Size of oxen for farm work

Greetings,

We’re hoping to get some guidance before buying a team (maybe cows, maybe steers) to help out on our sheep farm. We have limited pasture, so we don’t want them any bigger than they have to be. But we also want to be sure we get animals that can do the work we need done. They’d be pulling a sickle-bar hay mower, a side-delivery rake, a wooden hay wagon with a hay loader behind it, a two-gang disk harrow (we could reduce that to one gang if necessary), an old seed drill, a roller, and a wheel-drive manure spreader. We’d also have them twitch the occasional not-very-big log, and I’m sure we’ll come up with other tasks.

We’ve grasped that Chianinas would be too big, and Dexters would be too small. We’ve been imagining that something between 1,200 and 1,500 pounds would be about right, but we’ve never had oxen, so that’s pretty much an imaginary range. We’d be really grateful for any feedback from people who actually have experience, rather than just enthusiasm.

Thank you!

Jim