Jesse's Hill, Dexter Cattle and more

08/29/2026

Another worthwhile article on the SMD website!

08/22/2026

How We Roll. Husbandry, Management and Breeding.

I’m a jigsaw puzzle addict. I like trying out which piece could fit where and slowly building the big picture. It’s what drew me to classical dressage, the weeks of work to get a smidgen more of strength to help with expression or exacting a movement. It’s the same principle when breeding Dexters within the confines and true to the standard. There is no instant gratification, no magic wand or wonder bull for a quick fix. It’s fascinating.

The breeding herd as it is now are only homebreds and young. Maude is the oldest and barely seven. All ancestor cows were between seasoned (12-14) and senior (19) and had multiple calves here, so I expect fertility and longevity. If cows fall short in comparison or I don’t need them genetically, they leave the herd. If I think a heifer is good enough to join the herd, she has to be potentially exceptional, which includes being a milk cow. I still get the odd heifer who really doesn’t care for interaction and they can go into a field cow situation. Sometimes you really don’t know until she’s had her second calf and you end up getting rid of a whole line. Where we really lucked out was with our two SMD bulls, Tuck and Poppy. If you’re serious about dual-purpose Dexters, you’ll always end up contacting the Chambers in Nebraska. I learned more about bull selection from looking at Tuck and Poppy than any book could have taught me. I spent hours on pasture analyzing their conformation and later their calves. We will be using the third homebred bull this year, Fabio. While he’s the nicest one we’ve ever produced, it’ll be a crop of commercial calves due to his excess white. Rinse, repeat, try again. It’s a puzzle, remember?

I don’t worry about hanging weights. Our Dexters have width, meaning they have the capacity to gain easily. I can’t leave a cow open for a year without risking obesity and infertility. We still have beef from Lucien, our first homebred bull, in the freezer, who had a hanging weight of 677 pounds while being 29 months old and all of 42 inches. I’m working towards a herd of trained milk cows, but I don’t worry about milk volume. I know they have more than enough and have to be milked until the calf catches up. Would that be a three-gallon, four-gallon or even five-gallon cow? I honestly don’t know.

We always put out hay, even during growing season. Mind you, it’ll be from the year before, but if they need dry matter to offset fresh grass, they have access to it. We buy our hay locally and it might have some weeds, but that’s ok. The cattle never, ever, ever run out of roughage. We do feed a little bit of grain twice daily and use that time for a health check. I’m not going to sell cattle into a grass-only situation again. By feeding some grain I’ve changed the rumen biology. If you can’t feed her half a scoop of sweet per day, she won’t work for you. The morning feed has the minerals in it. That’s where I’m not stingy. Vitaferm products have been great, the dairy goats got them, too. This March I added an altosid mineral also, and with the permethrin rubs our cattle have been almost free of flies.

Calving season begins late October. I try to utilize the nursery paddock or barn stalls with all cows. We have camera systems for the nursery paddock and some stalls in the barn, so we can watch and observe without physically hovering. Coyotes and especially vultures are a real threat around here, so I’d rather keep them safe. I also bought pregnant cows when we began, so we’ve had the experience of calves in all months. We’ve paid our dues with summer pneumonia and overheated calves. The calves are born equipped for cool weather, not southern Tennessee heat, so late October and November it is. I milk the dams until the calf catches up. It usually has turned cold by then and my milking motivation is at zero. I don’t need-need to milk. I don’t need to make cheese every other day, that’s why the dairy goats left. But I signed up for Dexters and I’m following through, it’s really that simple. In an ideal world I’ll walk through the herd thinking “she looks kinda full”, get my gallon and be good for a couple of days. Hey, I’m working on it.

Breeding season begins January 15th. Either we start with the AI cows first or the bull goes in right away. The bull’s buddy is usually a beef animal and stays put in the nursery paddock for eight weeks of grain-finishing. Our AI tech is local and very good. If a cow doesn’t take, it’s my fault. I watch for heats and breedings meticulously and keep records on them.

