Meet the Cows of Deer Creek Homestead
How Our Cows Support the Work We Do
Each spring we purchase 2-3 bottle calves from a local rancher. We choose strong, healthy bull calves and move them into our goat shed where they live while they are being bottle fed. During this time, we invite guests who are staying at Campfire Cabins to help with bottle feeding twice a day. We believe it’s good for the calves to be around people, and it helps them get used to being handled by us. Once they are old enough, we turn them out onto pasture where they live with the previous years’ steers. We grow our cows out for 20 months, sell the 1-2 extra cows, and then process ours. We built a cold room processing station to hang, age, and package our beef. This gives us a year’s worth of grass-fed beef, jerky, bone broth, and tallow that we can use and share with our family. We do our best to use everything; beef scraps and unusable fat are ground into a high energy chicken food for the winter months, what we don’t use we compost or feed to the crows and eagles. We eat beef daily in our household; knowing how it was raised, what it ate, and how it lived is important to us. Our beef is hormone free, vaccine free, and antibiotic free.
Another thing on our homestead that the cows help with is improving our soil health. If you look at our pasture, you will notice it is fenced into 3 sections. We overseed and rotationally graze our cows throughout the year on these 3 pasture parcels and behind our house and cabins. By giving our cows access to smaller areas, we can monitor the rest and recovery period of each section more closely. It’s pretty amazing to see how our cows, goats, and poultry all work together to break up compaction, cycle nutrients, add organic matter with their manure, and boost microbial activity within the soil! What are we looking for? We want our soil to soak up and store water, contain organic matter, contain different sizes of aggregates, and hold enough water and air to support biological life such as fungi, bacteria, and plant roots. By not treating our cows with chemicals, we are enabling faster breakdown of their manure and encouraging the presence of microbes, earthworms, and beneficial insects.
Ground covers have an important job on our 25 acres as well! They help with suppressing weeds, holding moisture, and preventing soil erosion. At our elevation of 5000’ we plant ground covers that are fast growing, cold hardy, and drought tolerant. We have experienced success with native wildflowers & grasses, alfalfa, clover, and chicory.
Bonus: pollinators love them!
Get to Know Life at the Deer Creek Homestead
Walk the grounds, meet the animals, and see how the homestead comes to life. A visit is the best way to understand the heart of Deer Creek and the way we live here. If you have a reservation with Campfire Cabins and would like to arrange a tour, please reach out! Check out campfire-cabins.com for information and reservations.
