One of the most discouraging events on a farm is the untimely death of an animal. Whether it’s a humble chicken or a favorite horse, the landowner feels that he did something wrong…or didn’t prevent something wrong from happening—and often that’s the case.

Apart from the unease of these passings, there’s always a dollar cost that rubs it in.

I found a young steer the other day, sprawled on top of a flush-to-the-ground water tank that is fed by the overflow from our swimming pond. The steer’s head and legs were out of the water, so I don’t think it drowned.

But I noticed places when he had scraped hide off his inside legs and belly. I thought, perhaps, he had dunked himself in the tank to cool off during one of our unseasonably hot days and then couldn’t get completely out, even though that’s how I found him. Clearly, he struggled against the metal edge of the tank, but maybe something else was going on.

Several trees and plants are toxic to horses and cattle. Black cherry, peach and plum produce a precursor to cyanide when their leaves wilt. The dead leaves of the black cherry, for example, don’t appear to harm cattle when they are shed naturally in the fall. But if a windstorm knocks down a cherry in the summer, the leaves need to be burned immediately to prevent livestock from eating them. A very large cherry with branches that a highly motivated steer could reach if he stretched up as far as possible is about 50 yards from the water tank. It’s possible that he cropped some leaves and berries, and maybe I’m wrong about them being harmless when alive and green.

It’s also possible that as a young steer — about 500 pounds — who came onto the farm only a few weeks earlier, he had been stressed in handling and that led to pneumonia. So I spent an hour yesterday looking carefully and soulfully up the noses of the 30 survivors in the back pasture, searching for the strings of white snot and the sound of labored breathing that indicates sickness. None had any sign of illness. So pneumonia in a single, weak individual is a possible explanation.

One dreadful year, I brought home a bunch from the market as our pasture was flushing green at the end of April. They must have been denied access to early grass on the seller’s farm, because seven dropped dead from clover bloat within 48 hours. That had never happened before…or since.

I noticed that the pond’s main overflow pipe had settled slightly lower over the last year so that it was now just a hair below the small overflow pipe into the water tank. This meant that the water tank would only be fed when rain elevated the pond rather than all the time as originally designed. That meant the water in the tank could have been stagnant and possibly harmful.

I had another theory about this pond. For a number of years, I’d thrown a little copper sulfate into it to control algae. It’s toxic to fish, but its concentration in the pond was so low that it should not have harmed a 500-pound animal. I wasn’t even close to applying one pound per acre foot. But who knows?

It’s possible that the water tank could have become contaminated with bacteria from some creature falling in and dieing. I should have set the tank higher than ground level when I dug it in, but didn’t because it was easier to emplace it under the pipe than rig up an alternative. Maybe I’ll add a vertical extension to the tank this fall. Doing things wrong the first time always costs more in the long run.

It’s possible that a rattlesnake popped the steer, but that’s highly unlikely. I’ve never seen one in our pastures in almost 30 years, but then again I had never seen four bears in my front yard until two years ago.

Cattle fall victim to other diseases, though pneumonia is the usual culprit. Vaccination is routine and effective for their most common afflictions. A parasitic disease like coccidiosis is a possibility, but I’ve never had any problem with it and our pastures are cleaner than most because of rotational grazing. But it could have been sick when it arrived here.

Lightning is the best choice in a death like this, because of lightning insurance. But that wasn’t it.

So this death remains unresolved. It’s one of the mysteries of living out here.

We’ve been in the time of hay for more than a month. This is the hot center cut of summer, that slab of days when each breath breaks a sweat.

Farmers are making hay while the sun roasts. Heat makes misery in this work. The only worse misery is too much rain, which keeps farmers from making hay when it should be made or spoils cut hay before it can be baled.

In my part of Virginia’s mountains, our hay is typically a mix of cool-season perennials like orchardgrass, bluegrass and tall fescue; native warm-season grasses; and legumes (which fix nitrogen in the soil), such as clover. Thistles and burdock turn up at this prom like obnoxious thugs from a rival high school. Alfalfa, a planted legume, is rarely grown here, since it’s a five-star meal for three-star cattle.

While our hay is made over several months, the best is put up during a two-or-three-week sweet spot when the seeds are not quite mature but the leaves of grass are fully developed.

Cut too soon, and the hay’s moisture content will be too high. This impedes curing and causes other problems. Cut too late, and it’s less palatable and nutritious.

