Category: Cows

Last week we ran our finish herd across our scales here in the barn yard before moving them onto new pasture and starting our rotation all over again. This is something we do a few times per year to see where we are in our progress, and where we are going for the upcoming years. It takes about two years till a cow is ready to process, so sitting here in fall of 2016, I’m planning on what my needs will be in fall of 2018. It takes a bit of a crystal ball, as I’m sure you can appreciate.

We currently have some cows in the finish herd that were born on our farm, some that were born at another farm a few years ago, and our newest batch that came from a certified Organic farm in South Carolina. Going forward, our home grown cows and our SC cows will be our primary source for beef.

Finishing cows is something that I had to learn about when we decided we’d change the way we farmed. I thought, originally, that you just kept them a bit longer and then processed them instead of selling them. This is a common misconception. Since we are grass fed AND grass finished, finishing cows is the hardest part of this business. I’ve been told by more than one experienced cattleman that you CAN’T finish cows on just grass. It took us years to get it right and I’m still learning every day.

One of the things you have to adjust to is that a grass finished cow weighs only about 1100-1200 pounds vs the 1400-1500 pounds that a grain finished cow does. This means less yield for the farmer, less fat in the meat, and maybe a bit tougher meat as a result. However, we’ve come across a happy circumstance this last weighing. First, let me list the weights.

Ear tag number, then color, then the weight in pounds

#39 – Yellow – 1516
#Steve 10- Red – 1457
#42 – Red – 787
#A9 – Yellow – 810
#A12 – Yellow – 902
#A2 – Yellow – 668
#37 – Red – 632
#13 – Red – No weight
#50 – Red – 428
#A5 – Yellow – 515
#21 – Red – 987
#43 – Yellow – 1289
#A1 – Yellow – 677
#46 – Yellow – 1154
#47 – Yellow – 1006
#54 – Yellow – 817
#A3 – Yellow – 764 (Hard to read)
#A4 – Yellow – 908 (Crazy)
#41 – Red – 689
#57 – Yellow – 810
#LF18 – Red – 1219
#A10 – Yellow – 650
#A8 – Yellow – 524
#A6 – Yellow – 753
#55 – Yellow – 755
#30 – Red – 875
#759 – Red – 1255
#40 – Red- 743
Bernice (Milk cow’s baby initial weight) 508

What does all this mean? That’s the next post.

It was a long shot from the beginning. A vet, who I actually think has to be smarter than a doctor (his patients can’t tell him what’s wrong or answer questions), had already washed his hands of this cow and said there was nothing more that could be done. Yet, we tried. We did get the impacted rumen cleared. We did get her to poop a relatively solid poop. We did get gut activity going again with our treatments.

But she was severely dehydrated and emaciated from the beginning. There was no way we could get enough fluids in her to offset the down hill slide she’d already taken. And her liver was beginning to fail before we ever started working on her. It was a hail Mary pass from the beginning.

But yesterday afternoon, Erin and I consulted over her at the barn. The 4pm feeding was a no go. She was too weak to do anything. She couldn’t eat or drink on her own. We didn’t have IV fluids to administer (although we had everything else for and IV). And to top it all off, her trocar had become dislodged from her rumen meaning we couldn’t administer anything else directly without tubing her. The only way to put it back was to open her up again and basically repeat the surgery. In her weakened condition, that just wasn’t a good idea. That basically left us with nothing else we could do.

Over the course of the night, she passed peacefully. She’ll be buried here on the farm, as we deal with the effects of Hurricane Mathew passing overhead. Hopefully that’s all we’ll have to do with the hurricane.

Thank you everyone for the well wishes. And thank you Erin, Lucy, and Miguel for all the help trying to save this lost cause.

After lunch, I put two more 20 oz bottles of Gatorade into our sick cow. I also made up a 20oz batch of colustrum. Since her belly has quit working, I figured that a bit of starter milk might get things moving again. While I was administering the fluids, I thought I heard her have a wet breath. In other words, fluid in her lungs. That would pretty much be the end of her if it were the case. Then I listened a bit more and determined that it was actually burping.

