After moving to Webster County from Nashville, Tenn., about five years ago, Tom Donkin found the breed of cattle he was looking for at FarmFest.
“I was just looking around at FarmFest,” he said. “I walked around and looked amongst all the cows that I could find and I liked the Braunvieh the best of all of them. I just decided that was what I wanted.”
Tom, his wife Laurie, and six children came to the Ozarks “to slow things down a little bit and get some cows.”
Laurie said, “I think our goal is to have a working cattle farm.” In the process of fulfilling that goal, the Donkins have started slowly building a small herd of Braunvieh while Tom works off the farm in Springfield, Mo.
“It’s not a real big operation, but I can’t get enough grass around here to run as many as I want,” explained Tom. “Land around here is hard to lease. It’s expensive, too. Property values have gone up a lot in the last five years since we’ve been here.”
Tom has been pleased with the Braunvieh breed and their low maintenance. “They’re good mothers. They handle heat well. We don’t have pinkeye problems with them. I set hay out in the wintertime and minerals for them and that’s about it. I’ll feed them some range cubes to move them around and things like that, but grass and hay is pretty much all they need. I haven’t had any problems with them breeding back. They just do well all the way around. I don’t have that great of fences around here, but they don’t bother them. As long as you keep them fed, they stay right in where they’re supposed to be. They pretty much take care of themselves,” he commented.
Easy calving is another strong point of the Braunvieh from Tom’s viewpoint. He said, “We’ve had pretty good success with the calves. You can usually get some 75 and 80 lb. calves pretty much all day long. We haven’t had too much problem with them at all.”
Perhaps Tom’s biggest challenge is misconceptions people have about the Braunvieh breed. The Braunvieh are an original breed, not a cross. “One of the problems that I have is that people mistake them for Brown Swiss,” he said. “They’re meat cows. They put out a lot of milk and wean heavy calves, but they’re a beef breed.”
It is possible, however, to breed Braunvieh away from “the Brown Swiss look.” Tom explained that he likes the fact that Braunviehs' color is not dominant. "If you want white calves, you can breed them to a Charolais and all your calves will come out white. If you want a black one, breed them to a black bull and all the calves will come out black. That kind of gets rid of the Brown Swiss look.”
Tom's daughter Spencer helps with the feeding when he's gone to work. She has also shown Braunvieh in Marshfield and Springfield.
“I actually showed one of Phil Kimerer’s cows and won first place with her,” Spencer shared. “The very first time I showed, I came in third. The second time I showed, I came in first. I just love showing.”
Spencer had high marks for other Braunvieh people who helped her with showing. “The Braunvieh people want to get kids into it,” she said. “We just brought our cows (to one show) we didn’t have any blow dryers, nothing. They were like, ‘Here, you can use mine.’ They showed us how to use it. They’re just really nice people.”
“Really the main thing I want is some really good breeding stock so that I can have good calves and we can produce good, natural types of animals,” said Tom as he summed up his operation. “We eat some of it and we encourage other people to eat good, healthy food as well.”
