Breakfast

Hurry!

***There are several piles of haylage and feeders full too, but they always rush in as if someone was going to pull their plate if they didn't hurry...all business these girls.

Brand Loyalty

Broadway last March, with her heifer calf, Bloomingdale...a Poker daughter

how I wish someone was taking a show string this year so she could compete as a junior heifer calf.

I will always be a fan of the Holstein cow. They are the go to cow in the dairy world, utilitarian and productive, hard working, and lovely.


However, the little colored cows sure do have a lot of personality.  


I don't like milking the pretty little brown Jerseys...seems like every one we have ever had is temperamental and persnickety...but they are excellent grazers and convert feed to milk impressively. We had a half-bred once...black Jerseys some call them...and she gave a phenomenal amount of milk. She was a witch and getting it out of her was life-threatening, but she made a lot of it.


The milking shorthorns are tough and beautiful in their red coats that shade from copper to burgundy. The ones we have come from a bull that threw a lot of milk as well.


Both breeds seem to excel as lead cows. (A lead cow is the one that takes them out to pasture and brings them back in for milking.) A smart lead cow can save a lot of running and chasing.


Yesterday morning we all stood around out in the barnyard waiting to see which cow found the open north gate first. New pasture...or one they hadn't been in in a month at least. There was new grass out there waiting for them..all they had to do was walk to it. First they had to find the gate. That's where the lead cow comes in.


We were taking bets it would be Heather, Liz's old retired Jersey, who found it first. Heather is a great lead cow; she knows all the fields, and tends to notice the gates.


Hordes of Holsteins walked right past the gate and collected in a group around the heifer pasture gate, which was closed. Heifers walked right on by. Heather came out and walked by too. They all began to mill around in confusion. Why was the gate closed?


Then out came beautiful Broadway, our oldest milking shorthorn cow. She walked right over to the open gate. Stopped to lift her tail while she contemplated what she was seeing. (Cows poop whenever anything happens..walk in, walk out, get milked, get fed, be hungry, pause to think for a minute...it all brings out the fertilizer production system in a cow.)


As soon as she had that out of the way she strode confidently off to the north. She knew what was out there waiting. Soon Heather saw her and charged right off the bridge as fast as her little Jersey legs would carry her.

Heather and Liz some colder time in the past

That's all it took. Even the young heifers who had never been in the big pasture followed and they were off. They came in last night with bulging bellies, and, hopefully, full udders...

Taken Unexpectedly Happy

Frieland LF Bama Breeze

By a Facebook post by a very nice lady I have met a couple of times, asking for dairy judging terms. It reminded me of the days when the kids were involved in Dairy Quiz Bowl, Dairy Judging and the Dairy Ambassador (Dairy Princess and Court) program.


At the time I'm sure it was challenging to cart them to all the myriad practices and barn meetings and public events, where they dished out ice cream and great big farm kid smiles, but somehow I have fond memories of those hectic days.


And I love the way the terms for dairy cow judging roll around in my mind even now. (You can't help but learn while the kids do, and I coached the novice quiz bowl team for several years....loved those novices! They were so eager and interested and fun and even on the years when the team didn't do well, they always won on some level.)


Sharp and clean through the throat, sharp shoulders, straight top line, wide at the hooks and pins, sweeping rib, deep rib, correct set to the hocks, deep bodied, great body capacity,  heart girth, wide chest floor, dairy character, sharp and clean throughout, high, tight, wide rear udder, excellent udder attachment, smoothly blended fore udder....I could go on all day with the terms the kids had to use when giving reasons for their choices in dairy judging. The younger kids could just choose which cows they liked best in a class, but the seniors had to give spoken or written reasons and were judged upon them.


Liz went to state several times for both horse and dairy judging, and also went to state for quiz bowl. Becky was a junior and was placed on a senior team at the regional level. She placed high enough that she would have been an alternate for state had she been in the right age group. We all took the dairy stuff pretty seriously and I guess it stuck.


I sure do still love to look at a beautiful cow. Sometimes I go to the Harvue website just to look at Frosty.....


Anyhow, it was a nice little trip down memory lane...

More Cows

Moments, scrounging for some of the very short grass. You can see she is a little on the thin side. You expect to see some rib on a hard working dairy cow, but she could use some rain to grow her some new grass. The shine on her coat tells us that she is good and healthy though.

Since This is Supposed to Be

A dairy blog....here are some pics of the girls

Frieland LF Bama Breeze

The business end....because a dairy farmer likes a nice hard-working cow with a decent udder.

The Cow Whisperer and Strawberry Shortcake

Liz and Strawberry

Our Liz. Walked right out, tossed a halter on Northstar the other night and brought her in to be milked. You don't normally do that with a first calf heifer. Norry walked in like an old show cow. It was pretty cute. She has been led a couple times before, but still.


 BTW, June named Norry in a name the calf contest a while back. Northstar baby pic

High comedy around the place yesterday morning. Norry had the tiniest little heifer the other day...so small we spent some time looking for a twin but didn't find one.

And a few weeks ago, Velvet also had a mini calf...a bull. Although the girl is red and the guy is black, they are brother and sister on the male side, both being sired by our Checkerboard Magnum's Promise bull of old.

