Customer Reviews

How To Raise Cattle: Everything You Need To Know

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Whether your goal is to raise one cow or a larger herd of dairy or beef cattle, HOW TO RAISE CATTLE: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW offers easy directions for any who would house, feed, choose breeds and raise cattle and calves. From basic health issues to showing cattle at fairs, over 200 color photos accompanies basic details any would-be cattle owners will find invaluable. Rural library holdings or college-level collections strong in agricultural sciences will find it a top primer introducing the topic.

If you know nothing about cows, this might be the book for you. If you have ever been around or helped raise cows this will be too basic.

How to Raise Cattle was of little help if you are not knowledgeable about farming. There was very little detail about how to care for and market cattle. The author just kept referring you to your county extension agent for further information.

Tries to cover too much ground with too little information. This book doesn't know if its about the economics of a beef operation or about how to care for cattle. The sections on fencing is a joke and there is absolutely nothing about how to manage the logistics of keeping a bull. There is too much information about AI if you just want to have someone do it, and too little to even consider doing it yourself.

If you want a coffee table book about cows, there are better ones, but the pictures are nice. I suppose if you live next door to a dairy or a farm, it might be nice "background reading" but it sure won't help when it comes to actually raising cattle.

This book is a very nice, glossy brochure for city people who dream of starting a cattle operation to 'get back to the land' or 'live the simple life' or something similar. It's a good recruiting tool but is only helpful as a primer for someone who knows absolutely nothing about living in the country or raising farm animals. I recommend finding a more in depth book to get a real idea of what farming and ranching really means. This lifestyle is 24/7-365, all weather (the worse the weather the more you'll work) and all consuming. There are no vacations in this life. It's almost impossible to battle the corporate farms when working with an established operation and basically impossible to start from nothing. If you want to live in the country and play part-time farmer, look at goats or some other small animal that's easier to manage.

I have been around either dairy cows or beef cows for most of my life, and I found this book somewhat lacking in detail. "Cattle" are not "cattle"; they are either dairy cattle or they are beef cattle. There are serious worlds of difference between the two. Dairying is a full time job 365 days of the year; it may not be the same person doing all the work every day, but someone has to. Beef cattle are much easier for the part time farmer to manage; they don't need to be milked every day, and the capital investment is much smaller for beef than dairy. I found several pictorial errors in the book; sometimes captions were mislabelled as to referring to beef or dairy; in fact, on a second perusal, there are quite a few incorrectly labelled pictures. There are examples of dairy which are clearly beef, and vice versa. The editing for this book was not up to par. As many of the other reviews have stated, if you knew absolutely nothing about cattle you could look at this book and be given some information; most of the pictures themselves are fairly good quality. However, there are many other good books available which might better serve a person looking to get either into dairy, or beef.

Engaging book with great photos, it only covered the basics of raising cattle but is a great introduction to cattle ranching. Great book to read as a family before visiting a ranch

I agree that this is an EXCELLENT book for people who are from urban environments and have never thought about the difference between dairy and beef cows, heifers and steers, why there are good and strong fences to enclose cows. Just never thought about these issues, yet I eat so much beef and dairy, almost every meal.

I had no idea that the life of the cattle farmer is so rife with disaster: calves that cannot be delivered safely, failure to avoid heat exhaustion, threat of contagious diseases, necessity of vaccinations, reality of badly behaved horned cows... it is a hard life.

The author does have an agenda: he believes cows are efficient converters of the sun's energy into grass into milk and beef... for humans. He makes beef and dairy consumption sound like it is a completely wholesome, irreproachable system.
He does not get political about carbon emissions or fossil fuel dependency in that he does not even discuss such issues.

Color photos are a great plus.

Would of read this untill I saw where it was printed. Why can't we keep printing in the states? Have we lost the printing business in this country?