Category: Cows

Everything that moos on the farm

Posted on

#6, Sprinkles, had a new calf, #46.

Baby angus calf, #46, and mother, #6
#6 has a little calf, #46.

When Justin and I went to move the cows this morning, we found a new little calf roaming around the paddock. She was already up and moving, dry and nursing so she must have been born late in the afternoon or during the night.

Baby calf, #46.
Up close and personal with #46. Prior to getting her ear tag.
Baby calf, just born.
#46 getting a break from all the cows pushing and shoving, and instead coming over to help us feed.

New born calves are so cute. They bumble around and let pretty much anyone pet them. At least for the first day after they are born. That’s why we make sure to get out there immediately and get an ear tag and a band on them if they are a boy. We hadn’t made it to the barn to get an ear tag yet to tag this new little girl, but while we were feeding she decided to come over and check out the truck. I had plenty of opportunity to pet her and give her a good rub. She’s cute and will be one of our momma cows in the future.

#46, new baby calf.
#46, now officially numbered with her new earring.
Baby calf and mother.
Mom checking out her daughter after we’d put the ear tag in. 
Posted on

NC Cattleman’s Association comes to our farm

NC Cattleman's association meeting
50 people, representing 5 counties.

On Friday we hosted a pasture walk for the NC Cattleman’s Association. We were expecting about 20 people but when the buses started arriving we had over 50 for the tour. So many that it was tough to keep everyone together and to be heard by everyone as I explained what we do and how we do it.

I spent some time showing where we’d repaired our pasture with the help of Wake County Soil and Water. Fortunately everything was holding nicely and growing well so we had something that looked good to show off.

Everyone was very nice and asked really good questions. It was an honor to host the Cattleman’s Association meeting. I just wish I’d have more time to visit with people and to learn more about what they did in the rest of the meeting.

Posted on

#9 heads back to the pasture and an update on #32, Boyd

http://instagram.com/p/sve2wLjgmO/

Today we brought #9 out of the barn and put her back in the head gate so we could remove the trocar. While we had her we put some surfactant in her rumen just to be safe and then we released her back into the wild. Well as wild as it can be in the paddock with everyone else. She was glad to get back with the herd and didn’t seem to miss the spa treatment at all. #9 will be joining #40, #28, and #15 who will be culled this year. It’s time for culling as there is no need to keep cows we know we won’t keep over winter. The hay is just too expensive for no gain.

http://instagram.com/p/svfFqOjgmo/

Not everyone is going away though. Boyd, our little bull born this winter is growing like a weed. He is already showing some pretty amazing muscle definition for a little calf. You can see who is daddy is and that he’s going to be a chip off of the old block. It’ll be neat to watch him grow up and see how he turns out.

http://instagram.com/p/svghsqjgor/

Father and son, Boyd and Benjamin. Boyd doesn’t look like any of the other calves at this point. His rump is much rounder and more defined, like his fathers. He also has definition in his thighs unlike the other calves. Wildflower wanted to keep him as a bull. Looks like she has a good eye for these things.

Posted on

#9 has bloat again, but we were able to treat her.

http://instagram.com/p/so45qnjgtn/

Yesterday morning, the new intern Justin and I were feeding the cows and I noticed that despite the relatively cool weather, that #9 was drooling a bit and had labored breathing. She didn’t show any distention or swelling so I mentioned it to Justin and we kept on about our day. I told him we’d check her again in a few hours. After knocking out some more work we came back with more food from our first run to the market and found that she was drooling more and now had a swollen rumen. We quickly strung a corral to the barn and walked her up there with nary a problem. This was important because it was Justin’s first full day as an intern and while he wants to make a good impression, so does his boss. Who wants to intern with an idiot who can’t get a cow to the barn? Then we tried to maneuver her into the head gate corral and that’s when it hit me, she’s had bloat before. I remembered because as soon as she got near the entrance she took off like she knew what was coming. I tried to reason with her and tell her that I was much better at treating cows now but she’d hear none of it. So much for the not looking like an idiot thing.

So we took some of the vehicles and made a funnel wall out of various vehicles so that she had no choice but to go into the corral and that worked perfectly. Once in the head gate, I demonstrated to Justin how we treat for bloat. I’m not sure he knew home surgery was part of being an intern but it is if you work with ninjas. A quick shave and a thorough cleaning and we put in a 12 gauge needle in to relieve some of the pressure. Then because I remembered how much it took to get her cleared last time, I went straight for the trocar. Out came the needle and multiple shots of Lidocain to numb the skin were given. Then I made an incision about 1.5 inches long, being careful not to cut to the rumen itself. I inserted the trocar and phew all kind of gas came rushing out. It was like letting the air out of a balloon. At that point her belly quickly returned to normal and her breathing slowed down. We unfortunately had to take a few laps of the barnyard to get her into a stall and under a fan as she remembered being in the barn as well and wasn’t too excited about being sequestered from the herd. She has plenty of fresh water and a bucket of sweet corn husks which are pretty high in fiber. She’ll stay in the barn for a few days to make sure that she’s ok. Then we’ll pull the trocar and put her back with all her friends.