Burping is good. Burping is awesome! That means that the bugs in her gut are starting to go to work. A by-product of fermentation is CO2. Cows get rid of this CO2 by burping with nearly every breath they take. Usually you don’t hear it as it’s part of the exhalation but occasionally they do burp like a frat boy. This little lady was letting out some lady like burps, but burps none the less. It doesn’t mean everything is hunky dory, but if she’s burping to get rid of gas, that means she’s making gas. Making gas means fermentation, which means that her gut can start absorbing what we are putting into her. Burping also means that the stitches in her rumen should be holding and healing which both desperately need to happen.

To top it all off, she had a small stool that was closer to normal than anything I’ve seen yet. Up till now she’s been pooping nothing but water. Now if she’s passing what is still in her GI, and starting to make normal stools, she is at least doing better than yesterday.

For a prognosis, I’d say that at this point, I’d say we can slow down on digging the hole rather than stop digging altogether, but some signs are improving. She has a LONG way to go and an obscene amount of care to get there. But at least some signs are positive.

On the down side, she is not standing, eating, drinking, or doing much besides laying around. She is weak but I’d be too after effectively not eating for four days. Hopefully the electrolytes going into her will give her a bit of a boost and be a bridge till we can get her gut healed and her eating.

Erin checked on the cow this morning at 6am. She wasn’t feeling too perky but she was alive and kicking at least.

At about 8 I went over and administered through the trocar:

2 20oz bottles of Gatorade.
1 jar of vanana yogurt
One 20oz bottle of water

At 11am, after driving all over creation getting supplies, I went back and checked on her again. She is getting up and moving, then laying back down. That is good. She is not eating or drinking. That is bad. She is alert, and gentle. That is good.

I administered through the trocar and my new tube/funnel setup (much better):

An entire bottle of plain kefir.
2 20oz bottles of Gatorade

1 20oz bottle of Probios powder (mixed with water)
2 20 oz bottles of water

I’m heading out for my own lunch now, then it’ll be back to another few feedings over the next few hours. We are having to balance what we can get in her with not overloading her rumen. Hopefully things will start to percolate in there as the day goes forward and she’ll maybe get a bit of energy. If we could get her eating, that would really be the trick. Until then, we’ll keep doing it manually.

Once the rumen was mostly sewn up, we inserted a trocar. Then we sewed up the skin around the trocar, with Erin’s idea of a line from the rumen to the outside to help hold tension on it. Once everything was sewn up it was time to get things moving again.

The trocar gives us a direct line to her stomach. Even if she doesn’t want to eat, we can put food in directly. With her rumen all freshly sewn up, we don’t want much in there but we needed something to get the flora and fauna working again. First we put in some ProBios. It’s a paste of gut biotics that I keep around for weird things like this.

Then we put in some Gatorade, about three bottles worth. This gives her electrolytes and carbs, both of which she needed desperately. Then we gave her about 90cc of yogurt. Carolina Farmhouse Dairy yogurt, actually. We had a big jar of plain. Yogurt is good for your gut, why not hers? Then I washed everything down with a last bottle of Gatorade.

I also administered a dosage of Flunixamine(Banamine), and a dosage of LA-200 antibiotic.

Once all that was done, we walked our patient into the hospital barn. We made sure she had a bit of feed should she feel inclined, that she had fresh water, and then left her to rest. Erin checked on her at about 8pm and said she had a lot of gut sound (the sound of digestion, hopefully) and that she was resting nicely.

I was back at 1am to check on her and to put two more bottles of Gatorade into her via the trocar. As of 1:30 she was still resting comfortably. Since I was already up, I figured I’d document what we’d done so the farmer can get an update when she wakes up. It’s now 3am, so I think I’ll catch a few ZZs if I can before the day starts anew tomorrow.

