Calfy, Mousie, and Mini

Last fall, Danny bought feeder calves. Typically, heifers go for a slightly lower price, so we ended up with several large feedlot heifers. He was somewhat apprehensive that they were so large, and some of them were "bawlers" meaning they had just been weaned.

It turned out that quite a few of the heifers had been accidentally bred by having been weaned so late - if the heifer calves are left with the cow-herd so long they can be mature before they are separated from their mothers, and often the bull is the first to learn this.

So anyway, this spring, it became clear that some of the heifers were going to calve, and the plan was to allow each calf to stay with it's mother for the first 24 hours to get colostrum, then bring it to our barn so we could bottle raise it. That way the feedlot heifer that just gave birth would be able to continue on in the feedlot, and the calf would be ensured good nutrition. Often heifers bred so accidentally young as these were don't handle the stress of nursing a calf. So we did what was best for both calves and the heifers.

The first calf we got was a little black bull calf, who we allowed our daughter the priveledge of naming. She spent all afternoon trying to think of a good name for the little calf, saying she was "thinking 'bout it" in the sweet little way that she had. Finally I told her that we'd just call the calf "Cowboy" when she said no, his name is "Calfy." So Calfy it is.

A while later another feedlot calf was born. This one was a heifer, black with a white face, and some of the strangest ears I'd seen on a calf - they stuck up, not out to the sides like a normal calf's ears would. So I made the executive decision to call this calf Mousie - in honor of Minnie Mouse, because her ears made her look more like a mouse than a calf.

We put Calfy and Mousie in the same stable thinking it would be nice to let the calves have some bovine companionship. But that backfired. Calfy took to sucking on Mousie's ears in between bottle feedings, and Mousie found a place on the little bull calf to suck. Not good! So we ended up having to keep the calves separated until they were eating hay and feed and not so used to sucking on a bottle. I've heard people complain about the way dairy calves or veal calves are raised in individual stalls, but we found that it was in the calves' best interest to keep them apart from each other.

Calfy and Mousie have since been weaned from the bottle, and have been eating good alfalfa hay and sweet cattle feed and doing well.

Since then, there was a calf born just last month who wasn't getting enough to eat from it's mother. It was 5 days old and just skinny as can be, but spunky. Cora decided to call this calf Mini, right away. Mini started taking her bottles readily from the beginning, you could sure tell this calf was hungry! She looks healthy now, and is nearly ready for just eating hay and feed, though we'll gradually wean her from the milk replacer. I'll be glad when I don't have to mix a bottle twice a day!

Hello friends, it's been awhile!

long time, no post....you know, summertime, we live on a farm - gets kind of busy! excuses, excuses, but here we go

Yesterday's sunrise was oddly beautiful. It doesn't break light these days until nearly 8am, and the sky went straight to bright blue between the spotted clouds - it looked almost like a giraffe's spots, only in feathery white and blue. The sky to the south was dark and promised rain, and it looked COLD.

It seemed a good idea to wake my nearly 3 year old daughter so she could have breakfast and we could do chores in time before it might rain. She and my nearly 1 year old son go along and we feed our goats, our livestock guardian dogs, my horse, and our little bottle calves. Our boy rides in the stroller, and our daughter's big enough now that she walks alongside and gets to help feed the goats and pour the feed to the dog.

My father-in-law was outside also, he starts his chores in the dark because he's not afraid of a little cold (my excuse is it's difficult to keep the kids warm, so we wait until the sun shines a bit!) and he told me it had been drizzling rain south of us, but it wasn't going to come as far north as us. Too bad...we could really use the rain! Our county and several counties around us are experiencing EXTREME drought.

This has been an unusual farming year, the lilacs bloomed in April this year instead of the first week of May like usual. And the pattern continued, it was warmer than usual almost every month - July like temperatures in June, July, and August, September was as hot as August, October more like September. With the heat and lack of rainfall, the crops were ready to run in September, and we were finished by the first week of October. This was a first for our farm to my knowledge - which meant we got a lot of warm fall days this year to catch up on other work.

If we would have just gotten significantly more rainfall, crop yields would have been great. Drought and high yields just don't go together, though. But it could have been much worse, while our yields were down significantly in corn, they were about the same in soybeans, and the prices are looking great, which really helps!

Already this year's calves have been weaned, the corn and beans are in the bin, we've moved that goats around, the silo is filled, a new field has been cleared for hay and planted, wheat has been planted.....surely I'm missing some things. I'll try to post more frequently to catch things as they happen, and maybe I'll post some short re-caps over the winter.

Blizzard-like Conditions. . .

. . .but the animals still need to be fed!

Wow! It is so cold, windy, and snowing hard outside!

