Weather

As I click around my favorite blogs and talk to my friends at It's Your Turn this morning, the weather seems to be a common theme. While what is happening outdoors as far as wind and clouds and precipitation makes headlines on the news, it also makes inroads into our lives. Here in the Northeast we haven't seen the sun in so many days even the faintest glimmer in the sky is cause for rejoicing. I don't have exactly a full head of steam on cloudy days, which is why posting has been both lame and lean.


Out west many folks are calving cows. My heart goes out to them, having to be outside night and day in the kind of rough weather this winter has brought. Here at Northview we mostly calve indoors in winter and only let the cows have their babies outside in summer (that is when things go as planned, and Toots to the contrary). This does make life a little easier for us than if we lived in the west and raised beef. On the other hand dairy babies are nowhere near as hardy as beef calves and dairy cows are not generally as good mothers...if they had to calve outside I don't think they would do very well. Even calving indoors is tough enough because cows have to be checked on at whatever hour you think they might give birth. It's an inexact science, but after a while you get half way decent at thinking (sometimes even accurately), "yeah, she'll probably come in around midnight...." or, "Not for another few days.."


They still fool ya. Often. I have walked into the barn to find a calf toddling around and wondered where the heck it came from...or on the other side of the coin found a cow that had obviously calved and no baby. We spent the whole milking one morning looking for a little half beef baby that we finally found curled up all snug in a pile of feed bags behind a bin...those little beefers are smart indeed!

Right now I am dreading the first of March as if I was going to get an involuntary, no anesthesia, quadruple root canal and have to go on a 500-calorie a day diet, both on the same day. Liz starts her internship then. She will go to another area farm and do what she does here....plus probably learn some new things and have some fun. It will be good for her and is required to finish her last degree requirement. Still....we have just gotten used to having her home...helping. And more than helping, taking a hold and doing what needs to be done and doing it with the fresh vigor of youth and the benefit of a college education. Four months is going to be a long time to do all her chores. She has the cows up about five hundred pounds of milk every two days and doing good otherwise.

And worst of all, she willingly, eagerly, and with great enthusiasm, calves in the night cows for us. She is good at it and rarely needs help. I don't know how many babies we are expecting in March, April, May and June, but it is a bunch and I am not looking forward to a single one of them. I am getting too darned old for this.