I am sure anyone who has tried to start their own business understands the struggle to stay on top of changes in the market. But when you farm you also have to stay on top of changing weather! My the past couple of years have been weird–long, long winters, super wet springs, cool summers, etc. At least this year we didn’t have the number of severe storms we had last year. But anyway you get the picture. While we are adding a hoop house this fall for our vegetable production we decided that it was time to branch out into meat production. You have already see our pigs. Now it is time to meet the cows.

It has always been a dream of Proeun’s to have cattle. We always thought that we would go with a traditional beef breed but the price of cows is particularly high this year. We were lucky to stumble upon a local dairy that uses Jerseys (jerseys have always been my favorite), They sell their bull calves for meat production and we purchased five (not all of them are pictured). They are only a couple weeks old now and the children really love handling them. We are still bottle feeding them twice a day and we keep them in a stall at night but bring them out to their own pen during the day so the children are getting plenty of practice leading them.

While I love eating vegetables I have always found working with the animals more rewarding on a personal level. 2014 has been a difficult year for crops but at least some good has come out of it by pushing us to expand our business (and family life) into other ventures. All in all it has been very good.