As a cattle producer, I have been interested in following the thread on this horrible situation. I can't imagine losing someone like this, especially to another farmer/rancher. We do tend to trust each other more than the average city raised person can understand, so I see how JN was able to get away with his business dealings without others being aware of his past.
I keep seeing people post things about JN selling the Diemels cattle to Foster, but if you listen to the Foster interview you will see that Foster originally purchased those calves for JN to raise. JN was to provide the labor and the feed. Foster apparently believed they could sell these calves at a profit which they would split.
https://www.kctv5.com/.../article_e027ac90-b91b-11e9-aa86-cb91c253c23c.html
interview with Foster
Quotes from the article:
"“Our arrangement was that I was going to purchase the calves,” Foster said. “He was going to feed and raise them and when they got to weaning weight, we were going to sell them and split the profit.”
“It came time to be due for them to be weaned and sold and he was coming up with all these excuses and stories as to why he hadn't sold them,” Foster said.
Instead, Nelson showed up at Foster’s dairy with roughly 35 of the 131 cattle and dropped them off in one of his pastures."
The calves were purchased from Diemel by Foster with an agreement that Nelson would feed and raise them to about 500 to 600 pounds or typical weaning weights. I believe I saw where this arrangement was begun in November and the remaining calves were dropped off at Fosters in late June or early July. That would indicate JN had those calves for about 7 months, or the normal weaning age of a beef calf.
That leads me to believe the calves JN received to raise were bottle calves and probably only a few days old. The most likely source of calves that young would be from a Dairy. In the past most dairies bred all of their cows to dairy bulls to make replacements. Now, with sexed semen available, many dairies use artificial insemination to breed only their best cows to dairy bulls using female semen, and breed the rest to beef bulls using male semen. All calves are removed from the cow shortly after birth and fed milk-replacer from a bottle or bucket. The beef cross calves are often sold to others. I think Diemels may have had the connections to Wisconsin dairy farms and were able to provide the calves purchased by Foster to be raised by JN. If JN was able to convince Diemels that he had been successful in turning a profit raising bottle calves, they may have agreed to let him raise other calves they provided with their own money.
The problem with bottle calves is that they are notoriously difficult to keep alive and even more difficult to make a profit on. They need to drink a quality milk replacer at $80 or more for a 50-pound bag for 6 to 8 weeks. It may be cheaper in the Midwest, but it isn’t cheap anywhere. They must be fed multiple times per day and may go through several bags of replacer before they are eating enough solid food to wean off the replacer. They must be weaned onto high quality expensive feed & forage in order to gain an acceptable amount by the time they reach normal weaning weight. If everything goes perfect and you don’t consider your time of much value, you may sell them for more than what it cost you to get them to that weight. With any calves you should expect to lose some to death, and with bottle calves the death loss is usually much higher. Once you have a few calves show up with scours (diarrhea) it can quickly move through the whole herd with catastrophic affects. Losing 96 out of 135 is certainly not unheard of, and may not be JN’s fault. Another problem is that unless you disinfect everything those sick calves came in contact with, future calves are at risk. Wood is a common component of most barns and is near impossible to disinfect. While JN may be unskilled at raising bottle calves and that could be the reason for the high death loss, it is also possible he had a virus, bacteria or parasite that wiped out those calves in spite of them getting the best of care. I am actually surprised that Foster, as a former dairyman, would have taken the risk of trying to make money on bottle calves. JN must have given him a good sales-pitch.
