If there’s one thing rural France has an abundant supply of, it is beautiful churches.

I was up on le Cher in the Centre to visit a Salers farm, one that has 200 mother cows on 320 hectares. This was a much bigger operation than the one we run. They get a lot of demand for direct sale of Salers beef but with the workload of 200 mother cows there’s no way to deal with direct sales too.

One of the things I was looking at was a bull for the farm. This farm keeps all their male calves intact (i.e. no castration, no steers). Bulls grow faster than steers and produce lean tender beef at a young age. This farm aims at 20-24 months but I have heard of other farms doing bull beef at 14-18 months. This is a quick way to get a return for raising your own calves.

This guy was paying me close attention.

The downside of bulls is that you have to separate them from the herd if you want any control over your genetics or if you want your fences intact. So they have over a hundred bulls fattening in pens. This works well for the cooperative or auction market, but isn’t something we want to do for direct sale. We think good beef takes time and that steer beef, although slower to raise, will produce the best flavor. Still, this farm had a great setup for producing a lot of beef and making a profit.

Some of the two hundred mother cows are inside. Here they are eating at a cornadis, which is lockable so I can have a look at them. This is different from the attached cows at a lot of farms.

We’re thinking of adding another dozen young mother cows to the herd.

One of these things is not like the other ones! That’s a Charolaise in amongst the Salers. They are bigger and more muscular than a Salers but are slower to mature and have more birthing and fertility problems. And they don’t taste as good. They are probably the most numerous cow in France with the Limousine and Blonde following after.

It is the start of the spring birthing season so there were plenty of new calves. These twins were outside, but they had a little straw shelter to keep the wind off.

This little cross calf was born just before I arrived. Born curious, too.

His philosophy is very similar to mine – grass, outdoor cows, low-equipment, low-cost – but his methods were inverse. His herd is divided into smaller herds and they each stay on their own paddock for a long period of time, whereas we run a large herd with the cows moving each day.

He has an agent buy the cheapest rustic calves he can get then has the same agent sell the finished animals on a year later, so he spends little time on that side of the business. His farming style is to spend as little time farming as possible. There’s a couple of hours feeding in the morning then he gets his afternoon’s free barring any fence maintenance. There are no mother cows.

This work ethic has left him fit, active and fast-talking. His accent is Norman so he’s not too difficult to understand. Farming out here keeps you fit: at the time of these photos he was 75.

Instead of using hay bales, he picks up the hay in a silage wagon and dumps it out into various sheds, one shed per paddock. There’s a hot wire out in front and each day of winter he manually forks hay out of each shed for the cows. Forget boot camp, hay forking is a full body exercise.

Instead of purchased hay feeders, he uses old steel wheels and bends out the spokes, welding them against another rim to create a feeder.

In the photo above you can also see some of his Gascon cows. There are all sorts on the farm but his agent works in the Ariège so the herd is mostly Ariège Gascons.

The tractor he uses most of the time is an old Deutz 2wd with a loader. He’s not losing much money to depreciation.

That day he had to move some cows down off a hill into a different paddock. He put a charge of ground corn in the loader of the Deutz and let the cows discover it. That’s a Charolais being bold in front with a lot of Gascons and some crosses behind.

Then he starts to back away, drawing the cows with him.

They trot after him as he reverses the tractor down the hill.

Then they see the feed trough and go running to it. Stimulus! Response! He dumps the corn in the trough to seal the deal.

After moving the cows it was time to head back for a cup of coffee. He does have a nice house.

To end the story I think he is retiring now at age 76. The chateau and farm might be up for sale.

Cold morning.

Patient cows.

Fresh lucerne hay.

Well-rested grass.

Watching the rollout.

Nom nom nom.

Here is their cowshed in action. It is an old-style one with the chained mother cows and the evacuateur behind them. Still, it is light and airy and even the roof is insulated since it gets much colder in the Aveyron than in the Gers.

