Life After Cows

One last pic of Broadway, my favorite cow, and probably the best one I ever bred.
I miss her the most.

People have been telling me, for years, ever since it got really hard to pay the bills running a small dairy farm in one of the highest taxed and most regulated venues in America, that there is life after cows. That you pick up, go on, do something else, and maybe are relieved not to have to worry so much, juggle so many balls, always be bound by the constraints of animal needs.

 Can't say as I ever believed it. I started milking cows for a living on someone else's farm 35 years ago. The job has been my compass, salvation, nightmare, and joy ever since. You can raise good kids on a farm....it's a great, if difficult life.

However, starting today I guess I am going to find out if what folks says is true. With my heart clanging in my chest like the clapper in an iron bell, I helped load our heifers on trucks on Saturday, and all but two of the milk cows yesterday. Saturday we had help from family members. Yesterday it was just Ralph, me, and a bunch of strangers. Can I just say that it was one time that I really, really wished that I was a girly girl and could sit in the house and do my nails or something

Yesterday ranks well up there in the top ten worst days in my life. There were many factors involved in our decision, high fuel and feed costs, several years of disastrous wet weather and flooding, the 08 and 09 dairy price disaster, and such, but paying several months worth of income twice a year in school and county tax was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

This year it was maybe lose the farm for taxes or sell the cows. And so.

If you want to buy them, they are hard-working pasture cows, that will make milk on low quality feed. They will run out to grass and graze all day and come in and fill the milk pail for you. They are over at Hosking's Sales. You can even bring home cows whose names are known around the world...thanks to Blogger and the Farm Side. Broadway, Carlene, Foolish, Cevin, Asaki...yes, I had to sell my cow, Asaki....Baja, Camry, Zulu, Scotty, Dalkeith, Monday, Betty, and Lucky and the rest are selling. All but two.

Friends in Ohio will buy Bama Breeze so she will stay. at least for a while. And Liz is buying Neon Moon to maybe breed a calf for Peggy to show when she gets bigger. We saved back a handful of small heifers that wouldn't bring what they are worth to sell so we can pay the damned school taxes this fall, and a set of dairy steers for the same purpose. 

I spent yesterday afternoon holding a sleeping Peggy, her sweet small hand curled around my finger, strong as a good milker's hand would be. Life after cows, right there in my lap.