At the tail end of winter, we have our annual vet visit where everything, cows, dogs and barn cats, gets jabbed and more. Vaccines and dewormings for all, castration for most bull calves, dehorning and magnets for all calves. We did have some horned animals through the years, but they require more barn space than we can offer. I don’t like polled Dexters, they look weird with their slanty eyes, long noses and pointy heads. I’ll stick with horned genetics and follow the breed standard. Yes, I’m racist when it comes to Dexters, unapologetically. I also don’t do colors. Anything other than black I don’t want to deal with. I love the breed standard. It’s my competition and puzzle. A Dexter is a dual-purpose, short animal. Breeding the next generation is based on correctness, capacity and dairy qualities. Added to that are requirements for a uniquely Southern situation: I need Dexters that will shed their winter coat quickly. By the time growing season rolls around in late March, we can already experience heat. If an animal suffers, it’s my fault. All culls are my fault now. I need to breed better, always.

We rotate the herd through our nine paddocks during growing season. If we’re lucky and we’ve kept our numbers low, we don’t need hay until September. The weanling heifers are separated at seven to eight months in June and halter training begins for them. In years past halter training has been hit or miss because I was too fat and didn’t have my act together. I’ve lost 90 pounds so far and it shows with this year’s heifers. All four are doing very well and a daily joy to work with. The heifers learn about being tied, being led and the milking stanchion in the barn. It’s a simple set-up: an old, $75 head catch that needed TLC, a post to keep the front third of the body in place, set up against a wall. They get brushed and touched while eating cattle cubes, a special treat. The heifers have a fan in the nursery stall while the herd has fans in their barn and a misting station with a fan adjacent to it. Our summer heat and humidity are brutal and without a pond and some pastures without deep shade, the misting station is a necessity. If we bred a new bull for us, he stays on his dam at least a month longer. From weaning to reintroduction to the herd, I like a minimum of five months. There’s nothing worse than a cow that nurses on other cows.

Mini Jerseys have been the monkey on my shoulder for years. I couldn’t understand why Dexters didn’t compete for that part of the market. By having Evie here and hopefully also keeping a daughter from her, I want show that a well-bred, dual-purpose Dexter is absolutely comparable, but without the insane price tag. Evie has the requirements I was looking for: conformationally correct, a sweet temperament and from a line of long-lived, deep-bodied and wide cows with near perfect udder structure and good milk volume. Sounds like a Dexter when done right. What I don’t want to do is separating her calves and bottle feeding them as is predominant in the mini Jersey world. I like the freedom of calf-sharing too much and calves need their dams and the herd to learn how to be a bovine. Should Evie’s udder be damaged, I’ll be forced to separate. Her welfare will take precedence over my preferences.

What we do here won’t be what works for you. Every farm is unique. You’ll want polled, color, you are in a colder climate, you don’t care about dual-purpose and only want beef. I do have a bone to pick with those not caring about the breed standard and especially its height requirements. I remember a now retired breeder with an excellent beef market. They additionally ran Angus cows in their Dexter herd for a bigger carcass with no difference in the taste of beef. I also don’t like the miniaturizing of a naturally small breed. Dexters need to be economically viable, not pander to the pet market. The breed standard allows for enough variation to satisfy and easily pay for themselves. Going outside of the standard changes the animals into being unrecognizable and generic and begs the question of personal integrity. Why were you drawn to Dexters in the first place? What made you want to change those animals? What misguided arrogance makes you think you’re improving? I did a presentation of the UK Dexter breed standard and the ADCA breed guidelines at the 2024 Expo. I have a segment on it on the farm website. It’s beyond sad that at a time of such a large national herd, it’s so difficult to find US breeders dedicated to the dual-purpose qualities of the breed with animals recognizable as Dexters. So, what are you, a breeder or a multiplier?

As always, happy Dextering.

I’m a jigsaw puzzle addict. I like trying out which piece could fit where and slowly building the big picture. It’s what drew me to classical dressage, the weeks of work to get a smidgen more of strength to help with exp...

08/03/2026

Jesse's Fabio, nine months old. I hate that he has that excess white.

08/01/2026

Where have all the Dexters gone?

