Category: Cows

This past week I finally received in the last hay for the winter. I switched hay farmers this year because my new farmer would deliver the same hay, for the same price, as I was picking up hay from my old farmer. Since it takes an entire day to haul three loads of hay (51 bales), and we go through about 250 bales of hay per winter, that means it takes me 5 full days of hauling hay to get all the hay here. When the price is the same and I get 5 days of my time back, I switch.

Except that’s not how it worked out. Last year my new hay guy delivered like magic. All I had to do was send a text and hay was here the same day or at the latest the next. New equipment, nice people to deal with. It was all good. This year, the first few loads showed up, and then it stopped. And then things got flakey. He kept promising to call, but never did. Over and over again. He threw on a delivery charge when I finally receive the bill I’d requested a couple months before. A delivery charge I’d never paid before. It took several months to finally get one more load of hay and then things fell completely off the rails and he stopped responding completely. Not, “I’m sorry I can’t bring you more hay like a promised”, just stopped talking leaving me high and dry with promises broken. Sigh, I hate relying on other people.

Luckily, the old had farmer I had used for years had a SNAFU of his own and hadn’t sold any of the hay he normally reserved for me. The property owner (the actual land owner, I deal with the farmer who cuts his hay) called me about this time and asked why I hadn’t been by to pick up my hay this year. I explained that I’d told the farmer I needed it delivered and the farmer couldn’t do that, but if my normal allotment of hay was sitting there in his way, I’d come and get it. Since I had about four days of hay left at this point, this was an extremely lucky turn of events.

Three days of hauling hay later and we have the rest of the hay we need to get through the winter. Of course, I had plan B, and C, but I sure am glad it worked out that I was able to go back to my original hay farmer. I think next year I’ll keep him and just find time to haul hay.

Well, not us. The calf has milk. But after new years, we’ll start having milk again in the store.

This week, Betsy had a beautiful little red heifer who has yet to be named (I’m sure that is in process.)

Erin has been out checking on Betsy the last few days so she was right there when the calf was born. While new calves on the farm isn’t exactly a rare occurrence around here, this is just one of a few that have belonged to Erin as our resident milker.

For all of you who’ve been asking when we’ll have milk again, there stands your answer. We’d planned on January for a birth but it looks like Betsy had other ideas. So this means the first week in January, if everything goes well, we should have pet milk back in the store. We will only be milking one cow so no mad rushes to buy it all. We’ll be back to one gallon per family, at least till we see what we have coming in daily. Betsy with a new calf should put out a pretty decent amount of milk so we’ll lift the restrictions ASAP.

Our farm manager from our other farm called me today and informed me that she was drying off as of tomorrow. That’s both the cows and the goats. We will not being making the drive to that farm this week since the milk would be too old by Friday.

So, there will be NO PET MILK in the store from now till our cows start having calves. That should be around January but it depends on who gives birth when. Once we have calves on the ground, we’ll make an announcement here to let everyone know they can start getting pet milk again.

In the mean time, we will be increasing our orders on Simply Natural Dairy milk to supplement everyone till we are back in stock on raw milk.

For everyone who called me the past week and wanted to know when we’d have milk again, and I said this Friday, I’m sorry. I have to let my folks make the best decisions for the animals. I’m not there but once per week so I have to rely on trusted people to make the calls on when it’s time. If she says it’s time, then it’s time.

#66 had a little female calf, #88.

Our momma and baby cows spend most of the grazing season at a farm that we lease near our farm. Usually we like to leave the cows at that farm till late October to early November but we’ve been short on grass over there this year and this week we received a call from our property owner that the cows were out. Fortunately our landlord, despite being a successful doctor now, grew up as a farmer. He had the cows back in before we could even get there.

One way to make your landlord your ex-landlord is to have him chase your cows with any frequency. We love our landlord so we try to make his life as easy as possible. Regardless of how much grass was left (not much) we decided to go ahead and bring the girls back here and start prepping for winter feeding.

We still have a weeks worth of grass here (with everyone present), maybe a bit more. We’ll graze the rest of what we have, then start feeding hay and produce instead of grass and produce. That will last till April of 2018. That means we are going to have an expensive winter but some of that time they’ll be getting grass, hay, and produce so it all balances out.

Yesterday we took the trailer, truck, backhoe, ramp, and everyone who was present to our leased farm to haul cows. The process is we start about a week prior feeding produce near or in our portable corral. The cows love the produce and they’ll happily walk into the corral to eat it. After about a week, they have the habit down and on moving day we simply bring one load of produce, drop it in the corral, and everyone walks in. Close the gates and viola!

Except it didn’t work that way, of course. The cows had already wandered off by the time we got there so we took the produce and drove across the farm to lure them back. Once we had them back, we dropped the produce and closed them in. Yeah! Success!

