The heifer

A couple or three days ago one of the cows had a calf out on the hill. The boss was the one to find it and reported a beautiful heifer. He left it out there as it was too new to stand. The next morning the mama came down without it, but he saw it was okay so he still left it out there. He is the one who gets the cows most milkings and he didn't want to mess with it so it stayed out there under its mama's eye until tonight.


Every milking and sometimes in between we debated...what to do with this calf, what to do, what to do. You see its mama, Kid, AKA #152 is a total miserable witch of a cow. Her whole family is kind of on the nasty side, but she is the queen of mean. We milk her because she is also an excellent producer, but she isn't at the top of anyone's popularity list. We have more heifers than we need, so selling the calf would be an excellent option. However, we never seem to get market value for our heifers at the sale barn. We suspect that someone who is affiliated with the place buys them for themselves. It is frustrating. When heifer calves are bringing 600 bucks we will get two or three hundred or even less. We thought about trying to sell her to another farmer...or maybe saving up until we have several and hauling them to a sale out in the western part of the state. Finally we figured we would just keep her and see how she turns out. No one was real happy about it though. We have heifers all over the place and no more housing anywhere.


Tonight when the boss went up to hook up the feeder wagon the calf was sleeping under it, right next to the gate to the barn. When it saw him it jumped into the wagon and stood there swaying, legs spread wide. He wished for a camera and wondered if he could just hook up the wagon and bring it on down. However it soon jumped back out.


It was a good traveler by then though and when Liz and I were "being fence" while the cows came down to be milked it trotted right by with its dam. Beautiful calf. Then came the other debate. The cow was bred twice 19 days apart (the normal heat cycle is 21 days) She calved almost exactly half way between her two potential due dates....so was she bred to our own bull O-C-E-C Lindy Fred or Duregal Astre Starbuck? The calf was white and quite sharp around the head so we were leaning toward Astre. Fred throws them strong and black. If it was Astre then this calf is the first one put in there by LIz who studied AI in college and bred the cows while the boss was laid up last year.


Then Liz went out to catch the calf and pull it into the barn. She came back in muttering under her breath.
The muttering got louder.
And louder.
We soon understood why.
After all that discussion, all that fretting, all that deep concern over what we were going to do with that questionable heifer calf, she took a closer look at its plumbing.


And it is a bull!
So rather than deciding what to do with the calf we have to decide what to do with the man.