My father-in-law is the one who feeds the cattle in the mornings - scoops silage into the wagons with a shovel, drives it down to the cow herd, feeds the calves in the barns hauling buckets of feed and big sacks of silage and bales of hay, beds them with straw, fastens the hose to the hydrant to water them. Then when the first cow herd is finished eating silage, takes the wagons to fill them again for the second cow herd. Then he'll walk down the hill to check to make sure the cows have access to water - but if it's frozen he'll have to chop a hole in the ice. This takes on a good-weather day almost 3 hours.

Does any of that sound like fun in those weather conditions I described?? Not only that, but with at least 4 inches of snow already on the ground, and patchy ice hidden underneath!

Thank you, Danny, for your committment to feeding not only the cattle on our farm, but in turn when the time comes, feeding the people who will ultimately eat the beef. Thank you to all farmers - your dedication to doing the right thing regardless of your own personal comfort is admirable, and rare.

Great Article!

Please take the time to go read this article - it really sums up a lot of what goes through my mind when it comes to the commonly held viewpoint of "modern" agriculture....only much more articulately than I could phrase it!

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals/?searchterm=blake%20hurst

Working the Cows

A young calf after just having had a drink of milk from his mother! See his "milk mustache"??




The weekend after Easter we treated the brood cows for lice and dewormed them. I've never had the opportunity to help with this chore, and it was an experience! The mature cows are much more difficult to handle and contain than the smaller calves. The calves get handled (vaccination and castration) at weaning and then vaccinated and fly-tagged as yearlings before getting turned out on pasture for the summer. Then they get slowly brought up on feed and are typically market weight (around 1200 lbs) before they are 2 years old. So when the calves are being vaccinated and worked in the cattle chute, they are pretty easy to get to walk into the chute since they haven't had much experience yet. The older cows are a different story - they've been there, done that, and our cows aren't tame.

The picture below shows the chute that we created for the cows to walk into, with the homemade door that is super heavy-duty to keep them from running out before they got treated. Matt's inside the chute that went along the barn, getting ready to pick up the short aluminum gate that his dad used to help move the cows down into the chute. He just had to use the gate as a visual, to show the cows where he wanted them to go.

Usually he would get two or three cows to come in at a time, then he would stand behind the last cow to keep her from running back towards the rest of the herd that hadn't been treated. In the picture below, Matt is holding the dewormer/delouser in his left hand, and is squirting the product along the cow's back, from withers to tail head.

Once each group was treated, I would open the gate and let them out, and Danny would bring the next group in, Matt would treat them, and so on. The last one to go was the bull. He is BIG!

We then separated him out from the herd so that we will have a break in when the cows start calving again. He'll get put back in with the cows to in another month or so. All the cows and their calves got turned back out onto fresh grass pasture, and will be rotated around all summer and into the early fall.

Our Cora loves sitting on the tractor and getting her picture taken - so no surprise to see such a happy smile!

A Visitor

Here is a photo of the visitor my husband found when he turned on our front porch light to see how hard it was raining: A little black calf who'd wandered under the electric fence!


There was one little calf who did this last year, too. I wonder if it is a calf from the same momma cow? My husband and his dad showed him his way back under the fence, but I think we will see him back here more than once. The cows all have a shed with a roof they can get into and under if it rains, but I guess he wanted a little privacy! Too cute.

Introduction

It's high time I begun this blog, and started writing posts for it. After all, it is a big part of why I began blogging in the first place!

At the 2008 Indiana Farm Bureau Young Farmer conference last January, one of the speakers talked about how farmers can best stand up for their right to farm the land, raise livestock, and feed America. These rights are being challenged more and more by a variety of groups, and agriculture is at risk.

One of the ways was to get into the "blogosphere" by posting comments and blogging about the things we do on our farms and getting onto the animal rights and environmentalists blogs and leaving challenging (yet polite) comments to try to educate others about what we really do and why it is the right thing to do.

So, this is my hope for this blog:

• Talk about our farm operation and why we do the things the way we do them


• Explain why it's morally acceptable to eat meat and raise livestock


• Share information that may help others who also farm or who are interested in learning more about it

Specific things we raise that may be discussed on this web log:

• Charolais/Angus Beef - We have a 60 cow/calf operation, and finish the calves born as well as buying and finishing feeder calves




• Meat Goats - We have a small herd of boer cross meat goats, with about 10 mature does.




• Livestock Guardian Dogs - To protect our investment in the goats, we have a Great Pyrenees livestock guardian dog. LGD's are bred to protect small livestock from predators (coyotes, birds of prey, etc.)




• Rotational/Management Intensive Grazing - A good way to increase pastureland productivity




• Corn




• Soybeans




• Hay - Both for sale off the farm and to feed our animals




• Wheat/Straw - Most of this is raised to bed down our animals




• Corn Silage - Chopped by our neighbor, used to feed our cattle and goats in the winter months




• Vegetable Garden - My family's personal garden, we grow sweet corn, potatoes, onions, green beans, strawberries, tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, garlic....and are always interested in trying new things. Most of this produce is stored for our family's use by freezing and home-canning. We also eat a lot of it as it's picked!