Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

The two days that hubby was gone went smoothly. Neighbor did a really good job, and had fun I think. The cows seemed to like him. This isn't always the case. Sometimes they don't like new people and won't let down their milk for them. Cows are funny that way; funny-weird, not funny-haha. So of course on Tues we have a cow who has a calf. Another heifer. That makes 61 heifers for us, in a total herd, including two bulls, of 101. I think hubby said he was milking 38 cows now. So anyway. We got a new calf on Tues AM. Today we went down and got cow and calf. And, lo and behold, there is another cow in labor. So we brought her up too. Dunno if she's calved or not. Hubby will check on her later. That's it for today.

Yes, that's right; 14,600+ consecutive times my husband has milked his herd. That's over 20 years of non-stop dairy-ing. Twice a day every day. No vacations. No overnighters to the big city. No breakfast in bed. No sleeping in past 4 AM. No evening at the movies. No getting further from home than you can drive back between milkings. FOR OVER 20 YEARS!!! Tomorrow it all ends. Well, for a couple of days anyway. Ha. For the next couple of days he is going to go out of town. He will leave really early and be back really late each evening, so we are having our saint of a neighbor come over and do the milking. I will still do my calf feeding and graining up the road and do the washup as well, but the neighbor will do the milking. This should be interesting.

When you live on a dairy for very long the first thing you learn NOT to do is to name the critters. You never know when one is going to croak, or when you will have to get rid of them; either BEFORE they croak on you, or because they have some kind of problem. However, there are times when a name or a nickname just happens. This one calf came along back when I first started my calfkeeping gig here. My husband went by her house one morning and said, "That calf in the last house is sure fat and fluffy looking." And that is how Fluffy got her name. Fluffy just had her first calf this Monday. My husband was out there at 9 PM, stripped to the waist because he had to pull the calf. Fluffy was in no mood to cooperate, so it was quite the ordeal. He got her in the trailer, but she decided she didn't want to be messed with so she went after him and he had to climb the side of the trailer to get away from her. Anyway, he finally got a live heifer calf out of he. But she w...