Oh, about my tomatoes

I think there might be one tomato plant left of those I started in the house.  It isn't cutworms getting them, after all; I only wish I knew what it was.  Something is eating all the leaves off the tiny plants... every leaf!... and leaving only the stem standing.  The expensive plants I bought, so far, are faring OK.  Perhaps God is telling me I don't need to can tomatoes this year, since I'm having surgery.  Whatever.  Aldi's canned tomatoes are still forty-nine cents a can, so I'll just buy those; the way prices are skyrocketing everywhere, I'd better hurry up and get them.  
Jody is doing fine; hopefully she has adjusted to the change, from real milk at her previous home to milk replacer here.  Everything looks as it should this morning, and she ate grain and then frolicked and bucked and played for about five minutes.  
In my early days of calf raising I used raw eggs and Pepto-Bismal and Kaopectate and all sorts of other home remedies and human medicines, when scours hit.  When I began raising twenty-five to fifty calves per year, though, I started using more modern remedies.  I get really good anti-scours pills from the vet, and I buy electrolyte solutions to mix with water and give them in place of milk when they're sick; if I'd stayed with the home remedies, half my calves would have died.  As it worked out, the only calves I ever lost through the years were the ones that were already sick when I got them (from a sale barn).  Sale barn calves are a risky business.  Jody came to me straight from a dairy farm.  

Stuff about cows

A reader asked me to explain what a bobby calf is; I will, but I will lead up to it.  
Dairies exist to produce all the milk they can.  In order for a cow to give milk, she has to have a baby.  Ideally, when she calves, the calf will be left with her for three days, or at least fed colostrum from her or other cows that have just had calves.  After three days, the cow joins the milking string, never to see her baby again.  Two or three months following, she will be bred.  Six to eight weeks before the next calf is born, she will be "turned dry", or "dried up", as my parents would say.  When the dairyman stops milking, she stops producing and puts her energy toward growing the fetus.   
If the cow has a heifer (female) calf, the dairy will probably keep her and raise her as a replacement.  At the age of two or thereabouts, she will have her first calf and go to work producing milk, and the cycle goes on.  
Half of calves born are bull calves, although with artificial insemination, is it possible to buy sexed semen, which produces 80% heifer calves.  
Dairies have no use for the bull calves, so they are usually kept for three days and then sold.  In my part of the country, these little bulls are called "bobby" calves.  I've read that in other areas they are referred to as "bummer" calves.  
What good are they to anyone else, you ask?  Well, they make fine beef if you raise them past a year old.  I'm sure many of them end up as veal, too.  For a few years I had several milk cows and no use for all that milk (I do love to milk cows, it's a fact), so a nearby dairyman sold me all his Holstein and Brown Swiss bull calves.  I'd milk the cows, put the milk in calf nursing bottles, and feed all my babies.  It's possible to wean calves at six weeks, but I found they do better if they can have milk for three months.  Once weaned, I'd feed them a mix of grains for a month or so and then turn them out to pasture.  We usually hauled them to the sale barn around the age of six months, and I made a pretty good profit with this enterprise. 
  

I raised the calves in individual hutches, shown behind me here; the kids are my two oldest grandchildren, Arick and Amber.

On to another cow subject, butter.  I posted a picture of my pretty butter on Facebook yesterday evening, and a friend asked if that was the natural color of the butter.  Indeed it is.  When cows are on pasture, as opposed to eating hay, their butter is more yellow.  Also, Jerseys and Guernseys don't convert carotene to vitamin A very efficiently; so their butter is especially yellow.   

animal escape artists

Those two don't even look guilty, do they? You wouldn't realize they were running around the neighborhood, terrorizing folks, at 7 A.M.

I was in the middle of my bowl of Fiber One when the doorbell sounded. Now, anytime someone shows up at my door that early, I know they won't likely be bearing good news.

It was Farmer John, from down the road, asking if I had some cows out; someone had called him saying a couple of cows were loose on my dead-end road. He'd counted his cattle and they were all there.

I heard dogs barking furiously up the highway, and common sense told me that's where my two runaways had to be. I made a quick gate check and found the problem. Cliff and I can neither one figure out how the gate behind the barn got opened in the direction it was found, but with my druggie neighbors, you never know who's been messing around. Anyhow, I thanked the good Lord that Secret is a pet, and that I recently put a halter on her. I grabbed a rope and headed in the direction of the barking dogs.

One grumpy old guy hollered, "You missing a Jersey and an Angus?"

"Yeah, only he's not an Angus."

"Boy, you got trouble," he said, shaking his head. "They're about three houses down. How'd they get out?"

All this in a tone that implied only an idiot or a criminal would let her cows get out.

The two juvenile delinquents were in a back yard driving a pen-full of dogs nuts; there was quite an audience of neighbors watching, as though they'd never seen cows on the loose.

I walked up to Secret, snapped the rope onto her halter, and led her home, with Meatloaf following at her heels. Then I went to check the horses.

Ah yes, they were in the distance, grazing. But would you believe that not two hours later, they broke into the calves' pen? Geesh. I think we now have all gates secured.

We do have liability insurance on the livestock, just because of days like this.


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I think my Jersey calf is a blond

We bought a Jersey heifer calf last February because I've missed Jerseys ever since I sold my last one, years ago. Secret was born during the worst cold snap of the winter, and it wasn't until we'd had her for a couple of days that we realized she was going to lose the ends of her ears. Later on, we noticed that the freeze had also taken her "fly swatter", the switch part of her tail.

A few months ago I decided Secret needed some bovine companionship, so we bought a Dexter bull (Dexters are a miniature breed) and made him a steer. They bonded quite nicely. We plan to get Secret bred to a Jersey bull sometime next spring, and after she has a calf for companionship, we'll butcher the Dexter, whom we named Meatloaf.

I've noticed lately that in all situations that require intelligence or problem-solving of any kind, my prize heifer flunks the test, while Meatloaf aces it.

I've made a video that gives an example of this. Please forgive me for the terrible quality of the little movie; I was trying to take it while carrying a can of feed in one hand, often backing up, and limping pretty much constantly from a bum knee which I'm scheduled to have operated on in December. (Arthroscopy, not replacement.) So you'll be seeing the ground a lot. Not to mention the horrible wind noise most of the time; you might want to turn your sound off. Apologies done, here's the video:

Good times

I like the weekend I just had.

Saturday it rained all day, and except for cooking a carbohydrate-laden, old-fashioned meal, I did very little except (as I've said before) sit at the computer. But the rain was so welcome that I loved every minute of it. Our pasture is green and growing again, and there's water in the bottom of our tiny pond.

Yesterday, Sunday, I brought the filly, Libby, up to the barn. I worked on getting her to let me have her feet; she's doing much better with that. I saddled her and led each of my daughter's girls around the yard on her back. I introduced her to cars, close-up; and I clapped my hands often, because she jumped a bit the other day when a granddaughter clapped her hands while on her back.

The daughter helped me make a video of the two calves running for their dinner.

I went for a long ride through the countryside on Blue.

Yep, I like the weekend I just had.

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