At this point she may already have been dying and we can’t get her restarted. Her liver numbers apparently were not good per the vet which is a sign she’s starting to shut down. Or she may have lost too much body condition and she may not make it. Or she may die of thirst because she’d stopped drinking and we can’t get enough Gatorade into her. Or the fact I was elbow deep in her may cause an infection that will kill her. There are a lot of reasons why she won’t make it so I’m not buying candles for her birthday cake yet. But at least we have done all we could for her. Otherwise she would have just died. Now at least, there is hope.

The wetness you see above is from all the washing we did. Lidocain has epinephrine in it (remember the epi-pen scandal in the news recently? Same stuff.) and epinephrine restricts bleeding. There was actually very little blood through this entire thing.

At this point, we were deciding if we’d actually open her up, or just put a trocar in and get direct access to the rumen. That look on my face isn’t grumpy, it’s thoughtful. Sadly for my wife, kids, and employees, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Her rumen felt like one of those sand filled stress balls. It was packed with something that obviously wasn’t going anywhere. The best thing to do was to open her rumen and get it out. At this point, you’re probably thinking, “How does he know how to do all this?”

Folks, I don’t. Yes I’ve done surgery before. Yes I’ve worked on cows before. Yes I have experience. But I’ve never done the procedure I was about to try. Can it be done? Sure. Do I know how? Technically, yes. However, it boiled down to this. I can not do this procedure, and she can die. Or I can do it, and she quite likely may die anyway. But she wasn’t in pain from my surgery and I could at least try. That gives her a chance.

I opened the incision wider, enough to get my hand inside, and then proceeded to open her rumen. Once inside, I found it was packed full of grass. The grass actually looked perfectly fine. What had happened was something had stopped her gut from working, probably a change in diet. The grass just backed up in there and wasn’t going anywhere. A cows digests its food by bacteria that live in its gut. Her bacteria had died off, and she was literally starving to death with a belly full of food. I know how this works, because it has happened on our farm before. Changes in diet are very dangerous to cows. I remember loosing 8 cows one time when I was a teenager, all from changing their diet too quickly.

For the next 45 minutes, I reached in, got a handful of grass and gut contents, and then tossed it on the ground. The poor girl had done everything she could to eat, but it all had to come out.

This is less than half what we pulled out of her. I ended up elbow deep in her rumen, which if you are paying attention, you’ll note that my gloves don’t go quite that far. Fun day.

After getting all the gut contents out, I spent some time checking for obstructions that could have started all this. Erin, our resident veterinary technician and I had some conversation about the exit of the rumen and how the plumbing works. We had shoulder length exam gloves and she offered to go up the exit pipe and see if our hands meet in the middle. You have to love gallows humor.

Once everything was clean and clear, it was time to sew her up.

The dangly bit to the left of the picture is the rumen, now deflated and empty. Step one was we had to sew up the rumen.

I had to pull the rumen out enough for Erin to sew up the hole we’d made. We had enough room, barely. Erin did a great job sewing her up. Especially considering the degree of difficulty. No not the cow, she was a stellar patient. I was giving Erin no end of a hard time the entire procedure. Compound that with wearing pearls while doing cow surgery. She was a good sport.

Now, on to the trocar. But that’s the next post.

We got the cow loaded onto our trailer and headed home. We had customers waiting for us when we arrived and all the guys busy doing stuff. Miguel, never one to miss a detail, immediately noted that the empty trailer wasn’t empty.

“I’ll tell you later. Let’s handle the customer.”

After selling some chicken and milk, I filled him in on what happened. We can shoot her, we can put her in the pasture and wait for her to die, or we can do surgery to try to clear her impacted rumen. After checking on everything, and everyone’s schedule, we all jumped into action. We’d try surgery.

I had to go make a pickup at a new customer I’d promised to hit that day. Lucy unloaded all the farm goodies from the truck and coolers, and Miguel unloaded our sick cow from the trailer and into our corral. Once everyone was back, we put our patient into the head gate.

Jersey cows don’t carry any body condition anyway. They always look like they are starving. But this cow had been unable to digest anything for four days. She was downright emaciated. She was bright eyed and pleasant though.