I’ve helped a neighbor make cattle hay as late as November, which we both knew would amount to nothing more than nutritiously empty belly filler. We made it…because it would not have felt quite right to leave it unmade.

Farmers make hay as soon as the window opens and go until they’ve put up the last bale, long after the window has closed and the shades have been drawn. Stockpiles are usually a mix of different hay quality—excellent, good, fair and poor.

Hay is stored solar energy. It feeds livestock during the months when pasture plants — even weeds — are dormant. Cattle and other ruminants with their four-chamber stomachs get the lower quality stuff. Horses need better chow because they have only one stomach. Behind their backs, horses are called, “hindgut fermenters,” as are elephants, pigs and wombats.

On short-summer mountain land like ours, one cut of hay is the norm. Farmers in wetter and warmer places can cut the same hayfield two to four times each season. A first cutting produces more bales per acre than successors, but the quality tends to be lower.

In a one-cutting place like Blue Grass, it makes little financial sense for a person who only needs a couple of hundred bales to devote the land and acquire the machinery to make it himself. It makes more sense to pony up the $3 or more per square bale for the quality that’s needed and have it delivered and stacked where it’s supposed to be.

But I know farmers with small hay needs who insist on making their own. They’re particular, and they want their hay just so.

Made-hay is taken as an expression of the maker’s character. Is it weedy? Was it put up damp? Is it tightly bound? Is it a good size?  It takes skill and integrity to make good hay down to the last flake.

I’ve found that most farm jobs share two characteristics: First, they’re not much fun; and second, each one is finite. Every field contains only so many bales of hay; each fence line requires driving no more than a certain number of stakes. I find semi-self-delusional reasoning ever more useful as I get older.

Most farmers now make round bales, which are really chunky cylinders. They weigh from about 800 pounds to more than 2,000 depending on the equipment. When they’re wrapped in plastic, they remind me of giant, chopped-up Tootsie Rolls. One person properly equipped can cut, fluff, rake, bale and stack round bales from a tractor seat.

The older method made square bales, which are really rectangular prisms or rectangular parallelepipeds. Novice hay buyers should stick to haggling over the price of square bales and not insist on geometric correctness.

Once the grass is cut, fluffed up to dry with a tedder and raked into windrows, a tractor pulls a baling machine that spits out twine-wrapped square bales. Each weighs 50 to 100 pounds in the field. As they dry in the barn, they lose water weight.

Two or three people “make square bales”—one on the tractor, one or two on the wagon hitched to the baler. The job ends with stacking the bales in the barn. Square bales involve more sweat, more risk, more pain and more time; round bales involve more invested capital.

In light of the years I spent in undergraduate liberal arts and graduate school, I am always assigned to “work the wagon.” As each bale is pushed out of the baler and up its tail-like metal chute, I’m supposed to grab it with a metal hook, carry it to the back of the wagon and “build a load” of 100 to 120 bales from back to front. All of this hooking, carrying and building has to be done before the baler spits out the next parallelepiped. If I’m a slug and don’t get there in time, the rogue bale rolls off the wagon and down the sloped field like a convict running for freedom. Those with a chip on their shoulders come apart as they tumble.

While working the wagon is generally considered something that any 14-year-old farm kid knows how to do, it’s trickier than it appears. All the hooking, carrying and stack-building takes place on a rolling, pitching, lurching platform that is slicker than a peeled peach.

The bales have to be stacked tightly and interlocked or they will fall off the wagon. “Loose load” is not something that you want to find in your obituary. A tight load resists the wagon’s inevitable jostling that jiggles your stack into a mountain of Jell-O. It takes spatial sense and experience to build a load six or even seven courses high that survives turn after turn on a 30-degree slope.

If “your” load falls off, the tractor bunny takes a break, gets a drink of water, stretches and may compose a pertinent haiku to pass the time. When your load is on the ground, it’s your job to put it back on. Do this three or four times, and you will either learn how to build a load or figure a way to switch places with the tractor bunny.

At its best, working a wagon is hot, dusty, dangerous work. But it gets worse.

Once you’ve hauled the wagon to the barn, the hay has to be unloaded and restacked, which is hotter, dustier and just as dangerous.

