On Saturday night I got my last calf! I ended up pulling it, as it appeared as though some of the afterbirth was making an entrance with the calf. Of course, this happened to me years ago and the calf was dead; you are always gun shy of the things you have experienced in the past.
Though it seems much longer to me and my tired-out self my calves were fast – from due date to the last calf was only a month! I did have a few less cows but still I am happy with that. And despite the miserable weather things were going well until last week. With three left to calve I was feeling good, until I ended up with a cow with dead twins. I was sad, the cow was sad, and I had no extra calves to share with her. She is a young cow so I sure did not like the idea of her going to the abattoir or the next cattle sale, but reality is you cannot afford to just feed a cow with no calf. The next morning, I had a dead cow. Yes, a dead cow. She had calved on March 5. It looked as though she had just dropped dead, and I was about to say to my mom, “well looks like you will have a summer job of feeding a calf” when I remembered my cow with the dead twins. It is not usually an extremely easy or enjoyable task of convincing a cow to take a calf that does not belong to her or convincing a calf to suck a cow that is not their mom, but it was by far the best option we had for both parties. We finished chores, caught the calf, and put it in the pen with the cow. She was not impressed nor was the steer calf. We would give the calf time to get hungry and work on things after that. Of course, last week I was supposed to be back to work full-time but ended up having to use holidays to just deal with the craziness that blew into my farm life. I ended up getting help to skin out one of the twins to put the hide on the orphan calf. This often speeds up the process of adoption. It is going o.k. She is not overly impressed but she is not trying to kill him. Lucky he is two weeks old, so he is aggressive enough to suck when the going is good. Stacey my vet cousin confirmed that a heart attack had killed the cow that died and there was nothing we could have done there. Though she is dead, there is comfort in knowing it was not our fault. I have one calf that I am keeping an eye on as his mom had some mastitis problems and he seems a bit doggy but other than that the calves are great. Lambs will start coming around April 8, so we get a few weeks off!
The Sales Barn work-bees are going to continue most weekends now. They have removed all the material and have pens in place in the old pole barn. Gravel will be put in now. The place is really looking great and it sure makes you proud to be a part of such a great undertaking. Thanks so much to all those that have worked and continue to show up and work.
