Livestock question. Babies or no babies?

[ericm979]

It'll be a lot more effort and expense to raise deer than cattle.

Deer have different feed requirements than cattle. They need more protein. So you may be feeding alfalfa instead of oat hay. There's a lot of plants that cattle will eat but deer are pickier. They may be getting less food from your range, requiring more feeding. You'll have to have better fencing to keep them in- they can jump pretty high and can jump through small holes. A fence that will keep cattle in is barely a speed bump for an adult deer. In the wine country they use 8' high panel fences to keep the deer out. Cattle are used to being in large mixed herds, deer are used to being alone or in small family groups. Cattle have been bred for centuries to be docile and easy to manage. Deer are wild animals. They're not going to herd as easily as cattle and they'll attack your cattle dog (I have seen deer chasing coyotes). Your numbers require stocking deer to a far higher density than is natural. While you can feed them to keep them alive they also have established social patterns that require some space (i.e. the males tend to hang out in the high country away from the female family groups for much of the year; females drive off last year's offspring when they're ready to breed, etc).

 

[2LaneCruzer]

Eddie,

Texas A&M is a great resource.* Here's a link to A&M's cow-calf and stocker enterprise budgets -- Budgets by Commodity | Extension Agricultural Economics.


http://publications.tamu.edu/FORAGE/PUB_Forage Management for Non-Native Deer Farming.pdf provides info on forage management for non-native deer. It also references Non-Native Deer Farming Symposium Proceedings, but a brief search failed to turn up that publication online.

I advise you to contact your local Cooperative Extension agent. He/she should be able to put you in contact with an Extension specialist who can answer your questions about exotic deer.


Steve

* In addition, it's the basis for Aggie jokes, some of which (the really good ones) cannot be told in polite society.

We once had several herds of exotics here; American Bison and Elk for example. The Elk had to be destroyed because of some incurable and highly transmittable disease that spread through the herds.

 

[M5farms]

On the cattle side what you are describing is call running stockers . buying calves an running them for a short period and selling . This is a good model and some people do very well with it but its it truly a numbers (quanity) game . a realistic number on profit after expenses is somewhere between 100.00 and 200.00 a head. There will be times when this model will produce the higher per head profits and other times when buying old cows will work or buying bred cows and calving out then selling. Its a gamble and risk no matter the endeavor and everything cost money. right now it cost about 500.00 a year for a cow to be standing in your field and if she fails to raise a calf then she cost you 500 bucks unless you sell her. then you might break even.