In recognition of my extensive CEO experience and talent for telling underlings what to do, I was started right at the top of this organization—30 feet up in the hayloft, just under the metal roof. Outside, in the shade, it was 95 degrees.

To get bales to the top of the loft, they might have to be thrown upward, bale by blessed bale, in three or four lifts. A mechanical hay loader spares you only the first lift or two. Sooner or later, each square bale has to be barn-stacked individually by hand.

Making millions of square bales each summer left rural America with ruined backs and hostile teenagers. Round bales are better for big farms, but square bales will always be needed on places with just a few four-leggers.

Putting up hay is a farmer’s save-and-spend strategy. You save in the summer what you need to spend in the winter. And it’s always better to have a little left over than to run short.

This summer’s hay will be found in every drib of milk and cheese and every drab of beef and lamb that we eat in 2011. Like a few other things, it’s better that you don’t find any.

I am a nonpoint-source (NPS) polluter.

Everyone I know — and everyone I see around here, everyone — is just like me.

None of us permanently fence livestock out of our farm watercourses that form the Virginia headwaters of the Potomac and James Rivers.

Our cattle, sheep, horses, llamas as well as organic free-range poultry deposit nutrients — principally water-soluble nitrates and phosphates — in their waste products daily, sometimes hourly. Cropland and pasture can absorb some of this material without affecting water quality.

What isn’t incorporated and what’s deposited directly into running water, however, travel downstream into the Chesapeake Bay. Each pasture or manure-fertilized farm in its 64,000-square-mile watershed contributes to the buildup. An overload of nutrients causes high rates of algae and other plant growth, which limits the light-absorption capacity of the water on which the grassbeds depend and depletes oxygen, which makes life hard for those that depend on it. Despite several decades of goal-setting and concern, the Bay is not infrequently described by its friends as an environmental zombie. Other watersheds around the country also struggle with nutrient overloading.

My farm and others pollute these waters in other ways too. Manure carries bacteria and other vectors of disease. A second type is water-soluble inorganic pollutants, such as toxic metals, salts and acids. A third type is organic compounds, such as petroleum products and pesticides. And a fourth is suspended sediment—particulate matter that reduces the water’s ability to absorb light and affects the health of fish populations.

Clean-water legislation focused on controlling point sources of pollution from the likes of sewage plants and industrial sites, which, in the early 70s, were thought to contribute about 85 percent of the water-pollution problem. Today, point sources are highly regulated and contribute only about 15 percent of the pollution; NPS pollution, such as the runoff from farms (including mine), precipitation, drainage and all other sources that don’t qualify as point sources, now contributes an estimated 85 percent. In addition to livestock in water, fertilizer applications — particularly from poultry litter, large dairy operations and municipal sludge — contribute to nutrient overload. Most individual nonpoint sources contribute a little bit of pollution, but the cumulative load is very large.

Fencing livestock out of watercourses would reduce nutrient loading and contribute to helping the Bay, but it’s only one among a number of nonpoint-sources of pollution that make up the problem.

As always, hard questions arise over what seems to be a fairly straight-forward matter.

First, are the additional cost and limitations that nitrogen reduction through additional livestock fencing worth the gain? Some would argue that cost should not be a consideration at all. Others argue that the marginal improvement in water quality that would result from fencing would have only marginal impact on the Bay’s environmental and aesthetic qualities.

Second, there is the question of who should pay for installing the huge amount of fencing that would be required, as well as its routine maintenance and subsequent replacement? Should polluters — that is, individual farmers — pay for their own fencing? Should there be a livestock tax or a meat-consumption tax to finance the program? Should the expense be cost-shared or tax advantaged (beyond being deductible)? Should small farm polluters be exempt from a fencing requirement?

Third, should the fencing be permanent or would temporary fencing be permitted? I do rotational grazing, such that cattle are next to a stream perhaps 30 days out of a 180-day grazing season. Would I be allowed to rig up a temporary electric fence during those grazing days?

Fourth, who would enforce compliance and what would be the penalties? How could thousands of farms be inspected? Through satellites? Is that where we want to go?

Fifth, how would a baseline measurement of individual farm loading be established and then monitored?

Nothing is simple, easy or cheap about this idea. But as the focus shifts from point-sources tononpoint sources, fencing will be increasingly on the agenda—and that will affect most farmers, consumers and taxpayers.