The heifers are in stabulation libre on the other side of the shed. These girls are between 7 and 12 months old.

There’s another visit to a Salers farm planned for later this week which will be a great chance to compare cow qualities and farming methods.

You don’t notice this when standing on the ground, but once you climb around the roof these things dominate the view.

And the corrugated iron roof likes to grow rust. Those are the Pyrenees in the background.

Moss growing on top of the old stone wall where the roof had blown off a couple of years back.

This is no job for people with vertigo.

The first cut hay is in there. If I had the right fork attachment I could get a third layer on top.

How to carry new tiles up to the roof without hurting your shoulders. Those are concrete telegraph poles supporting the roof joists.

Jan on the roof. He comes well recommended. If you want to contact him drop me some mail (bc at wobbly.com) and I’ll send you his contact details.

The hole in the roof of the hay barn. Our house is in the background.

There’s a nice view from up on the hay barn roof. Here is the herd out in the Florida paddock, so named for the new construction house just at its limit. The barn in the foreground is the wood shed that is full of old vine posts. Yes the roof needs work. No it isn’t on the top of the work list yet.

OK enough writing; back to fencing.

I wanted to disc in all the bio goodness but we just couldn’t. The risk to cattle of having all those nails lying on the surface was too great, plus the slight terracing of the rows would make hay very difficult to cut and would complicate all tractor work in general. After talking to many vineyard-owning neighbors we did what they did and plowed it all in.

Well, Didier the neighbor ploughed it all in. In a given year we don’t want to plow so it wasn’t worth the cost of acquisition of a plow and the learning curve to figure out how to use it. Plus I don’t want the risk of stress damage to my tractor. Didier used his 130hp machine.

This buries the surface material to a depth of 20-30cm. There likely aren’t a lot of weed seeds in the soil since the vineyards haven’t been plowed in decades, but plenty of weeds will get blown in. I’ll have to disc it a couple of times to continue the contour smoothing and sod breaking process before seeding in the spring. I’m not sure what is going in there but likely a legume like lucerne or red clover and a cereal like oats. There are two main chunks to seed and I’ll do something different in each.

Red clover is supposed to deal well with excess copper and it grows wild on our farm, but I’d rather have lucerne for the better summer performance. Still, I need to rebuild the surface soil so anything that dumps a lot of vegetation will be good. Oats could be grazed directly, leaving the undersown legume or grass to take over. So many variables!

Gosh that backhoe is useful when it comes to lifting roof tiles.

And from the roof of the little cowshed…

The courtyard in the background of the above photo is where the cattle pens are going to be.

This is going to be the alley with a bud box at the far end. This end is an entry point but is also a shelter for cows we want to keep inside. It had a similar role in the old design. There’s a small chute off the far end but we aren’t going to use that since it is too short and too wide. The cows hated to go into the chute. The heifers can turn around in it.

This is the same alley, but at this angle you can see the old stone barn hidden inside. Now the rotting wooden barriers are down the old barn is a lot more visible. A couple of the roof joists need replacing but overall the roof is worth keeping.

Some of the fine construction on the cowshed. This post was hanging off the cross beam, which was hanging off the various vertical boards forming the gable end. These boards were all hanging off the roof joist.

Given that everything is hanging off the roof joist it isn’t easy to prop a ladder anywhere stable. So out comes the backhoe with its handy bucket to stand in.

It is fun being up in the bucket. Here’s the view down. The rear stabilizer feet are extended to hold it steady.

Standing up there allows me to rip down all the trash.

It is nice to open up the end. The light will help draw the cows into the bud box and also allows us an exit into the paddock outside.

The next step is to finish the list of parts we need and put in our order for new barriers.

The farm is at zero-point-something degrees of longitude, which makes us just a little east of Greenwich. But we’re in France, so that puts us on Continental time despite us being under Britain. What this means is that the sun hits its zenith some time close to 1pm (2pm on daylight saving days) and the sun rises late in winter. So I get to see it a lot more often.