Dexter or Jersey?

I am torn between our immediate needs and those needs that will be growing in the next year.  

Background:  18 to 23 heavily wooded acreas with only up to 5 acres being flat and open.  

Is it still the rule to own a Dexter cow for single family dair needs or would it be better to get a Jersey for what we will need a year from now?  Is there any advantages between the two?

Dexters produce 10-12ltrs (2.9 gallons) a day for 305 days a year. a jersey produces 22ltrs(5.8 gallons) per day, how much milk can you use? I assume you will share with the calf but still that's an awful lot of milk every single day.

Do you plan to make value added dairy products?  Do you have any use for excess milk?  Could you just get a second Dexter in a year or so to make up the anticipated deficit by then?  Will you be clearing (or thinning and removing underbrush from) any of the heavily wooded areas?

All of those are questions that are, or might be relevant to giving you good advice.

How many in your family? How much milk do/ would you consume? Do you have time/ desire to make cheese, yogurt, kefir, ice cream, etc, on top of your daily milk drinking? The place to start is with your own consumption, and your willingness to find ways to use excess milk.

My first thoughts about a cow are butter...

Jerseys have more butterfat in their milk than Dexters, so you can make more butter from them, but from what I have heard, Jerseys seem more high maintenance than Dexters, and need better quality feed.

Another consideration is bull choice - Dexters need smaller bulls than Jerseys, so you might want to see what bulls are around locally or whether you want to do AI.

As an owner of a dexter milk cow, there are pros and cons.
Pros: Our cow is very hardy, with no health issues, masitis or otherwise.
She is not picky about feed, produces very well on grass or hay, even if not the best quality. We don't have to feed any grain.
They don't eat as much as a jersey
Our cow has never had any issues calving, and she is 10 years old with plenty of life left in her
Milking is easy to do by hand and does not take long because there is not much milk.
We don't have any extra milk (this is both a pro and a con)

Cons:
We don't get much milk. Right now it is just my wife, 7 month baby, and me. And we go through most of the milk we get just making yogurt, ice cream, and daily consumption.
We only get about 6-12 cups per milking depending on where she is in her lactation. Granted, we don't have a "milking" dexter.....those are much more expensive but she does have a decent udder and teats.
They don't have a long lactactation, it is hard to get dexters to produce for more than 9 months.
Calf sharing can be a pain because she is such a good mother, dexters are very vocal cows
Quality of milk (I will do a follow on post about this one)

Quality of milk:
We calf share for the first 5-7 months after freshening. You don't get milk for the first month because it all goes to the calf. Then we start separating the calf at night, which produces much bellowing for about a week. After that they still bellow, but only in the evening and morning, but no longer at one am (I always feel so bad for my neighbors).
While calf sharing, we pretty much get 1% milk. Maybe 2% on a good day.
Once we wean the calf using a no bellow nose weaner, our cream line is comparable to a jersey cow and is rich, yellow milk. We start milking twice a day and try to freeze the evening milk to use after we dry her off.

Jt Glickman wrote:Quality of milk:
We calf share for the first 5-7 months after freshening. You don't get milk for the first month because it all goes to the calf. Then we start separating the calf at night, which produces much bellowing for about a week. After that they still bellow, but only in the evening and morning, but no longer at one am (I always feel so bad for my neighbors).
While calf sharing, we pretty much get 1% milk. Maybe 2% on a good day.
Once we wean the calf using a no bellow nose weaner, our cream line is comparable to a jersey cow and is rich, yellow milk. We start milking twice a day and try to freeze the evening milk to use after we dry her off.

I'm so glad you posted this, I haven't heard the same from anyone else. If you could do it over again, would you go with a dexter?

Dexter are a small breed. You can trip over it. 😉 😊 Jersey are a bit better.
But: Why not milking Simmental???
You have enough space and fodder. The cow give you as much milk as you need (for you and your family, no matter how many) AND her own calf.
After a year you can slaughter a 1000 pound living wight yearling (or more, if you slaugther it later).
Good steaks.

A further question: What are you feeding this animal? Because yes, Jerseys can produce up to 5 gal + per day, but not if they mostly eat grass. A backyard cow is not likely to over-produce.

Personally, I would not use a purebred of either. Jerseys are good animals, but any purebred Jersey available to you will probably be modern dairy genetics, which means she will do best on high-quality, carefully formulated feed, and if she doesn't get that, she is likely to milk off her own back and her health will suffer. Temperamentally, they are usually sweet but they sure do like to get into stuff (read: trouble). They are famously incapable of JUST LEAVING THAT THING ALONE. Jerseys are also prone to certain health problems and weaknesses, such as a high incidence of milk fever or winged shoulders in age. Jersey farmers are very, very good at dealing with milk fever, but unless you know how to insert an IV yourself, it might not be the best idea. By the time the vet gets there, she may have gone downhill. Any cow with ANY Jersey genetics in her definitely needs oral calcium at calving. For a purebred Jersey, that's not always enough.