Footnote: Robert McCartney added another perspective on this issue with his column, “Redefining the beautiful lawn when it comes to bay’s health,” Washington Post, April 25, 2010. He reports on an April, 2010 study by Chesapeake Stormwater Network that found that “mowed turf grasses” (i.e., lawns) have become the largest “crop” in the Chesapeake Bay’s watershed. And this crop involves fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides–all of which, in part, find their way into the watershed’s streams and rivers as runoff. Lawns are not the biggest sources of such pollution, but they are the only source that is rising; agriculture, sewage and air contamination are falling. The largest area of mowed turf grasses is the D.C. metropolitan region north to Lancaster, Pa. The White House lawn is part of the problem.

The main culprit is corn, which feedlots give to 800-pound cattle for three to five months to get them up to about 1,250 pounds. Corn adds fat — or marbling — to meat. Fat adds taste that Americans expect and like.

Feedlot corn is mixed with other feeds, hay, minerals, antibiotics, gain-enhancing hormones and additives, possibly urea and perhaps some “byproducts,” such as the hulls of soybeans, distillers grain, brans, whole cotton seed and poultry litter. The objective is to add pounds and taste as efficiently as possible.

This finishing process used to be called “fattening” until American consumers became fat-adverse above our shoulders.

Even as America’s population increased during the last decade, total annual beef consumption has remained at about 26.5 billion pounds +/-. That’s about 67 pounds per person at an average price last year of $4.33 per pound. Health concerns — fat, mad-cow disease, E coli contamination, health risks, hormones, etc. — and price have weakened beef consumption.

In response to worries over beef quality and healthiness, a tiny — but growing — number of farms have turned to finishing beef cattle on grass, bypassing corn and feedlots altogether. This sector is so miniscule that the U.S. Department of Agriculture does not track its numbers—pounds produced, number and size of farms, costs and value of production, profitability and growth trends. A couple of hundred grass-feeders are selling beef, is my guess. (www.eatwild.com)

Prior to 1940, most beef cattle were finished on grass, not corn. They were slaughtered at four or five years. Age toughens beef, so Norman Rockwell’s grandmothers had to cook their pot roasts slowly, for which we now celebrate their Iron-Chefiness.

With corn finishing, cattle are slaughtered at about 18 months. With grass, it’s about nine months longer.

To reduce birth-to-plate time, grass finishers search for the best combination of cattle genetics, forages and management practices that, at the same time, keep taste and other characteristics roughly comparable to supermarket products.

The taste and tenderness of grass-finished beef depend on the quality of the individual producer’s animals, agricultural practices and length of dry-aging hang time after slaughter. Grass beef can taste like conventional beef, or less so.

The main selling points of grass-finished beef relate to consumer welfare. It’s leaner, has less saturated fat and contains Omega-3 fatty acids. Other health claims depend on the practices of the individual producer.

Grass-finished beef is a specialty product. It may never be more than an alternative for a few farmers and a few consumers. Why might that be?

Retail price is one hurdle that most consumers won’t jump. It costs more to produce a pound of grass-finished beef than corn-finished, probably twice as much, or even three times when everything is counted. Grass feeders need more pasture and hayfield per pound produced, and this has to be high-quality land. They have to keep their animals longer before they make a sale. Grass finishing might add a pound or two per day compared with corn’s three to five pounds—this adds cost and risk. Grass-finished beef is also harder for the farmer to market. For these reasons, it has to be priced twice as high, or more.

From the farmer’s end of things, it’s debatable whether grass-finished beef makes money when all costs — including land and labor — are counted. On the other hand, the conventional cattle business has shown a profit in only two of the last 20 years. Cattle producers of all types learn early not to confuse cash income with profitability. “Cash cows” are not found on cattle farms.

Most grass-fed beef is marketed directly by producers to consumers, restaurants, natural-food shops, farmers’ markets and buyer clubs. A few supermarkets handle a few grass-fed products.

Consumers may be understandably confused by beef labels—organic, grass-finished (or pasture-finished or grass-fed) and natural.

“Organic” beef may or may not be finished with corn—organic, of course. The care and feeding of these animals must meet strict certification standards as set out by USDA’s National Organic Program in 2008.

