It is Hard

To be gloomy with the sun so bright and orange and the cedar waxwings are coming right to the shady cedar-draped front porch to feed.


But it can be done. Our boy is broken down along the highway in Secaucus, NJ. I know that, as he says, he is a big boy and will get it figured out, but I am a mom and must worry. Always.


And those blasted ratcoons on my porch last night...and yes I can spell better than that but I don't find them cute. They were after the porch cat's food; he was cowering in his cathouse and things were tumbling and crashing.


 I turned on the light and opened the door, TWO FEET from them!!!! and they didn't even move, just stood on their hind feet peering nearsightedly at me and waving their little paws around.


I had to scream at them to get them to leave. So now the cat will need a rabies booster and I guess I need some .22 shells. At least I know now what knocked down all the potatoes that were growing on top of the compost bin. They must have come up on the back porch after we went to bed and caused general chaos there as well, looking for who knows what.


And the pup is sick


On the better side......We have four new milkers, which will be good news for the tank, although it gets us out of the barn an hour later morning and night because their milk has to be segregated from the milk that goes in the tank for a while. 


We stuff them with hay morning and night to keep their tummies healthy. Transition, the time between being a dry cow, on vacation from milking from six to eight weeks each year, through having a calf, into getting up on full feed, and beginning to work hard making milk, is a challenging time for cow and farmer. A lot can go wrong, especially with the cow's delicate metabolism. 


A DA, displaced abomasum, or twisted stomach, is dreaded by all. One of the cow's four stomach compartments can flip over, closing off both its ends like a twisted plastic bag. Then surgery is needed. Not good. We try to keep everybody as crammed full of hay as possible to try to keep all those inner workings...well...working.


The four that have freshened (had a calf in farmer-speak) are Liz's Dalkeith, a second calf girl who stands in my line, Dublin, her full sister, a first calf heifer, who now also stands in my line, Becky's Evidence, an older cow, and Bonneville. The boss milks the latter pair. All had heifers except Bonneville. 

The elusive common yellow throat, 

you hear them all day long, but don't see them much

Bonneville is a miserable, mean, mean animal, who pinned the boss on the stall rail the first time he milked her this year the other day. She smashed his ribs up against a steel pipe and bent his hand up pretty bad...nothing broken we don't think, but he is a very tough man. She had him moaning and groaning and clutching various body parts... She is six years old and has been milked plenty of times, so she really has no particular excuse for such behavior. When Liz was milking her when she was a first calf heifer she knocked her right out cold jumping on her head. She probably weighs 14 hundred pounds!