Dexters, as mentioned, do just fine without the professional services of a nutritionist, but, as others have pointed out, you may not get much milk. I have only met a few Dexters, but every one I have met was more than a little wild, which personally I would find challenging in a backyard cow. Of course there is individual variation in temperament, but overall breed temperament tendencies do exist. Dexters, as I understand it, were originally bred to handle themselves on range and resist the neighbor's efforts to steal them. That makes for an energetic, independent animal, which is to say opinionated, which is to say she might not go along with YOUR ideas one bit. The biggest genetic weakness of Dexters is that some unscrupulous breeders have encouraged dwarfism in the pursuit of a small frame. Dwarfism is a mutation with bad effects on heart health and health overall. So if you buy a Dexter, you definitely want to look for one with normal cow proportions, even if small. No oversized head, no extremely short legs.

My preferred backyard cow is a crossbreed. My present girl, Vivian, is (mostly) a Jersey-Hereford cross. She's small framed without being a bag of bones, intelligent but not an unbearable pest (most days), and keeping her weight reasonably well through peak lactation in a hard winter on about 40 lbs dry hay (fairly good, not the best possible) and 4 lbs 16% grain, plus any apples or pumpkins going bad in the root cellar. I am calf sharing, and I split her calf off for about 12 hours, then let him in to get her started letting down, milk her most the rest the way out, and let him in again to finish. Then they spend the other half the day together, so I'm milking once a day. I get about one gallon daily (no doubt the calf gets much more!), and that's been consistent for the first five months of this lactation, although I suspect she's starting to slow down, which may mean her beef daddy gave her poor milking persistence. That is one of the risks of beef-crossing, but you never know until an individual animal grows up. Sounds like Jt has the same problem with Dexters. It's probably the inevitable result of a more balanced, hardier animal.

I'm getting a reasonable amount of cream but I don't doubt the little boy takes more than his share of those last creamy drops. She is reluctant to let down for me without involving him, and in the past, I have NOT found the nose-flap weaners to work. A determined calf can get around them and a patient cow may even put up with those nasty plastic spikes, if she loves her baby enough. Which is bad for udder health, obviously. Calf sharing may generally cause problems with udder health. They can be bitey little jerks.

Judging temperament in a cow before you buy her:
Go meet her, preferably untied in a roomy stall or small paddock. Approach her quietly, not looking at her straight on, but with your shoulders and head turned a bit to the side. If she starts to back up, stop and wait. Your ideal cow will think about it for a bit, then come over and say hello. She may not want to be petted until she knows you better, but she should come say hi. It's not unusual for her to want a few minutes to decide whether you're secretly a vet with a needle hidden in your sleeve, but a cow that continues to freak out after you've stood quietly with her, not staring straight on, for several minutes, may be too nervous to be good for close handling in the backyard. Conversely, a cow that comes *immediately* over and starts licking you with great enthusiasm and copious slobber is likely to have aforementioned problems JUST LEAVING THAT THING ALONE, especially if she won't stop licking when you ask her to. And if you meet a cow that reacts to strangers by plunging and shaking her head, do NOT bring her home. She is evil. You're going to fight every day, and probably lose.

If you're buying an adult, it also helps a lot in a backyard situation if they have already been trained to lead, although you can work around it if she's not, as long as you have adequate facilities for channeling her where you want. If you plan to do rotational grazing, find out whether she already recognizes polywire. If not, you will need a small, hard-fenced area to train her in. You should always unload into a small, hard-fenced area anyway, because road trips are stressful and a freshly unloaded cow is confused and may bolt. If you don't have one, try to make a temporary chute to send her directly into the barn and keep her inside for a couple days until she settles down and gets a sense for where she is. If you're buying a cow in milk, go for a bred cow in the last third of her lactation, to minimize transition stress. But most commercial farmers don't milk beef crosses, although they often do have them born, so if you go that route, you might wind up needing to raise her yourself.

Breed temperament matters with beef animals too. Hence Vivan's Hereford parentage. I wouldn't try this with range-beef genetics.
I did know one commercial farm milked a Jersey-Hereford cross who regularly gave 6-7% butterfat by the DHIA test, but only for about 9 months at a time. She was brindle, too!

If you can't find the ideal and you want to buy a grown cow, a small framed Jersey-Holstein cross often does better in the backyard than either purebred parent. Mention to the farmer that you want gentle temper and hardiness over production. You *don't* want the maximum production that cross is capable of unless you have a family of about twelve, but again, there's significant individual variation, and a farmer is more likely to be willing to let a lower-producing animal go anyway. A lower-producing animal will also have an easier time transitioning from commercial to backyard feed.

Hope this helps.

Jens, your suggestion is great, but unfortunately, Gregory probably would have difficulty finding a milking Simmental here in the States. You have a much broader genetic pool on your side of the pond, including lots of breeds whose balance and hardiness never got bred out of them in the first place! Of the nine million dairy cows in the US, very nearly ALL of them are Holstein or Jersey, with a light smattering of Swiss. Even our last few Shorthorns are becoming mostly Red Holstein. If we want an all-purpose animal, we usually have to mix one up!