USDA doesn’t have a certification program for grass-fed beef, but producers can request a USDA audit verification for a grass-fed claim. USDA defines a grass/forage-fed animal as one that’s been fed grass and forage for life, excepting milk consumed before weaning. These animals cannot be fed grain or its byproducts, and access to pasture must be continuous during the growing season. The USDA forage-fed label does allow grass-finished cattle to consume a few high-fiber, low-nutrient roughage supplements, such as the hulls of cottonseeds, almonds and peanuts.

And to further complicate things, “natural beef” was defined this year as coming from cattle that have been raised without growth stimulants, antibiotics or byproducts. Natural beef may or may not be finished with corn, either organic or not.

Most grass-finishers lean toward organic practices, but they’re not required. Several use antibiotics when needed, which is an organic no-no. Hay and pasture could be treated with fertilizers that would not qualify as organic.

Many grass-finished beef producers appear to be lifestyle farmers who serve lifestyle consumers. Most of these operations are small. The larger ones tend to be diversified, offer lower prices and a direct-mail capability.

A jaded greenie might smirk that the grassy part of the beef business seems to be a byproduct of liking to live on farms. Since I like to live on a farm, I should be the first struck with any stone I cast called, “lifestyle choice.”

Grass-finishing seems to be a better, healthier choice than corn finishing, but it’s far more expensive, inefficient, risky, burdensome and no more profitable.

If all cattle were finished on grass, we’d be running them on many new pastures that used to be cornfields, or using that land for other food and fuel.

The interesting question about this funny little niche is this: Is grass-fed beef cheaper than corn-fed beef when the costs of corn-related diseases are factored in?

And if it is, what policy and federal tax changes might follow if we wanted to produce the cheapest hamburger, which might also be the healthiest? Should we stop subsidizing corn and start subsidizing grass?

More research, of course, is always needed.

Panic is the best description. I’ve been in a few. Fear pounds your flight button. Everyone starts moving away from the threat. Faster. Then wildly, desperately faster. Someone goes down; then others. Screams.

In battle, it’s called a rout. In cattle, it’s a stampede.

Fear starts it, fear feeds it. The fear is rational: Stay where you are, and you’ll get hurt. But fear smothers the part of your brain that might save you, the part where you keep your wits.

One person at a time, panic stops. Fear is not mastered, but it is compartmentalized. Reasoning returns. It suggests that a better alternative might be to turn and face the threat, accepting the possibility of bad consequences. Those who turn into the threat bring others with them. The pell-mell slows and eventually stops.

In the stock markets, this is called the “point of capitulation.” Cattle stop trying to escape. Investors sell because getting out with a big loss looks better than staying in for a bigger one.

We are closer to a bottom in stocks than in real estate, because stocks have fallen farther and faster.

Country-property values have not dropped as much as their metropolitan cousins despite being over-valued. Sales have slowed, and some prices have been lowered. But I’ve not seen 50 percent reductions anywhere.

The factors that goosed urban and suburban house values until 2007 — speculation, too easy money, among others — were much less present out here. Some country parcels should come down by as much as 50 percent, but most are overpriced in the 15- to 30-percent range.

Amid the retches and wretches of western financial civilization last week, my wife, Melissa, made a deal.

She needed 100 bales of horse-quality hay for Spirit and Red, her Tennessee Walkers.

I encouraged her to buy it from a neighbor who has been a solid friend for 25 years. His hay is a mix of native grasses from fields we know, made properly into regular-sized square bales. No mold, no weeds, no problems. Fair price. Close by. We had bought from him before. What’s to decide?

Alas. Simple solutions, I’m forced to admit, are the hobgoblins of minds like mine.

Melissa chose, instead, hay from Mr. Alternative.

She called me last Friday morning and asked if I thought I could ready the barn for delivery. Restacking hay bales and sweeping barn floors usually fall within my realm of demonstrated competencies. I haven’t broken a broom in a long time.

Mr. Alternative arrived with 50 bales on his truck and began unloading. I helped.

Farmers are both knowledgeable and fussy about hay, particularly purchased hay.

I am even more particular about purchased hay for spousal horses who rank far above me in the hierarchy of my wife’s affections.

As I unloaded the first five bales, I noticed they were short. Bales, typically, are 36 to 40” long; these were 30 to 32. They didn’t weigh what I thought they should, but maybe, I thought, I was just being suspicious or cranky. They looked like they had been barned-up for a year or more, but I could have been wrong about that too. They didn’t smell like this year’s cutting, but I am commonly acknowledged to have a nose that couldn’t smell a skunk sitting on my lap in a linen closet.

