The OK Corral

The last I wrote about the Farmily was the tragic loss of Daisy’s newborn calf. Thank you to everyone who expressed concern for Daisy ~ I didn’t even address that side of things because it was too sad for me to write about ~ Daisy loves being a mother. I did what I could to minimize her loss by making sure she had companionship ~ Sir Baby has been in one section of the corral since his injury, as confinement is an important part of his healing process, and I had Daisy in another section of the corral for the week leading up to her due date so I could keep a close eye on her. Since I wanted to continue to monitor Daisy and since Baby is healing so well, I opened up the two sections in the corral so that Daisy and Baby were together, and we brought in the ancient matriarch cow, who is over 20 years old and a total badass, and one orphaned calf, whose mother died this spring, to join Daisy and Sir Baby in the corral.

The Matriarch was part of the Special Project cows who roamed the home place, but since it’s been so dry, we moved the Special Project bunch, including Fiona and Frisco, to grassier pastures just down the road. Though the matriarch can get around surprisingly well, trailing her to the new pasture with the rest of the group seemed a bit much. She has been a strong, gentle presence in the corrals with Daisy. The orphan calf has been weaned for two months since he lost his mother, but I had hopes that he and Daisy might connect. Unfortunately, he wasn’t at all interested in milk anymore. The most essential part of making an unmatched cow-calf pair is the calf’s drive to nurse. You can help manipulate all the other elements, but you can’t force that. When I saw that connection was futile, I told my vet that I was looking for a bum calf ~ it’s not the season for calves, but one never knows what might pop up and my vet is hooked into everything.

But back to Sir Baby and Daisy for a moment. For new readers, I bought Daisy from a dairy. She’d calved about three months before I got her, so she was in milk, and she was bred back (pregnant with Frisco). Cows are mammals, not machines, and must have a calf annually in order to make milk. Dairy protocol is to remove the calves from their mothers immediately (veal is a “by-product” of the dairy industry), so Daisy had never raised a calf when I got her. I was pretty overwhelmed with milking when I got Daisy, and I wanted a bum calf to help me with the excess milk. A neighbor happened to have a freakish love triangle occur with some of his cows ~ one cow had a calf, and all was normal. Then another cow had twins and accepted one of them, which is also normal. The first cow abandoned her calf and adopted the other twin! Very weird. But it was fate. That abandoned calf was Sir Baby. I still remember going to pick him up and sitting with him in the backseat of Mike’s truck on the ride home. Daisy was NOT interested in being a mother when I introduced them; she didn’t know, she had only been milked by machines, and then by me. But baby Sir Baby was determined to nurse, and after about a week, Daisy clicked into motherhood and she and Sir Baby still have an incredible bond to this day ~ they are family. In the days following her calf’s death, I’d often find Daisy licking Sir Baby’s neck and shoulders, tending to him as her first son, and the connection they share seemed to really help Daisy with the absence of her newest calf.

My vet called me on Thursday afternoon announcing he had a calf waiting for me to pick up. Buying bum calves at the sale ring is risky business because you generally don’t know what their first hours and days were like ~ how was the birth? Did they get colostrum? So many factors can affect whether a calf becomes a strong, healthy youngster or expires early, as proven with Daisy’s calf. But the stars aligned in this case ~ a rancher brought two dozen “cull cows” to the sale barn on Wednesday night for Thursday’s sale. Some of these cows were pregnant, and one of them had her baby that night, between midnight and 6 am. Cull cows are generally fine cows, just older ~ as I’ve written before, most ranchers sell their cows when they reach a certain age. Older cows are generally excellent mothers, so it’s likely this calf nursed and got her first dose of colostrum right after the birth. My vet bought the calf for me before the sale began, and I’m grateful beyond words that this cow’s last act was to provide Daisy and me with her beautiful baby. I had given my vet a gallon of Daisy’s colostrum as a thank you for coming out in the middle of the night to help with Daisy’s breech birth, so she was bottle fed Daisy’s colostrum throughout the day until Mike and I got there to pick her up.

Daisy was less than thrilled. Cows have very strong instincts to not allow any calf but their own to nurse ~ doing so would jeopardize their own baby, and this instinct carries even when that baby dies. So, twice a day, I put Daisy in the head catch with a bunk full of gourmet hay and let the calf drink her fill before I milked. A head catch is not a torture device ~ it’s a levered metal apparatus that closes around a cow’s neck but doesn’t actually touch her. Cow’s necks are wide when viewed from the side but incredibly narrow when viewed from above. The head catch has two curved panels that close around the cow’s neck but leave a hole ~ if you touch your pointer fingers together and your thumbs together, this is the shape of the hole it leaves. It’s not tight against the cow’s narrow neck but she can’t pull her wide head through the opening. I use this every day when I milk; it keeps Daisy comfortable but relatively still.

I wasn’t worried about this routine lasting forever, as Daisy and I went through this exact process with Sir Baby when he was a calf ~ at first, Daisy would only stand for him in the head catch, but after about a week, something switched inside Daisy and he was HERS. And today, that switch happened again. I went to the corral this morning and saw that one of Daisy’s teats was already pulled down (all the milk in that quarter had been drunk) and the calf was full and dozing. We have a love match! The calf is amazing ~ she adored Daisy from the start ~ and she’s huge. At one day old she looked like she was a month old, and now at a week old she looks three months old. She has her health, she has a new mother, and now all she needs is a name!

~ Rosie ~

Yesterday, a dream I’ve held for thirty years was fulfilled.
I rode in a big rig!!!

Bethany is even more amazing than her truck ~
I’m thrilled she’s my driver and I wish she were my neighbor!

Much more to share but I am frustratingly exhausted….
over & out for now.

You Win Some. You Lose Some.

Daisy calved Saturday night ~ she had a breech birth and it was hard and horrible and I thought I might lose her. My vet came out to assist and, against all odds, the calf was born alive.

He was up and nursing after the birth, and bouncing around the next morning, nursing on one of Daisy’s front teats as I milked the back ones. But he started failing that evening, and though we did everything we could, he died two days later.

What can you say about a baby calf who died? {Who knows the book whose first line I just slightly altered?} I can’t really scream and cry about things being unfair, because in the last six weeks, Sir Baby and Daisy have been thisclose to death and pulled through beautifully. But it’s still terribly sad.