This is the second time she’s had bloat. She was already on the list of cows leaving the farm but now her departure will be expedited.

Posted on

We’ve changed our milking process with Dottie

http://instagram.com/p/sKA3AwDgl7/

Since we started milking again this year, we’ve elected to go with the most simple form of milking which is getting your milk cow up early in the morning, milking her once, and then leaving her on pasture the rest of the day with her calf. The theory is that the calf is snoozing overnight and not nursing. Momma is happily snoozing in the grass as well and making milk all night. Once we milk in the morning, the calf gets the scraps but has all day to nurse and catch up on her nutrition. Everybody wins and the handling is very minimal for everybody.

The downsides to this method is the calf is getting a lot of the milk, maybe more than half but if you are just milking for your family that’s ok. Plus if you need to go out of town, you simply don’t milk and the calf takes care of everything. A nice, low stress way to have a milk cow and it works, most of the time. However Lightning, we have learned, is an early riser. Some days we get almost two gallons of milk, some days considerably less. But after two days of milking a completely empty cow (less than an ounce) at 5:30am, we switched to the next level of milking. Now every afternoon Dottie gets put into one of our barn stalls while Lightning stays with the herd in the pasture. She is kept from the calf overnight and the calf cannot nurse. Dottie is now milking a solid 1 1/2 gallons every morning and going out to Lightning for the rest of the day. This means we have to deal with the cow both in the morning and the evening, and we have to clean a stall every day so the workload had gone up. However we are back in the milk/cheese/butter/yogurt business because we now have consistent supply of milk, so it all works out.

Posted on

Update on #1s new calf, #45

Today I was giving Wildflower a driving lesson on the gator and looked ahead of us just in time to notice that the new calf was sleeping peacefully in the tall grass tucked away outside the paddock. This is normal for little calves who need a little space to get their rest away from the push and shove of the big cows. The moms will tuck them into a quiet spot then go graze with the rest of the herd. #45 was so small I could barely see her in the foot tall grass.

Since #45 is still so young, sometimes you can pet them as you see Wildflower do in the below video. You can only do this for about a day. After that it’s pretty difficult to get your hands on a cow unless you keep doing this daily, which we don’t do.

While we were walking around today, I also happened across this.

http://instagram.com/p/sGQV3GDgo1/

Talk about pretty. This solitary flower was growing right out in the middle of the pasture. As I looked closer I could see a grasshopper hanging out on the petal. Luckily I snapped a pic before the grasshopper hopped away.

Posted on

My day on Saturday and #1 has a baby calf, #45.

http://instagram.com/p/sDue3HDgn8/

Yesterday when I went to move the cows, I found that #1 had had a new little calf. She’s a pretty little heifer and is already nursing which for our system is about the limit of our involvement in the birthing process, making sure the calf is nursing. It’s always a good day when we have a new calf on the farm but having another female Benjamin baby, off of another good mother, is an extra blessing because this will be another replacement heifer for our farm. In two years this little cow will be having cows of her own and our good blood lines will continue. I’ll update this blog post with her tag number once I tag her today.

http://instagram.com/p/sGJP_Fjgqz/

As promised, she’s number 45.

Saturday was an interesting day on the farm. My day started at 1:30am when I woke up from sleeping with Spork in his bed. I’d read another chapter of Name of the Wind to him and fallen asleep in his bed. Some stress over managing some of my stuff had pulled me out of sleep and unfortunately once I’m awake I’m done so I worked on the computer for a bit. Then at 3:30 I got up and did my workout till 5. I then milked our milk cow, fixed a broken paddock that the cows had destroyed, then moved the cows water, fly control, and mineral feeder. The cows themselves were already moved from when they broke the paddock. I then made and ate breakfast (my bacon, my eggs, my tomatoes, it doesn’t get any better!) then did some computer work till the sun came up. Once there was daylight, I fed the pigs and the chickens. Then I took our truck and trailer and made a run to an extra farmer at the farmers market who needed to get rid of avocados. This was someone Miguel had talked to and had already worked out the pickup. I was just the delivery driver. I was able to work on my horrible Spanish (comida pa puercos?) About 4-5000 pounds of avocados were loaded onto the trailer. You can see what we had below.

http://instagram.com/p/sDtih7Dgl5/

Since I was already at the market, I picked up from my four regular farmers which was an entire truck load, all hand loaded and a lot of it heavy watermelons. I had to hurry to get everything done because when I got back I came back to the farm and met another blogger who interviewed me for an hour and a half while we conducted a farm tour. He was nice and I look forward to seeing what he writes up. I then went to meet a potential intern to interview him and instead ran into a deputy sheriff who was in the middle of a man-hunt which likely included my farm. Apparently there were deputies with K-9s searching my woods as we spoke looking for this guy. I got a description of the guy and then spent the next two hours locking down our houses, barns, and renters houses, and neighbors house who was out of town. At the end of two hours, I and my neighbor were the only one to see the fugitive but I couldn’t arrest. Shame too because I had him right in front of me and could have gotten him. However, good citizen or not I’m taking one for the team on that level unless he’s threatening me or mine. So I left the deputies to continue the manhunt (he got away completely) and went to grab lunch before Angie’s closed at 2. We got there about 1:50.

