Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

The past week or so there has been a heifer up the road who was nearing her calving time. Yesterday she'd been off by herself, but nothing happened all day. Then this morning when I went to feed them I went in to check on her. She was lying down, with the hooves and the nose of a calf sticking out of her rear. I took one look at the calf and thought; "It's all over for that one." Its tongue was hanging out of its mouth and it just didn't look good. I whacked on the cow but she didn't move; just laid there with her chin in the mud. I was going to head back to get hubby, but then I saw something. The calf's chin twitched. I thought I was seeing things. I chucked it a bit and sure enough, it moved again. I whacked on the cow again, but still she would not move. I thought maybe I could herd her to the corral, but no dice. So I ran back to the 4-wheeler, got hubby's nice new rope, put it around one of the calf's ankles, dug in my heel...

It all started off as usual. Except when I went up the road at 6:30 AM to feed the heifers and dry cows I found one dry cow going into labor. We usually give them a while before we go back and check on them. If she had been a first-calf heifer we'd likely have brought her back to the barn ASAP. So I went back and finished chores. Then at about 8:30 AM, when everything was winding down, a guy comes by and needs hubby to help with his well pump. He'd been out of water for TWO WEEKS trying to fix it himself. To make a long story short, hubby had to go up there and pull the pump again and fix the wires on it. This took until nearly noon. Meanwhile, I took mother-in-law and Ellen to town. MIL had a doc appointment. When we came back I checked on the cow. Uh-oh. NO calf! Hubby came home, ate, then we took Ellen to her grandma's and took both 4-wheelers up the road for a cow round-up. We got her back with no problems. However, when hubby went in to the trailer to do ...

Last Wednesday we had a set of twin heifers born. One didn't make it. We brought the live one back here and I got some colostrum in her; she was really tiny and wasn't able to stand. Hubby looked at his records and found that they were a month early. I didn't post anything about it because I was afraid she wouldn't make it. The above was a shot of her and Ellen on the second day; Thursday. On Fri and Saturday she went downhill, so much so that I pretty much gave up on her as well. But happily enough she came around, started guzzling her milk and standing up on her own. On Sunday night I put her in her own little calf house. She's pretty perky now. I got pictures of her today, but don't have time now to upload and post them. As you can tell by the above pic, Ellen was enthused about her. She kept giving her sticks and trying to get her to fetch, like a puppy. Now that the calf's in her own house, Ellen has lost her enthusiasm, it's just anoth...

(OK, can you believe it's been a week already since I have posted?! Sorry. Our internet service has been down a couple of days off and on, then we had the stupid thunderstorm/tornado storm thingy come through (in which 2 people were killed-so I guess stupid is a weak word to use) and then various other things happened so that I couldn't get a chunk of time to be on the computer for long.) Anyway. This title sounds dramatic but it was my first impression of what I saw in the dark. Thursday morning, it was still quite dark, I was out graining the weaner calves and came up short one in my head count-or tail count, if you will. I re-counted a couple of times because sometimes a small one will get between a couple of big ones and you can't tell, especially in the dark. But, no, there were only 10 calves eating in the feed bunk. So I went trucking through the lot to search for the missing one. Looking for a missing beast is a job I abhore, especially a smaller calf. I alw...

Whenever we have a storm of some kind we get a calf. We are now kind of in the middle of a freezing rain episode. We got some Saturday night, a bit yesterday, some last night and this moring and we are supposed to get more tonight and tomorrow. What is saving us from a great deal of headache is that it warms up above freezing during the day, so much of it melts off and the roads, so far, are clear. This is a VERY good thing because we NEED to milk truck to be able to make it and pick up the milk. If he doesn't we are supposed to dump the milk because he's not supposed to get milk that has been in the tank for more than 2 days. Husband says sometimes they allow it if the weather has been really cold like this, but we have a fairly small tank that only holds a bit over 2 days worth. Anyway; back to the calf. This morning husband takes hay up the road to the dry cows and finds bull calf. He is back snug and dry under a cedar tree but as soon as husband comes over to inspec...