The other day I was perusing social media when I came across a picture of a gangly red heifer. A weanling, I thought. Another one of the hundreds of non-descript smallish Dexter whatevers that happen to be registered, so you know which bloodlines to avoid. But even I got rocked a bit when I read it was a two-year-old in her second trimester of pregnancy. There’s always another low to remind you that folks a) don’t cull or even select, apart from color or test results, and b) they’ve never even seen a Dexter and have no idea what to cull or select for. It says “registered Dexter” on the tin, so it must be the original great quality, right? The originals *were* of great quality, right??? If there was selection, yes, they could be very attractive and productive. They looked similar and recognizable. They couldn’t be anything other than a Dexter. Almost as though breeders cared. During a recent phone conversation, a friend commented that the UK bull A looked almost identical to UK bull B, in spite of different breeding. Yathink? That’s what happens when selection pressure is applied towards a goal. Not just by the odd breeder, but by the breed association, the show judges and the folks doing linear assessment. Here in the US we’ve had the ADCA “celebrate the diversity”, meaning that anything goes as long as it’s from registered parents, because the ADCA won’t police their breeders for fear of losing them. It’s not just Dexters and the ADCA, though. With our foray into the wonderful world of mini Jerseys, there are eyesores galore for your perusal. The equivalent to red, leggy and unbalanced in Dexters is painted, pot-bellied and sway-backed, with short hips and high tail sets in mini Jerseys. They do have cuter faces. Your run-of-the-mill Dexter bull of the red polled persuasion has no type at all, instead he has squinty little piggy eyes over his convex nose (my apologies to all piggies). Both breeds suffer from low heels and generally flat feet, the Dexters are usually worse. Dexter bull calves are offered as weanlings instead of being steered, mini Jersey bull calves aren’t steered either, but are offered as “great herd sires” as soon as their test results are in, usually within the first two weeks of their life. Woe to the calf that was already 25 inches at birth! In both breeds the new and uninformed want homozygous polled and A2/A2, because it’s easier to read than learning to look. Testing will trump any real breeding effort with a newbie, every time. In both breeds everyone has “great lines” because that’s what they were told. I think I’ve counted five registries vying for the attention of a mJ breeder, it’s absolutely chaotic. Since all but one don’t require genotyping and parent verification, you might as well use the cheapest one and let your buyer figure out their own path. Dexters are being bred to be taller (Hello, Legs!), while there is healthy obsession about height within the MJ breed. If you’re defining yourself as “mini” in the name, height and breed purity should be your priorities. If I personally prefer a taller cow to milk or butcher, I can change breeds. No need for me to change the breed. Mini Jersey owners usually have one, maybe two cows, making AI the preferred breeding method. Sexed semen is outrageously expensive, because heifers can command three times the price of a bull calf. Calves are usually pulled within a day of being born and then bottle-raised. Two or three farms can command exorbitant prices for those bottle babies, with some having asking prices well into five digits. As far as milk production goes, IMO a well-bred, true dual-purpose Dexter has the same milk volume as a mini Jersey. Since said well-bred dual-purpose Dexter cow has become exceedingly rare, the Dexter breed has lost that slice of the market to the cute little doe-eyed cow with the eyeliner. Faces and size matter. Udders can be excellent among the mini Jerseys, and when you run across such an udder on a pleasantly balanced cow, it makes you want to weep knowing what the Dexter breed has lost.

So, what do you do if you want a little bit of beef or a little bit of milk or both? Take Your Time. Don’t let your money burn your pocket. Get your infrastructure in place while you read and educate yourself on why form follows function. Just because millions of flies eat p**p doesn’t make eating p**p the right thing to do. Do right by the breed with your future calves. Culling for the freezer is your most important tool, always. Read, read, read and learn about pedigrees. I waited and searched for a mini Jersey heifer for years and while Evie is exceptionally well-conformed, I still missed that her sire’s lines are known to go over height. The silver lining of that is that I can use a very small AI bull for her future calves, while she herself has calving ease and I have more space when milking. Learn the lingo. For crying out loud, if you can’t be bothered to use the correct terminology or spelling, do you really care about lineage or the cow you’re asking of me? Disregard if you only want a huge hindside on your bull. Have higher standards than your breed association and those functionaries of yore who lined their pockets while changing the breed. It’s a dirty old tale and a shameful one. We can’t change history, but we can understand the anger. Follow the strict breed standard, not the lenient guidelines. I’m saying that while being guilty of using an excess white bull next breeding season. Apart from that excess white, he’s the best bull we’ve ever bred with breed type and strength to spare. He couldn’t be anything other than a Dexter. Because of the excess white, I will use him for the shortest possible time. Hopefully those fall AI calves have among them a solid-colored bull calf of quality. Be your own worst critic. In a time of uber-politeness and correctness, nobody is going to tell you that your cattle suck. On social media, a fifty-inch bull is still going to get oohs and ahs, a pathetic long-nosed heifer is still going to get little hearts and a “so cute!”. Who are you kidding? Grow up and be an adult. If you love the breed, then be a breeder. Change breeds or cross-breed, that’s ok, but don’t change the breed, especially for financial gain. Put your problems in the freezer, not on the market. Find those are like-minded, encourage one another and be honest. It’s not about you, it’s about the cow.

