter comes their weight will decrease in order to keep their body warm. Also maintaining or even increasing their weight in winter will make your production cost higher. For dairy cattle, you should read this amazing article about Things to Know How About Dairy Cows to Breed.
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Grows Your Own Feeds
Cattle are primarily grazers, which means the eat grass and other plants that they considers as weed. To have a quickly develop and manage a small cattle farm, you need to at least save some productions cost and growing your own feeds is one of it. A grazing management plan does not have to be complex. You just need to know how much grass that your cattle eat daily and how long it takes to grow the plan. The key is proper timing and proper intensity of the grass.
This thing might be a challenge if you don’t have enough land to grow pastures on your own. Because pastures are essential facilities for cattle farm. But at this modern era, many growing plant technique has been developed like the hydroponics. Hydroponics is a method of growing plants using mineral nutrients solutions, in water, without soil no fertiliser is used. Cereals such as sorghum, rice, maize and sim sim are some that are commonly used on hydroponic plants.
Hydroponics allow farmers to grow plants for six days with a proper production guidelines. It is very ideal solution for a small cattle farm owner. The perfect material for your hydroponics garden is aluminium trays, using galvanised iron could turn into rust when frequently contact with water. This could cause health problem when the plants are consumed by the cattle. Putting a unit that capable of producing 50 kg of fodder a day will be enough to feed 5 cattle on small farm.
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Create Waste Management Plan
Cattle will produce a manure, having a cattle farm surely will produce a lot of manure. These manure is considered as waste, but if you could manage and use it properly then it could be a great resource for the farm. Creating waste management plan is another way of how you could develop and manage a small cattle farm. Manure or waste could turn into some compost for your pastures, or if you use the hydroponic plants you could sell the compost and have some income from them. Waste management plan is necessary to all cattle farms, but how you run it depend on each of the farms size.
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Learning About Animal Health
Providing your cattle with medical care when they gets sick and hurt is necessary thing to do, but it would be better if you could prevent them from any disease and injury. You need to learn everything about animal health, so you could take care of certain illness related to wounds to birth. It will be great if you take short courses in your local college, or consult regularly with your regular veterinarian.
Having healthy cattle will increase your productivity, and that is another way to develop and manage a small cattle farm. Another thing you do beside gaining some knowledge is provide your cattle with stress-free environment. Take some time to interact with them, and monitor their feed consumption, because healthy cattle have full and rounded stomach. You need to schedule vaccination for them, it is another effective way to keep your cattle healthy.
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Regularly Consult to The Expert
It is a common wisdom that you never stop learning, having a lot of useful knowledge help you to success. Although you might already more experience than everyone else, consulting to cattle farm experts will also help you to achieve your success, even knowing more of how to develop and manage a small cattle farm. Expert here doesn’t always have to be cattle or farm expert, you also need well advised from educators, bankers, agronomist, veterinarians, and nutritionist expert. They all could give you good advice about various aspect that will help you develop and manage a small cattle farm.
You also need to regularly interact with other farmers, you can gain and share some advice to each other. You can take note what they had done and worked, and vice versa. When they do something that didn’t work in their farm, doesn’t mean it could not work in your farm. Never stop learning, new knowledge is created all the time, and there are still plenty of knowledge to master.
The key of how to develop and manage a small cattle farm properly is to reduce production cost and increase your productivity. Slowly you could grow your small scale farm to big scale farm, and if you consistent of what you do, there is definitely a success waiting for you later. You just need to keep learning to know every new knowledge of how to develop and manage a small cattle farm, to make you a better owner and business person. These 10 Facts To Love About Cows will make you love your cattle more.