Testing Our Dream Cow for A2/A2

La la la la la, let me be free.

Happy 2 days to Thanksgiving! As you can imagine, that's a big day for a homesteader. It's a holiday centered around a meal, by the way, and a lot of traditional foods that you can grow on the farm. They're fat and happy, they're in no hurry to move. We got pumpkin pie poops back. Cow poops are runny-ish. Like that when they have good nice green grass. They get clumpy and circly and horse-like when they're on hay. Very fibrous. That, that's a nice juicy pumpkin pie poop. Blaze, your winter coat come in nicely. Hey, come here, come here, come here. Where are you going? Where are you going? Where are you going exactly? Don't remind me. We gotta let Vanilla's calf over so we can pull some hairs off her tail. Let's see if she's A2. A2. Vanilla's calf has a fantastic constitution. Oh yeah, look at this, look at this. Yeah, short legs, pot-bellied. That's who I want our third family cow to be, I think. Not Harriet. Harriet will be a fine family cow, but there's some constitution right there. We got to see if she's what you call A2. A2, it's a beta casein, makes the milk easier to digest. Digest. It's like human milk, which is A2A2. It's like goat milk, which is A2A2. Not all cow's milk is A2A2. Now we have an A2A2 bull, we have A2A2 cows. So the reason that one could be A1A2 is because Stud Muffin was A2A2. So it's 50/50 chance that's an A2. Let's give these guys a little more food. Blaze! Dag gummit, Blaze! Blaze is running off the cows.

Really?

You just got to laugh sometimes. That's your future family milk cow right there, buddy. There we go. Did it. The calf didn't even move, and that was on alfalfa. So if it's A2, A2, we'll start taming her, calming her down, keep her away from He-Man until she's 20 months old. This is Stud Muffins, so it'd be neat to have Stud Muffins lineage. This is what we wanted, you know, that little flesh-like stuff at the end of a— to pull out hair. It's little bits. Tuss. I made that word up. It's a swear word. It's a 4-letter swear word. It's a T-word. Uh, that tuss is what they need to, to test to see if she's A282. Just look at this build. Looks like a little steer. Got a nice beef constitution. You'd think this was a steer. But it's got the pot belly, short little legs compared to the body. Of course, her mom is awesome, little, gives a lot of milk. We've weaned Vanilla. That might be partly my, my, uh, cow guy from Our Father's Farm when our cows weren't getting pregnant. Although I wonder if they were, and I wonder if they're far along. They're a lot farther along than we thought. But anyway, he said Sometimes you got to wean them for them to come back into cycle and heat and get bred. See if we can get mom over without the calf. What you got for him this morning? I got some grain for Blaze. You know, some of the biggest, most successful YouTube videos are around some big idea, some extravagant thing. Well, like our hurricane video. It went bonkers. I like a big video. I do not like hurricanes. So I guess what we could do is create something big and extravagant. I don't want to do that either. I'm more of a documentarian. Than a creator. Well, big show isn't what homesteading is about. I mean, sometimes you have a harvest or a birth and there's big excitement, or new animals, but most of the time it's about the increment. Just a little bit every day, a little bit. Whoa, go left! We got the intake speed right. This water has been flowing all night.

What are you doing here?

Let's get a paddock ready. For Harriet and Minty. They're telling me that that's the name of that cow that I hope is A2A2. They're saying his name Minty. I'm gonna need you, Gideon. We gotta work this up. There's precious pasture under here. This tree fell down during the hurricane. Much-needed pasture land, grass after the hurricane. We can take advantage and utilize all this but we might as well get these edges clear of these trees and utilize it too. There's something satisfying about that, you know. There's something satisfying in just slowly, little bit by little bit, cleaning a place up. This is nice. Let's finish. One step closer every day. Let's show our pal all this brush lined directionally. We were going to rent a wood chipper, rent a 12-inch wood chipper, and that'll make it easy for the machine to load that right into it. Tomorrow is another day. We ought to be able to string trim for a fence, put in our fence. I don't see why we can't get the ladies over here. What you making?

Oh, I'm starting sweet potato casserole. So what I'm gonna do is I'm just cleaning the sweet potatoes. I'm gonna cut out any bad spots like that one, and then that's homegrown tomatoes, homegrown, uh, sweet potatoes.

Yeah.

And then I'm going to bake them in the oven. And then I'll put them in the fridge overnight, and then tomorrow I will put together the whole casserole. This week's hit of casserole. All I have to do on Thursday then is just pop it in the oven, and I don't have to really cook on Thursday.

Is this pie crust you've made before?

I haven't, but I've made other things from this, this person.

Who is it?

It's the Loopy Whisk.

The Loopy List?

Whisk.

Lupi West.

Yeah, and they're gluten-free. And so I did the Farm Fresh Family one last year and it was good too, but I wanted to try hers because it was just slightly different. And so I was like, that's pretty good.

Free in this house.

Yes, homegrown sweet potatoes. So I'm gonna let these cool and then I'll shred— I'll get the, um, the skins off of them like this, and then I'll put them into a container, and then tomorrow I'll mash them up and make them into sweet potato casserole. Cornbread. This is for cornbread stuffing. So tomorrow I'll cut up the scallions, the green onions, and the celery.

And where do you think chicken stock— where do you think your Thanksgiving meal comes from?

Oh, definitely Alabama.

This is a very Alabama—

yes, very southern. My dad's family was from Alabama, and so we would go there.

On today's episode of Chicken Minute, Floors. Overrated in the chicken coop. Promise me you aren't going to do floors. I get why you would want and think you would need to do floors for your chickens. After all, you have floors in your house. Chickens are not you. Chickens are more like your toddler. They're going to poop all over the place and definitely not pick it up after themselves. If, uh, you know, your toddler didn't have a diaper. Chickens don't have diapers. Or do they? Chickens literally have nothing to do but to poop, scratch, and peck. A better floor would be a slatted floor, 1 inch in between, or a wire mesh with 1 inch in between so that manure can fall through. Leave that behind. Or how about no floors at all, like in my chicken tractor? Zero floors. That's what makes it a chicken tractor. Uh, walls Roof, no floors, allows the chickens to manure and scratch directly with the floor, therefore working it. Let's rethink everything and let's start with floors. Do we really need them in their chicken coop— in our chicken coops? No. Without floors, we don't have to clean up that poop, and that poop is nasty. Speaking of chicken tractor, my new book Homestead Builds exactly how to build a chicken tractor. I'm giving away 10 of these books, 10 physical books plus 50 digital copies of the whole book. Just got to sign up for my email list. You can do that at homesteadbuilds.com. You got to do it by— we're drawing Thursday night midnight, so you got to hurry up. homesteadbuilds.com, link in the description. Thanksgiving is coming along, and tomorrow I hope to move those calves over. You don't want to miss that. We'll see you then. Happy day!