First step was to get all the gear out, make sure we had everything, and then shave the area where we’d be working. This was harder than it sounds because her rumen was very sunken in. A straight razor shaves a basketball easily. It doesn’t shave the inside of a bowl quite as well.

Once everything was shaved, washed, soaped, washed, and ready to go, I gave her multiple lidocaine shots to numb the area. This is the same stuff the vet (and your doctor uses) so she was getting the good stuff.

Once everything was numb, it was time to begin surgery. But that’s our next post.

Yesterday Lucy and I were making the rounds to our farmers, the processor, etc. dropping off piggies, picking up goodies, and catching up on all the happenings and ideas from Lucy’s trip to the Women Working in Meat conference held the first part of the week.  (This link is to the Huffington Post. This was a big deal).

When we arrived at one of our farms, we learned that they still had around the barn yard a cute little calf I’d met before, but also had a brand new little calf, just three days old.

While we were admiring the cuteness, The farmer informed me that they had a cow who was dying. She had an impacted rumen and the vet had just said there was nothing more he could do. The farmer was obviously upset, as any farmer would be. Loosing an animal is tough, both emotionally and financially. Then she noted that they really didn’t know what they’d do when she died. They didn’t have a tractor or a way to bury her. In all my trips there, I’d never really paid attention to the lack of a tractor.

“What about a neighbor? Somebody out here surely has a tractor.”

“I don’t know my neighbors.”

We have some aspiring farmers who follow us. Folks, know your neighbors. You’ll never have everything on a farm. Working together you are always so much stronger than working by yourself. Back to the story.

I looked around and tried to think of how they could handle a dead 900 pound cow with no tractor. They could drag her with a truck over here. But then how do they dig the hole?

Then the farmer noticed I was pulling an empty stock trailer. (Remember the piggies we’d dropped off earlier?)

“Can you take her to your farm? You can bury her.”

“Uh, I don’t need to take your sick animal to my farm. She’ll get my cows sick.”

“She just has an impacted rumen. She’s been checked for everything else there is. No diseases.”

I tried desperately to think of a way out of this. But I’m a sucker for a damsel in distress.

“Ok, show me the cow.”

When we first started taking cows to the processor, we were struggling to get to 500 lbs of hot hanging weight. We didn’t have scales, we were woefully behind on production, and frankly we were pretty new at finishing cows.

A few weeks ago, I took two cows to the processor, LF07 and 63.

63 was normal sized but crazy so he got a free ride.

LF07 was pretty big and he was the number one candidate to go.

On Friday I picked them up so we’d have fresh beef in the store for this weekend. I put 21 baskets in the truck to hold all the meat, plus a pickup at the goat dairy on the way home. I usually only take about 9-10 for one cow so that should be enough. When I got to the processor, they handed me my bill which has our hanging weights. #63 weighed 685 pounds hot hanging weight! Now that’s a great weight. That means that we really have these cows finished well. That we have lots of fat, lots of meat on the bones, and we are delivering a quality steak to our customers. Then I was I saw LF07’s weight.

820 pounds!! Oh my God! I’ve never heard of a weight like that.

So to make a long story short, 21 baskets was about 4 short of having enough. I had to scramble to get the meat loaded, and still get our dairy order on the truck. I made an emergency stop at a customer to drop off 60 pounds of hamburger just to get something off the truck and when I got back to the farm, it was all hands on deck. Lucy, Erin, and I all worked to stuff every inch of every freezer on the farm with beefy goodness. We BARELY made it, after I’d taken all of our beef bones to the dump just to make room. Don’t worry, I held back some of the fresh beef bones but we are literally bursting at the seams.

If you want some beef, or pork, or whatever, we are loaded for bear. Steaks, ribs, whatever, we’ve got it. Plus SWMBO is working the store today between 8-5 so stop by and work her hard! I’ll be at the Garner pop up market today on Old Garner Road working that event so she’s unsupervised.