Still, these bales seemed off. “Did you tell Melissa you were selling short bales?” “No.”

She had asked for horse-quality hay. Mr. Alternative knows what horse hay is and isn’t. This wasn’t.

For $3.50 a bale, she thought she would get what Mr. Alternative knew she was expecting. She had negotiated price and delivery, but not specs.

Melissa had made an assumption.

We’ve done this before. Many years ago I ordered 200 sharpened locust fence stakes. They arrived on the appointed day—all 200 and each sharpened to the point of fine human hair.

They were so thin that I used several for toothpicks and flossed with others.

They were also a foot shorter than the local standard, eight feet.

I, too, had made an assumption. I did not say eight-feet long and stout. So I paid the fence-splitter and suggested that he use me for a business reference.

We unloaded the 50 bales, making me angrier with each one. Had this been my deal, I would have stopped unloading after ten bales, paid and thanked Mr. Alternative for thinking of me. But Melissa is a turn-her-other-cheek kind of girl, though in my opinion she’s running low on cheeks.

I phoned and gently suggested that she cancel the second 50 from Mr. Alternative. She agreed, and paid him for the crummy 50.

That night, Red and Spirit left most of their “new” hay uneaten. I’ve seen these two eat barns, paint off pickup trucks, wire fence and my forearms. Still, they are not without their palatability standards, which apparently excludes broom sedge.

I went up into our woods the next afternoon to putter and mutter. It was warm and sunny. The hardwoods — black birch, red oak, sugar maple — were afire. Their reds, yellows and golds played like a 1940s Big Band, and I was sitting in the front row being blasted.

Suddenly, the late sun hit a big sugar just right, exploding its colors, making it glow from the inside out. It was better than the best note Benny Goodman ever blew—higher, purer, sweeter, more impossible.

“It’s an honor,” I said.

Wall Street is Wall Street. Mr. Alternative is who he is.

Other things are important, too.

Chuck Wagon was the name we called a too-big kid over on the next block. Today, we might call him Salad Bar, but that really doesn’t convey the intended schoolyard meanness of the original.

I was not, like President Bush, born with a silver burr under my saddle.

Nonetheless, for the majority of my adult life, I’ve grazed beef cattle — about 1,500 altogether — on a Virginia mountain farm.

So how did that happen?

Twenty-five years ago I bought a country place that had fenced pasture. I was pretty sure that something in addition to mortgage debt went in there.

Almost half of America’s two million farms run cattle, about 100 million head in recent years. It is America’s largest agricultural sector and provides us with about 28 billion pounds of meat at an average of $4.16 per pound in 2007.

If you buy open land in the country and certainly a farm, you’re likely to discover your inner cowperson even if you didn’t realize you were looking for it.

Every greenhorn buyer should know a few things about the cattle business.

Requirements. Cattle need food, water and occasional shots—roughly the same things I provided male teenagers courting my daughter. It’s not for nothing that Molly announced that I was “the worst Daddy in the ninth grade.”

Cattle also need fences. States approach fence law in different ways, but assume that you are responsible for half the boundary fence line. Certain neighbors will be eager to point out that all the bad sections of common fence are yours.  In some states, you and your neighbors are jointly responsible for all fence. Ask your seller how fence responsibility has been apportioned before you make an offer.

Cattle do better on grass than trees, dirt or rock. Your pre-offer research should include walking the land with a knowledgeable person–the local cooperative extension agent, agricultural consultant or just an experienced friend — to determine forage quality. Check for invasive weeds and poisonous plants. Then estimate conservatively the land’s carrying capacity, which can range from one animal per acre to one per 100.

Consider rotational grazing. Instead of grazing one 100-acre field continuously, fence it into ten ten-acre lots and run the whole herd into each paddock for a few days each. Management-intensive grazing allows you to increase your number of head per acre, which means more total pounds of gain produced per year. Both cattle and pasture are healthier. (See www.attra.ncat.org/attar-pub/rotategr.html and www.stockmangrassfarmer.com.)

Rotational grazing requires interior fencing, water in each paddock and a cowperson to open and close gates.

