05/19/2026
“But why keep such an oddball cow in the herd? Those aren’t the genetics you’re after? What value does she add?”
Well, for one, that’s Bessie and we love her.
Her fun little backstory:
Bessie is a Corriente cow that belonged to a neighbor of ours back before we moved up here. I had a bottle calf at home (not in the old leased cow pasture), and Bessie’s pasture was, as the crow flies, just over a hill and through some woods from him. Only two cows around in that area. Bessie was not content with that (if you know cows, they don’t tend to live solo very well) and for a week or so straight, she’d bust OUT of her fence, take a jaunt across the hill and through the woods, and bust INTO our fence to hang with the bottle steer. After a week of that chaos, mending fences, and continually catching, penning up, and loading this little heifer up for the neighbor, we finally just decided she could stay and worked it out with the neighbor. She was somewhere between 8-10 months old at the time.
Since then, Bessie has been our loyal guard-cow. She took it upon herself to guard the pastures against anything that wasn’t bovine, equine, or human, and she does a damn good job at it. She also alerts the humans when something is amiss. New calf? Low water/minerals/hay? Something isn’t right?
Bessie trumpets like an elk.
And as a bonus, she’s given us three wonderful calves over the years, 2 heifers and a steer. Her first daughter has now raised two beautiful bull calves of her own, her son was delicious at freezer camp (🥩), and her youngest? Well, just look at that cutie 😍
In all honesty, Bessie is probably the hardiest cow we own, and she passes that along to her offspring. She’s docile, she’s an excellent mother, and her offspring continue to out-produce her (I mean, just look at little miss Noel here)
Plus, I have plans for where to mount those horns when the time does finally come😂
