The Luna Mesa Ranch Press catalog of books on cattle — the Dexter herd and the American herd, the working operation and the working history.
The Dexter Books
The Dexter Way: Raising Dexter Cattle on the American System
The Dexter is a small-frame, tri-purpose, family-farm cow. She raises her own calf on grass. She gives milk in surplus to what the calf needs. She works under yoke when a man takes the time to train her. She has been doing all of it since long before the cattle industry forgot how. The Dexter Way is the working manual for the small-scale rancher who wants to keep cattle the way cattle are supposed to be kept — beef on the rail, milk in the bucket, calves on the ground, and ground that comes back better for it. Written from a forty-acre operation on the Southern High Plains, with the actual numbers from the actual herd that walks the actual ground.
History of Dexter Cattle: A Tapestry of a Breed
One of the smallest cattle breeds in the world has left behind one of the largest paper trails in livestock history. The Dexter is a cow a family can keep on a few acres — and yet its history runs back through the wild aurochs, the cattle-law of ancient Ireland, the black mountain herds of County Kerry, and two centuries of herd books, breed societies, and scientific papers across three countries. This is a documentary history for breeders, heritage-cattle keepers, and anyone who has ever written a small black cow into a book so she would not be forgotten.
The American Cattle Books
Where’s the Beef ? Ranching on the American System and the Restoration of America’s Cattle Industry
The American cattle herd is the smallest it has been since 1951, and the industry that raises, finishes, and processes it is more concentrated, more fragile, and more dependent on foreign ownership than at any point in its history. In Where’s the Beef?, rancher Leonard Meyer — fifty-three years inside the beef chain, twenty-eight of them in the operational infrastructure of the nation’s largest packing plants — takes the full measure of what has gone wrong. Organized around four convergent threats to American cattle — biological, ecological, economic, and demographic — the book diagnoses an industry losing sovereignty over its own land, water, inputs, equipment, data, credit, and kill floors. Drawing on the American System political-economy tradition of Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, and Carey, Meyer argues that the restoration of the cattle industry is inseparable from the restoration of the republic that depends on it.
The Small Herd: The Cattleman at Honest Scale
The American System Series volume on the American cattleman at operator scale — the man who runs cattle at the honest number the ground and the family can carry. The controlling claim: the small herd is not a marginal category the industry can afford to ignore. It is the American norm the industry stopped counting, and its restoration is the Fourth Pillar returning to the ground it was built for. Seven movements, seventy-nine chapters. Grass and feed as operational depth inside the argument. Every zone of the working small-herd country named, and the market apparatus by which a man with forty cows closes the year.
The American Herd Book: A History of the Breeds That Made a Country
The American herd walked in ahead of the settler, ahead of the railroad, ahead of the fence. From the Spanish criollo cattle that carried the frontier from Florida to Montana, through the British breeds that fed the industrial working class, to the dairy herd that held the family farm and the American-made composites a generation of cattlemen built from scratch — the story of American cattle is the story of the country that ate them, worked them, and sometimes preserved them. Seven movements: the Spanish arrival, the British improvement, the dairy establishment, the American-made breeds, the Continental invasion, the consolidation under the Angus monoculture, and the restorationist recovery at small-operator scale. Not a reference encyclopedia. Not a coffee-table tribute. A working history of the animals that built America.
The Cattleman’s Century
The history of the American cattleman from Goodnight forward — the men, the outfits, the drives, the range, the associations, the winter kills, the political fights, the feedlot revolution, the packer century, and the working cattleman still on the ground today. Told from the cattleman’s chair, in the register of the trade rather than the register of the academy. Companion to The American Herd Book: where the Herd Book tells the century through the animals, the Century tells it through the men and the institutions. Same century, seen from both sides of the fence.
Luna Mesa Ranch 