Travis you are so right on the many things that can cause the chewiness. Feed fed, amount of room to roam, length of time the meat hung in the locker plant (not in the package but on the hook). Jersey, better yet, that Jersey/Angus cross is in my book THE premium meat. Jersey has so little muscle mass it creates tender meat automatically. I realize your holstein might be half the cost of a beef calf, but it will cost at least twice to get it to same size. They are not efficient meat producers and also are very wasteful in their eating habits. If your field is fenced, after your farmer harvest the corn, put it out on the stalks. For a couple of months it is good roughage for cattle.
You make some good points. I might look into getting a beef calf of another breed, but the pull is pretty strong still for the Holstein. Just go over to the barn, pick one out and raise it. Considering these are "drop calfs" or male calfs that are worth at most 50 bucks and destined for Veal, its tempting. I mean I won't pay that, I'll get one or two for nothing, but they male Holstein cows on a dairy farm are not looked at with fond regard..in other words, pretty much useless to a farmer.
I am not disagreeing with you at all Jon, so don't take it that way please. You are right in that Holsteins are and will only be, milking type cows. I did have success in raising Steak though,and his cost was pretty nil since I had the hay and pasture already. Really only the grain cost money,along with the slaughtering. From what I understand, their bone structure is what's a killer. Since slaughter houses go by live weight, and their bone structure is high, you are paying to have less meat butchered.
As for the Jersey mix, we had plenty of those cows too, well the Jersey's not the Jersey mixed cows anyway. Nice small cows for sure, with plenty of butterfat in their milk. I remember my Grandfather skimming milk all week long, then on Saturday mornings we would watch cartoons and "crank the butter churn", to make butter and sold it at the local store. I am forced to eat marginene these days by the Mrs, but give me good old butter any day. I don't care what they say, I think real butter is better for you. I do know this, margerine burns off the frying pan in a black, sticky mess. Butter never burns and keeps things from sticking. Oh yeah, give me real butter any day!!
As for the Jerseys themselves, I like their overall look,and their smallish size, but good golly they are some skittish animals. We used to herd up cows on the loose by touching off the rifle. The sound would start them in another direction, and hopefully back into the pasture. One time my Grandfather held the rifle too low and the bullet got the cow. Down it went...dead. He quickly called up the cattle dealer and said "hurry up and get over here." It took some explaining but he finally believed our story and took it to the slaughter house. As everyone knows, slaughter houses are not supposed to accept a dead cow. In this case though, they understood "things happen." It was an honest to goodness mistake.
As for the crop ground Jon, I am not sure if I am understanding you right or not. I don't think grazing cows on our corn fields would amount to much. Here we plant cow corn, and when we chop it, we take everything. The stalk, the leaves, and the ears of corn. Everything runs through the chopper and gets blown into trucks and fed to the cows. Our new chopper chops everything up to pieces about ¼ inch in size. That fine size helps the cows make more milk believe it or not. The only thing that is left in the fields after we are done is the stubble, or roots of the corn.
I looked for a picture of this "stubble" but could not find one Jon.I do have a few other pictures though. The first is of my "Davis Place Field" which is growing corn in the picture. The other picture is of our chopper picking up hay and chopping it into haylage and blowing it into a truck. What a nice, nice machine. Last year I drove it while knocking down 12 feet high corn. Every six minutes we knocked down an acre of corn. The machine, a 400 hp chopper was bogging down it had so much corn it was chopping (six rows). That's pretty good when you are taking the stalk and all.