Buferd the bucolic beast

from Country Acres - January 21, 2023

by Star Publications

Rabbit rewards

Saturday, January 21, 2023 | Country Acres • Page 5

Buferd the bucolic beast

Seven-year-old pet steer attracts attention

BY SARAH COLBURN STAFF WRITER

HEWITT - Standing at a full 6-feet, 5-inches tall and weighing in the upper 2,000s, is Buferd, Wally Wiese’s pet steer.

“He’s gentle, never had a rope on him,” Wiese said. “If I did, I wouldn’t be able to hold him down anyhow.”

Buferd eats 25 to 30 pounds of grain a day and, in the summer, consumes 20 gallons of water a day. The castrated Holstein steer eats as much hay as he wants to.

Wiese said the seven-year-old mammoth attracts attention. The neighbor’s grandkids trek over two to three times a day just to check him out, and, when he’s out in the pasture, people stop their cars on the road just to get a look.

“The kids are impressed, even the older people,” Wiese said. “They can’t believe he’s so big.”

Daren M. Sheffi eld is the director of performance programs at Holstein Association USA. He said the size of animals has been increasing ever so slightly through the years via the use of selective breeding and artifi cial insemination. As farmers aim to breed cows that produce more milk, their size typically increases.

“What makes them odd and unique is they, castrated males like that, are usually not at a mature enough age that they would reach that height so it makes them stand out,” he said.

Typically, the steers are sold for meat before they gain Buferd’s level of height and weight, and most, he said, aren’t around for more than a few years; it’s rare for a steer to reach seven years of age.

Typically, steers are slaughtered around 15 months of age at a weight of 1,300 to 1,400 pounds.

So was the case with Wiese’s other steers.

At the end of his dairying career, Wiese said he had a tall cow that he stood on a bucket to breed artifi cially with a stature bull. He was hoping for a heifer calf and instead got Buferd. He had a few other steers around the same time, which he began butchering, but by the time he got to Buferd, the steer was so big the butchering became cost prohibitive.

By that time, Buferd had also developed a personality.

“He’s easy to take care of,” Wiese said. “I have a single wire fence, not hot, and h e doesn’t know it, but he respects it.”

For a long time, Buferd spent his days in pasture with two horses. One died, and Wiese had to get rid of the other a month ago. “He’d walk around looking for the horse,” Wiese said. “That was his pet. When he saw the trailer come and the (other) horse get loaded up, he started bellering. He didn’t like that.”

Though Wiese goes out to feed Buferd twice a day and scratch his belly and neck, he said it was clear the steer was sad, so Wiese talked to his nephews to come up with a solution.

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Buferd, a seven-year-old steer, stands next to the barn on Wally Wiese’s property near Hewitt. Although he is of big size, Buferd respects his fence and is easy to contain.

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