That’s when Vicente noticed that they weren’t all in there. A few minutes later some of the younger cows came wandering up. We opened the corral and they scurried in to be with mom. Ugh. Kids! Always late, always causing trouble.

Then a couple more wandered up. We scooted them inside as well. Stupid kids, why wouldn’t they listen and come with mom when called.

Then three more wandered up. By this point the food in the corral was running low which means the moms are ready to go back out. That means we can’t just simply open the gate because now somebody will come squirting out. Also, one of the young cows was obviously not going to behave. You could see it in how he acted immediately. We chased these three cows all over the woods and they went everywhere and anywhere except where we needed them to go. Why is it always the kids who cause the trouble? The moms I could just about verbally tell what to do and they’d do it.

Teenagers, there is a lesson here. Sometimes you are too smart for your own good. We were trying to move the cows back to food, water, and comfort, and these knuckleheads were stopping the process.

So after several attempts we finally got the cows in the corral and loaded onto the trailer. But not before a whole gaggle of young cows couldn’t figure out how to get onto a trailer and blocked the ramp entrance with their idiocy. Once again, the moms had walked right on. The kids were clueless. We walked a mom back off, then walked her back on to show the dummies how it was done. Then we pretty much just pushed the young ones on the trailer because they still didn’t get it. 

Once we had a trailer load of cows we’d drive the five minutes to our farm, back into the pasture, and simply open the gate. The cows hop off and realize they are back home. They immediately go over to see all the other cows already here and have a big running around party. There is some pushing and shoving as the pecking order is reestablished. You can almost hear the, “Mom’s home!” from the cows as they assert their roles as herd leader.

We took 30 cows to our leased farm last time we offloaded this summer. We brought back 33.

It’s nice to have everyone home.

One of our new moms, #45, has lost a calf. We noticed when we were tagging another new calf that #82, the calf,  looked skinny. The moms and the calves are at our leased farm so we aren’t able to keep as close of an eye on them, only checking them every few days. Miguel texted me (I was delivering a cow to the processor) and asked what I wanted to do. We talked the next day and agreed that we’d either get the calf by himself or if possible get mom and the calf. This was complicated by the fact that the backhoe was down with a blown boom cylinder.

We use the backhoe when we load cows as we have to move and place a ramp we built that allow us to load cows from the ground up to the height of the trailer. With the backhoe down, we couldn’t place the ramp, so we couldn’t load the cows. Ugh. Well maybe we can load her from the ground. I’ve done it with milk cows, but they are a lot easier to deal with.

So let’s catch the calf, truss him up and place him the corral. Then when mom comes to be with him, we’ll lock them both in the corral. Then we’ll take junior and place him in the trailer. Then hopefully she’ll jump on to be with him and off we go. If not, we’ll have to force her on which will be no fun but maybe doable. I had to go another direction that day but Miguel and Vicente could handle if all went well. Ok, we have a plan.

While I was on the road, I received a phone call from Miguel. The calf was caught, and the mom showed no interest in him at all. She just walked off. The calf was very weak and minutes later died while in the back of the gator.

It was if the mom already knew.

From what we could tell, the mom had dried off and the calf wasn’t nursing. I don’t know if this is a result of the calf having a problem, or if the mom had an issue. At this point, it doesn’t matter. “Love your family, forgive your enemies. Do neither for your cows.” The calf is gone and the mom will now be marked for culling. She is #45, one that we were pretty happy about when she was born. Now she’ll be transferred into the beef cow category and be used for hamburger.

#87 is a male calf. He was banded and tagged.

I had to rush the post out this morning because I was minutes away from our weekly newsletter going out. I didn’t have time to do much more than put out a quick blurb.

One detail I neglected to mention was that we were not planning on drying off one of our cows this week. She did it on her own. This is why we had the sudden notice as I’d only learned it myself just minutes before. At the time I found out we’d dried off, I knew we had GALLONS of orders from people planning on picking them up this weekend. I needed to get the word out ASAP so everyone would have as much of a heads up as possible.

Sorry for the late notice. Everyone knew about five minutes after I did so it was the best I could do.

A quick note to our milk customers. One of two cows has dried off this past week. That significantly cuts our production. This means that for our regular milk customers, we will begin rationing how much milk you can purchase per week. It also means that if you are a milk only customer (i.e. you don’t shop in the rest of the store) you will likely be cut off from supply totally.

Sorry, but we only have so much milk to go around and we will try to balance between everyone’s needs.

For those of you who’ve never heard of drying off, this is something a cow does before having a calf. It’s for the health of the cow that we allow her to dry off. It lasts a few months. We’ll be back in full production in January of 2018. We will be in limited production from now till everyone is dried off closer to Thanksgiving.

Female calf.