Yesterday was a sad day on our homestead. Despite spending the last several weeks trying, we were not able to find enough hay, at a price we could afford, to keep our milk cow. We have already spent more than three times our normal hay budget and still needed more to get us through the winter. It was a tough call but we had to put our cow on the cattle buyers truck. We sometimes raise calves up to butcher or to sell for butcher but the family milk cow falls in a different category. If we were still milking a herd it would be different too. When you have a milking herd there have to be some decisions made based strictly on profit motives or you will not be farming for long. When we got Sissy, our cow, we expected to keep her for a long time so we treated her more as a pet than we would have otherwise. Any animal we have is treated with respect and cared for gently but those we are going to part with are kept out of our heart. We hadn't planned on parting with this one.
On top of all that there is also a feeling that we somehow failed, that we didn't plan well. We have been buying hay for winter feed for years and never had to sell of livestock before to keep going. This year the prices are two to four times higher than what we paid last year, I certainly didn't plan for that. Then ,the big jump in fuel prices over the last week, made hauling hay in from areas with no shortages, just as expensive. All of this has left a bitter taste in our mouths and a lot of doubt about the direction we should go with our homestead.
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