The Lord is gracious and we are thankful.

It is a wonderful thing to look outside and see a couple of young dairy calves grazing in the yard!
Yes, as unbelievable as it seems to us right now, there are a pair of Jersey bovine in our back yard! The Lord is good to His people at all times, but sometimes we have a special blessing that really reminds us of that fact. Our friends recently surprised us with this 4 week old Jersey heifer calf and a 5 week old Jersey mix bull calf! We have always dreamed of our own Jersey milk cow but at around $1000.00 a piece in these parts, we did not expect to procure them this soon. We are overjoyed at the kindness the Lord has shown us!
This is Bessie! Our future little cream maker!
And here is Buddy! Proud future Papa!

It turns out that there is a Dairy farm about 50 miles south of here that uses Jersey cows. Usually they seem to use Holstein cows in our neck of the woods. Holsteins are copious milk producers, but there is not enough butter-fat content in the milk to make a good supply of cream products like cheese and butter. Jersey cows on the other hand, produce less milk but the most cream of any cow. This means that a Jersey would be a good homestead cow in most situations.

The really odd thing about the dairy industry here is that they will almost never let any heifer calves go for sale. One farm that I contacted in the past even said that they would cull, (kill), the heifers before selling them because it would be hurting themselves to have people keeping their own milk cows! The bulls are not so hard to come by. Bulls are a burden on a dairy farm so they are usually glad to sell them for $100-$150 just to get rid of them.

As it turns out, this heifer was nursing from an older cow that was once a regular industrial milk cow but had recently been moved to the 'nurse' cow category. The mother cow was not only rearing this calf, but had 2 other orphan calves that it was feeding. A week ago we had a huge storm system moved through the area and the venerable nurse cow was killed when lightning struck a tree that she was under! This left all three calves without any milk. The farm had planned on culling them, but a worker asked if he could have them as bottle calves to try and save and the farmer said yes.

The worker bottle fed them for a week and then decided to go into the cattle business himself and placed them up for sale. He was planning on making quite a pretty penny of the two heifer calves and a modest $150 on the bull. Apparently though, there was little interest in the calves and he was stuck rearing them and buying milk to feed them!

The fellow posted a couple ad's offering to sell them for $150 each to the first comer. As soon as our friends heard of it they came and got us to go look at the heifer. The thinking is that this will be a good investment for our future homestead in West Virginia.

Upon our arrival the fellow said that he was willing to let the bull go for $75 if we bought a pair. He even dropped $25 on the heifer! So, in all we got both calves for $195 !

Our friends paid the man on the spot but since we were all crammed in our vehicle it was decided that I would come back with my little pick-up the next day and get them.

Saturday morning had me and the two older boys loading old hay in the back of my truck bed and setting off for a 100 mile round trip to get our new little blessings! We were thrilled to get them loaded up and back to their new home. The only thing wrong was that we had no where to shelter the animals and more rain was coming.

We have been told that rain could kill new calves because they just stand out in it from pure ignorance without a mother cow to teach them. We needed a cheap shelter and quick!

Enter the many purpose pallet! Recycled pallets were the obvious choice to build a little barn for the protection of our new beasts.

Below are the photo's of our new two stall calve 'barn' done Poor Man style! I think that you will agree, they came out even better than my chicken tractor! That is a 16oz waterproof canvas tarp on the roof, and it was a gift also. In all the building cost $129 with the $100 tarp and nails and feed. Pretty good for a two stall barnette!

Here is a good shot of Bessie's new room! The open slat walls are perfect for the hot Florida weather! Here we never worry about warmth or snow. It is the lack of cross ventilation that kills all the livestock here. Also, having the inner/outer wall keeps the rain out very well.
Here you can see how we made the 'doors' by driving in a trio of free fence posts to allow for the pallet doors to be slid in and out! We even got his and her milk buckets hanging on the posts to dry!

I told ya that the Lord is good and kind!

Hope you get some ideas for cheap building too!