I know we don’t get a reboot of the Dexter breed, but we can hold ourselves accountable now. To all of you happy, thoughtful, Dextering.

PS: The bull in the picture is Sant'Angelo Maverick.

New blog post https://jesseshill.com/honest-to-goodness-blog/f/where-have-all-the-dexters-gone

07/30/2026

The breakfast club, Elora, Lizzie, Gretchen and Evie.

06/28/2026

Summer '26, Dual-Purpose, Again

Summer is here, the temps are rising and our HVAC unit has died. The initial quote is $8000. Oomph. As part of rearranging and reallocating funds to pay for a new unit, I won’t be able to buy sexed mini Jersey straws this year. In fact, any purchase for the cattle herd has been cancelled. (Charlotte’s sale is paying for a good chunk of winter hay, so that’s sorta covered.) This means that all calves next year will be Fabio’s and that’s ok. Instead of a mini Jersey calf, Evie will have a little mutt Belfair. Maybe I’ll get lucky and it’s a spotted heifer. I’ve always wanted a spotted cow.

Fabio makes me smile every day, white belly and all. He and Elora are still on their dams. I want to wean Elora next month at eight months, while Fabio will get even longer. The only thing that could change that schedule is if Elora cycles in the meantime, which is possible. Imagine my surprise when Evie, our mini Jersey, cycled at three months! Three months old and bawling for a bull, it was insane. Would I have missed that behavior in a herd setting? I hope not. Different breeds roll differently. When I reached out to her breeder about it, she told me it was fairly normal in her experience. It has me wondering if early puberty is a dairy trait. If anyone knows, I’d appreciate the input.

The weaned heifers Evie, Lizzie and Gretchen are learning to be tied, led and handled. So far, so good. Lizzie is impressing me by being sensible and tractable. She’s turning into a stout little package, reminiscent of her granddam Squire Valley Bonnie. Gretchen and I still have our issues. Her attitude is a big fat “whatever”. So, I grovel and pet and try to feed treats. She’s lighter in build than I like heifers of her age. Without capacity, there is nothing. Let’s see what happens. Evie, the MJ, will do anything for food. If her nose in her feed, you could set off firecrackers next to her and not get a reaction. That one is so easy, it’s scary. I’ll take it.

Dave and I have been discussing if it’s possible to keep all future heifers and only sell trained young milk cows. We want to try it at least. While it would strain our pastures, it would add value to the individual bovines, get more people involved in appreciating dual-purpose Dexters and give me an opportunity to find my holy grail: the bull that gives his first-freshening daughters good, open orifices like in dairy breeds. If I don’t milk every cow that is born here, how can I know if there are improvements or setbacks in that regard? I’m not aware that anyone has asked this specific question within the breed to the point of it being a selection criterion. For myself it’s a big part of the dual-purpose equation. Any cow can be milked, but wouldn’t it be nice to zip through milking, even with a first freshener?

There is a market for lower-producing, trained house cows. Not everyone needs five or more gallons of milk a day, every day. It’s a market that Dexter breeders have barely utilized, to the detriment of the breed. “For a Dexter” or “typical of a Dexter” are phrases that describe sloppy udders, iffy temperaments and very low volume. I’d like to see more breeders taking the dairy side of Dexterdom seriously. With that thought, I wish you all a good summer. Stay cool!

https://jesseshill.com/honest-to-goodness-blog/f/summer-26-dual-purpose-again

06/11/2026

I guess summer is here! It's in the low nineties, but thanks to an abundance of rain, grazing is still very good.
Maude in the foreground and Matilda in the back, heading into their seventh month of lactation.

05/07/2026

Love, love, love our cows. Boop and daughter Lucy behind her.

