Culling Your Herd and Other Uses for Cattle
Two chapters in one post here because chapters 12 and 13 are both shorter but cover topics that fit together well. Culling your herd and other things you can do with cattle besides the obvious milk and meat.
Culling: It Doesn’t Mean What You Think
Let’s clear something up right away. Culling does not automatically mean killing an animal. A lot of people hear “culling” and think slaughter. But that’s not what it means.
Culling means removing an animal from your herd. That’s it. Selling a dairy cow to another farmer? That’s culling. Sending an animal to auction? Culling. Yes, sending one to slaughter is also culling. But the word itself just means the animal is leaving your operation.
This distinction matters because culling is a normal and necessary part of herd management. It’s not a failure. It’s how you keep your herd healthy and productive.
Why You Would Cull
There are several good reasons to remove an animal from your herd.
Age. Cows get old. Their production drops. At some point, keeping an older animal doesn’t make sense when you could replace her with a younger, more productive one.
Lameness. A cow that can’t walk well can’t graze well. Chronic lameness affects the animal’s quality of life and your operation’s efficiency.
Not breeding. If a cow won’t get pregnant after multiple attempts, she’s eating your feed and taking up space without producing the next generation. That’s a problem for a small farm with limited resources.
Drought or feed shortage. Sometimes you just can’t feed everyone. Reducing herd size during tough times is practical, not cruel.
Temperament. Some animals are just difficult. Aggressive, hard to handle, dangerous around people. Life is too short to fight with a cow every day.
Chronic health issues. An animal that’s constantly sick costs you in vet bills and time. And she might be passing health problems to her calves through genetics.
How Culling Improves Your Herd
Every time you remove a problem animal and replace her with a better one, your herd gets stronger. Better genetics. Better temperament. Better production. It’s not complicated. You keep the good ones and let go of the ones that aren’t working out.
Pezza recommends getting experienced help your first time making culling decisions. It’s hard to be objective about your own animals, especially if you’ve raised them from calves. Someone who’s been farming longer can help you see things clearly.
And here’s something worth knowing: animals at auction may be culls too. If you’re buying at auction, ask yourself why this animal is being sold. Sometimes the answer is fine. Sometimes it’s not. Do your homework.
Other Uses for Cattle
Now for the fun part. Cattle aren’t just for milk and meat. People have been using them for all sorts of things for thousands of years.
Oxen: The Original Work Animals
Oxen are castrated male cattle trained to work. They pull plows, haul logs, move heavy equipment. Before tractors existed, oxen did the heavy lifting on farms. And some people still use them today.
Training an ox takes time. You start young and work with the animal regularly until it’s about four years old. That’s when an ox reaches full working maturity. But the training process begins much earlier.
There are different types of yokes depending on the work being done. The yoke is the wooden frame that sits on the oxen’s necks (they usually work in pairs) and connects them to whatever they’re pulling. Getting the right yoke and proper fit matters a lot for the animal’s comfort and effectiveness.
Rodeo Cattle
Bull riding. Roping. These are things that cattle are bred and raised specifically for. If you live in an area with a rodeo culture, raising bucking bulls or roping cattle can actually be a business.
This is obviously a niche thing. Most backyard farmers aren’t getting into the rodeo supply business. But it’s worth knowing that the market exists.
Riding Cattle
Yes, you can ride a cow. People actually do this.
You can train a cow to be ridden much like you’d train a horse. But it takes more time and patience. Cows aren’t naturally inclined to carry people around, so the training process is slower. The key is to start when they’re calves and build up gradually.
Not every breed is suited for this. The breeds that work best for riding are Hereford, Longhorn, and Brahman. These tend to have the right combination of size, temperament, and build to carry a rider comfortably.
Is this practical? Not really. Is it kind of cool? Absolutely.
The Takeaway
Culling sounds harsh but it’s just good herd management. And cattle are more versatile than most people give them credit for. Whether you’re managing a small dairy herd and need to make tough decisions about which animals to keep, or you’re interested in training an ox for field work, there’s more to cattle farming than just the basics.
This post is part of a series retelling and reviewing Backyard Farming: Raising Cattle by Kim Pezza (ISBN: 978-1-57826-495-7).