Once I got back from Angie’s, Dustin and I unloaded the avocados and took the rest of the truck load of food to the cows so they could have lunch. Once unloaded and damp from rain and sweat, we took the truck and trailer back to the two different farmers markets and picked up another full truck and trailer load of food and brought it back home after stopping back by Angie’s to pick up from her which we do six days a week. I also took some time to visit with my farmers and to deliver a present to one of my farmers that I’d made for him about a month ago. He was very happy so that was nice.

Once home, we took another look for our fugitive and then quickly showered and dressed to head over to White Deer Park to attend Miguel’s daughter’s birthday party.

http://instagram.com/p/sEzJRqjghi/

We showed up and were handed heaping plates of awesome food. Then SWMBO called and I discovered I hadn’t been listening closely when we’d talked before and I needed to be home at 6:30 so no fugitives would be in the house when she came home with the kids. We high tailed it back home, effectively eating and running out on the party which was very bad, but made it home a few minutes before the Mrs.

Dustin, SWMBO, and I then proceeded to share a bottle of mead and sit around the table discussing home school, politics, etc. SWMBO and Carter recreated a skit that had been done at Co-op about heraldry and they compared it to our modern symbols we use like the Nike swoosh. SWMBO scampered off to bed and Dustin, Spork and I played a partial game of Superfight before Dustin went home and I took Spork to bed where we watched a couple of YouTube video before I fell asleep.

Alas, today has started at 1:30 again since in all the above didn’t really solve anything that was keeping me stressed. But today is another day. My intern didn’t make his interview yesterday so I’m giving him a working interview today which means I’ll have some help and we only have to pick up from one market. We will have to feed a lot of food today though so the old back is going to have to keep at it another day. At least I was able to get my post done.

Posted on

Watermelon overload on our farm today

As I’ve mentioned many times before, we haul fresh produce from two farmers markets every day and feed our pigs and our cows with it. For the pigs, it’s their main ration. For the cows, it’s a supplement. Today we had a call that there was a trailer of watermelons the farmer wanted us to take. Since the only trailer I’d seen was a class 8 (tractor-trailer sized) trailer, I wasn’t sure what we were getting into.

http://instagram.com/p/r7l1Fgjgih/

Here is a picture of the trailer as we found it at the market. A heavy-duty tag trailer loaded to the gills with watermelons and ready to depart as soon as we backed up to it. Now I didn’t take this thing across the scales but I’ve pulled plenty of heavy loads and if this trailer didn’t have 18,000-20,000 pounds of watermelons on it, it didn’t have any.

http://instagram.com/p/r7l98Bjgiy/

The trailer after we’d safely arrived home. Some of these watermelons are fine and some are definitely not any good. But all were already loaded, covered, and the trailer was ours for the taking. As a goodwill gesture we are going to fix a few things wrong with the trailer while we have it because this entire endeavor cost me gas and time. Not a bad return on investment.

http://instagram.com/p/r7mM7zDgjV/

This is part of the load already spread in the pasture. These watermelons won’t go to the pigs or the cows. There are simply too many watermelons for our animals all at once and keeping them around just allows them to go bad. So instead we place the watermelons in an area where the grass is underperforming. This load of melons will add a ton, actually many tons of organic matter and water to an area where the soil is lacking. Next year, this area’s soil will be black and dark and prime for growing grass, and most likely, watermelons.

We will break open these melons and allow the chickens, the birds, and my bees to have their fill for the next few days. From below the worms and bugs will be doing a number on whatever is in contact with the ground. I wonder if this means we’ll have watermelon honey this fall. May be worth taking out one comb just to sample.

Posted on

Dottie, our milk cow, is being bred back, again, again.

For the last two days when we’ve gone out to get Dottie for her mornings milking, there has been Barry White playing as we pull up. Dottie is in heat again and Benjamin is definitely on the job. Since Benjamin is a force of nature and is currently thinking with the little brain only, we decided to just leave Dottie and Benjamin in the pasture to consummate their relationship. Dottie had been giving little milk already the preceding few days and we were already out of milk at our house so giving up two mornings milkings wasn’t exactly a treat. Especially since we had to get up, get the milking equipment prepped and ready, open up the barn, then find out we weren’t milking.

Hopefully tomorrow we’ll be able to milk.

Hopefully Ben’s work will take this time and we’ll have a little calf next May.