05/06/2026

It’s another farm anniversary. As of today, we’re in our twelfth year of having Dexters. Our first was Buster, a nine-month-old carrier steer, the little dude in the picture. For a while he was an “only child”. In that time, I sat with him, gained his trust and eventually trained him to halter. Because he was so little, he got himself into some precarious situations of which he needed rescuing from. If a c**t is determined to chase you around, you can’t hide behind a tree. Because he was so fat, he couldn’t run very fast. Because he was so cute, he was always being bathed by the big cows, especially China. Our fencing has since changed, our infrastructure became geared towards cattle, the horses left and the Dexters we started out with are no more, though some have descendants in the current herd. Buster himself left together with a heifer that turned out to be sterile due to neglect and starvation as a calf. I learned so much in those early years, it was like a favorite college course. The things that always had me confused were the claims breeders made vs the reality of their cattle. Everybody was either bettering the breed or preserving the heritage or being hailed as a premier breeder. Then there was me, culling yet another cow with basic, obvious and non-negotiable faults. The breed has changed a lot since then, turning into a generic polled smaller-framed red beef breed, and most of the breeders that were acquaintances or household names then have since quit Dexters or retired from farming. Some died. So, what did I learn? What are the nuggets of wisdom I’ve gleaned? In a nutshell: Try Your Very Best. Don’t Lie. Stay Safe. Do What Makes You Happy. I’ll add the two Golden Truths I already knew from the horse world: Shut Up And Listen, and Not My Horse, Not My Problem; Until I’m Asked To Help. I’ve become very jaded since then. There are a few heritage breeders I cheer on in my mind, while there is only one breeder I admire. All others are either still blind or have sold their soul and caved to the mighty dollar. But I can’t fault them. We all need to live. I wish there were more breeders taking dairy genetics seriously and returning to a dual-purpose Dexter. A big part of wanting a mini Jersey is because I want to compare a small-framed dairy breed to a well-bred, dual-purpose Dexter. If I look at the prices that some of these mJ breeders ask for, it blows my mind. 15K for a weanling heifer with the “right” stats and color??? 8K for a plain fawn with slightly “off” stats?? While in the Dexter breed, we’ve neglected the market segment of the homesteader looking for a gentle, lower producing milk cow in favor of a cheap, smaller beef cow by introducing polled, just to maintain the breed itself. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. It doesn’t mean dual-purpose can’t get done; it only means that more breeders need to dedicate themselves to the task. Milk your Dexters!

In other news and before I let that frustration color my day, the little heifers Lizzie and Elora are finally popping. A little bit. I know there’s a lot of wishful thinking going on, because they’re the friendliest calves we’ve had, bar Lucy. Genetically, they have seven years of work in them, meshing some of the finest Dexter dairy genetics in the country. So yeah, I’m a sucker for a cute calf with a pretty face, while I tell myself that I’m exercising patience. Fabio on the other hand has no trouble drawing attention to himself for all the right reasons. I see a lot of Tuck in him and it makes me smile. Dave and I were contemplating about leaving Lucy open to be Fabio’s companion cow once he gets separated from the herd, but decided against it. Lucy got AI-ed to Old Sureshot, aka Sooty, and Luxa will serve as companion cow. Calving will be very spread out next season, that’s for sure.

Gretchen and Evie are sisters from different misters. Gretchen still hates me because I do the halter thing. Food is finally becoming a motivator, so things are looking up. Weaning her at four months has stunted her growth, regardless of the quality feed she was offered. It’s a shame it happened, but the situation was what it was. I’ll keep throwing calories at her. Evie is the happy, demanding, oblivious, hippie bottle baby: in your face with no idea of personal space or her own size. She’s down to an evening bottle and once this current bag of milk replacer is empty, that’s it. I don’t know why I think of her as the flower child, I just do. Conformationally, she’s stunning, but her attitude needs tweaking. I’ll take a dam-raised calf over a bottle baby any day of the week.

For the first time in almost a decade, we are sans chickens. We initially quit with free-range because we were being overrun by the cluckers. Feathers, p**p and eggs were everywhere. Having them contained had other problems surface: the enclosed run between the coops, though spacious, was never designed for continuous use. We decided to sell our over forty chickens and eventually renovate (and reduce) the area. Motivation is non-existent, to be honest. It’s so much easier buying eggs from a store. Without the chickens doing duty in the barns and pastures, I was worried about fly control. I added a Sweetlix mineral with feed-through fly control a couple weeks back. That and the permethrin cattle rubs seem to work nicely. There are a few facial flies, but so far, they’re negligible.

I guess that’s it for now. Take care of yourselves and support one another. Keep on Dextering.

https://jesseshill.com/honest-to-goodness-blog/f/anniversary

04/29/2026

Our little Cardinal made it through the storms and is still sitting on her nest.