Water. Grazing operations need two kinds: rain to grow grass, and water for cattle to drink.  Irrigation water may be necessary as well for the production of winter hay in arid areas. Farm buyers might consider avoiding chronic water-short areas, dry rangeland and perhaps the drought-plagued parts of the Southeast.

Act locally. Cattle can degrade their environment. Four-hoofed traffic compacts ground and causes erosion. Where their number exceeds available forage, overgrazing produces harmful effects. I know steep hillsides that have been left permanently bare and eroded from overgrazing. Cattle foul streams—but not on purpose.

Overgrazing has been an especially difficult problem on western rangeland that ranchers lease from public agencies. The case to eliminate livestock grazing on arid public land is made in Debra L. Donahue’s, The Western Range Revisited: Removing Livestock from Public Lands to Conserve Native Biodiversity, University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Ranchers tend to hold an opposite view.

Cattle grazing need not harm pasture and water resources, but protection requires fencing them out of certain areas and other measures. My best guess is that farmers will eventually be required to fence livestock away from flowing surface waters to protect downstream water quality.

Care. Cattle require attention, even if you’re just grazing stocker steers from spring to fall.  You will need handling facilities, including a head catch, and an array of needles, bolus guns, applicators, bull tongs (a nose pliers), nippers, knives and medications.

Cattle do not like to be poked, prodded and punched full of medicinal holes. They complain and are not above evening the score if you give them a chance. I once had to use a needle to inject medication into the eyelids of ten steers for five consecutive days to prevent them from going blind with pinkeye. My wife, an animal-friendly person, stood next to me, helpfully shouting into my ear: “Don’t hurt them!” A good time was not had by all.

Cow-calf operations breed cows, and either a bull or a bull-substitute does the breeding. Sex and babies always complicate matters.

First-time cattle farmers should stick with steers and avoid the issues raised by arranging unprotected teen sex with older guys. Steers, incidentally, are bulls lite.

Here is a thumbnail personality guide to beef cattle. Cows are always female. They tend to be suspicious and, with calves, fairly hostile. Heifers, though virgins, are sluts. Steers can be goofballs. Old bulls are unpredictable, and young bulls are idiots.

The cattle business. Newcomers should know three things.

First, cattle farming is one of our few agricultural sectors that has not been federally subsidized, at least directly. Uncle Sam will not pay you to not raise cattle. No floor is put under sale prices, and no supplement is added to whatever you receive in a cattle sale.

Second, like all farms, the majority of cattle operations probably lose money. In the 2002 Census of Agriculture, 994,000 of America’s then total of 2.13 million farms reported a net gain, averaging about $19,000, while 1.13 million farms, about 53 percent, reported a net loss, averaging about $14,000. Profit and loss for cattle farms specifically is not available.

Finally, the IRS allows farm businesses to deduct expenses and depreciate equipment and improvements. Losses from farming can be taken against non-farm income. Losses from hobby and lifestyle farms cannot. Certain taxpayers with high off-the-farm income are not unfamiliar with these distinctions.

Cattle and horses are two common farm ventures for small farmers and those new to farming. The manual that the IRS uses to instruct its auditors on these operations is at http://www.unclefed.com/SurviveIRS/MSSP/a1farms.pdf.

It’s hard to make much money from cattle when you’re trying to, but it’s pretty easy to show a loss if you’re trying to do that.

Many state cooperative extension services will work up a financial profit/loss projection using the particulars you provide. Contact the beef-cattle specialist at a land-grant university in your state.

Information about the cattle industry can be found at the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistical Service at http://www.nass.usda.gov and Economic Research Service at http://www.ers.usda.gov/.  Useful websites are www.farm.com and www.beefusa.org.

The cattle industry has been criticized for two decades over its grazing practices, environmental impacts, winter-feed constituents (such as chicken litter), slaughter-house procedures and product safety. I agree with much of the criticism. We can and should do better.

Still, if you decide to graze cattle, know that you are doing something useful.

Over the years, I have produced one four-pound book on farming and country real estate and about 300,000 pounds of grass-fed meat. I’m sure I’ve benefited society more as a grass farmer than as a writer, certainly on pound-of-product-produced basis.

Perhaps the Farm Bill now in Congress will include a new provision that will pay writers like me to stop writing columns like this. Unfortunately, that subsidy would be taxable income. Maybe Congress can give writers a loss they can use against other income.  It is a Farm Bill, after all.