Grazing beef cattle: Happy tails to you

No buffalo roamed on Hawthorne Street in Pittsburgh where I grew up. Punching a time clock was more in my future than punching a cow.

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. Read more