Yak meat is much leaner than beef. They eat about 1/3 of what a cow eats. People around here have been able to sell it for $12/lb.
Yaks are very docile when handled daily from birth. That being said ours were originally range cows and thus pretty wild. We can now pet them while they eat. They ARE NOT agressive. The man we bought ours from said his bull was one of the gentlest bovines he had worked with. They are very good mothers. Ours nursed both her new calf and her 2year old bull ( the one in the previous picture). She wouldn't even let the cats into the pasture with it. She is very predator aware. She probably could easily kill a pack of coyotes by her self. There is a ranch in Montana that actually uses them as gaurd animals for their sheep. They had issues with wolves. They did say they have lost a few sheep to tramplins and gorings during feeding over a couple years. If you raised a bottle calf with a flock I think that could work fairly well.
I haven't heard of anyone around here milking them but that's one of their main purposes in Tibet. I've read they have a high butterfat content. Going off ours gals udder I would say they produces way less milk than most cow but she did manage to feed a bull and a calf, so who knows.
If yours are tame you can brush out their undercoat and make pretty good chunk of change off of fiber.
My only complaint is ours jump our fences. Our fences are really old though (75+) so they tend to give whe they jump on them. They actually can jump pretty high but if it can hold a horse I would say it can hold a yak. The folks we sold the bull to don't seem to have an issue keepin him penned
. They also do best in the cold. We do reach triple digits during the summer though. They enjoy swimming and wading.
When bred with cows ( different species) you get fertile females and steril males. The hybrids are called Dzo's although we call ours a yow.
Hope this helps.
Here they are today
That little ewe lamb is precious...she DOES seem to have "feminine" features doesn't she?! I'm sorry...I was looking at the pictures, imagining how that wool spins up, takes die, etc! Then I saw you have Yaks! How cool is that!? We should get some photos of those too!
It's ok Coco, I wonder that my self actually. It's really soft and has nice crimp but unfortunately I have no time to even attempt processing it. We generally end up throwing it out or putting it in the burn pile. We have enough this year that we'll probably join the wool pool here.