At the moment the big heifer pen at the back of the barn is empty and Shortcake, as Liz named the bull, has been living there in splendor. We decided to put Strawberry, the heifer (aren't we cute?) in with him for her own safety. She had already been nearly drowned in the mud by the big heifers out in the barnyard, curious to see anything so tiny in their domain.

Is that my bottle...do you have my bottle, buck, buck, bunt, bunt, bunt

Well, just as we started to let the cows in for morning milking, Strawberry shot out of the pen like a blob of red toothpaste and began to bolt around the barn.


Liz grabbed her (she only weighs about thirty pounds) and stuffed her back in


She came back out


Lather, rinse, repeat.


Then Shortcake, deciding that this all looked like a lot of fun, hopped through the wall himself.


We were all laughing so hard we could barely catch them. (And isn't it just like a guy to not figure out for himself how to get in trouble but to embrace it so gleefully once somebody shows him how).
 

Since we did have to get some chores done rather than play with calves all morning, the boss put up some gates and plywood to keep the little miscreants in the pen...and so far Strawberry has only gotten out one more time when the big beef steer opened the gate, but who knows what we will find this morning.

Sometimes Red

Is my favorite color....or at least Broadway is my favorite cow. (click to embiggen my dear old girl)


**I actually prefer blues and greens, but I love them red cows

Habit

Right now we are using two pastures although we will soon open a third. The girls go to the old cow pasture in the day time and the heifer pasture at night.


They have been doing this since the men got the cow pasture fence finished.


Now, even if given the choice to travel to the larger, grassier, shadier and all around nicer cow pasture at night, they will not go without a fight.


The other night when the girls were bringing Velvet down, we had planned on putting them in the day field at night, so they wouldn't stomp the poor little critter any further into the swamp.


They had other thoughts and as soon as the gate was opened they charged up the lane to their accustomed night time accommodations.


Then the boss forgot to close the gate to the day field last night, so when we turned out, the cows could have chosen to go that way, while the heifer field gate was shut. 


They were so eager to get into the heifer pasture that I had to jump out of the way of old Lakota when I opened the gate. You sure don't want to get between them and where they are going in all this mud. Your feet can get stuck and if they brush against you, you are down.


When we were digging Velvet out Liz got stuck and twisted and fell and I thought sure she was going to break a leg. We have a lot of clay soil and it sure is gummy and sticky. Thanks to lots of milk though, her young, strong bones held up to the insult though.

Rain, Cows to Breed, Green and Growing

I hate to even think welcoming thoughts about rain, it scares me, but it was getting dry again. Heather and Pecan were playing merry-go-round last night and will need to be serviced this morning. 


Hoping Heather will have one more calf, but if she doesn't she has earned her retirement. Liz will take her up where Jade pastures his horse and she can live out her days there. The boss has decreed that Mandy can stay right here even though she will probably never milk again. 


As I write this I can look out the window over the sink to see the cows striding down to the gate to come in to be milked. They are slicking up quick on nice, green grass.


Anyhow, the rain is getting the grass bumped up to full speed, especially since it has warmed up a little....been pretty cold the past couple of weeks. Lilacs are coming into bloom, apples and pears look as if they survived the multiple frosts over the past few nights. I surely hope so.

A Sunday that was Monday

 Sassenach left over from Sunday Stills

Worked my morning off yesterday because of green grass and our too-small, inch-and-a-half milk pipeline. The girls are working hard with all the lush new feed and they make so much milk that they flood that skinny little line.


All the milkers fall off, and the cows kick and jump on them, and you have to dump the vacuum trap, and milk runs all over the floor, and there is a mess. 


On and on and on. It can happen several times per milking.


However, if someone spends the whole milking in the milk house, thumb on the pump switch, turning on the transfer pump every time a new surge of milk gushes into the receiving jar, you can get through milking without any drop offs.


I appointed myself Sunday morning pump switch engineer in chief and, with the company of my iPod, spent a fairly peaceful morning. However, the rest of the day was pretty much a Monday, only dressed up nice for the weekend.

Lucky jumped the fence Saturday night and bruised her udder, requiring much treatment both morning and evening. Plus Velvet finally decided that she can walk, but not well enough to make it out to a stall to be milked by machine. Thus the kids put a halter on her and tried to get one of the bull calves to take care of the job. However, the calf wasn't hungry and didn't cooperate, so they haltered her and hand milked her.

She is such a pet that she just let them do it, but with all the doctoring and all, we didn't get out of the barn til after nine PM. The boss was grateful that we did all the work on Saturday while he was off being an auctioneer, so he was going to buy everybody pizza for Sunday supper. However, by 9 they all wanted to go home or go in the house and crash.


So I made tuna sandwiches. Maybe tonight we will get the pizza.


Pretties seen for Sunday: Boss and I walked up in the day pasture to bring down the cows for night milking. Sun was on its way down and glinting off the river to the north, surrounded by trees like a sapphire on a sea of green. In all the years I have worked here and all the trips up the hill I had never seen it like that. It was blindingly beautiful. The land will surprise you that way ....new lovelies every day.


Then Jade and I were holding gate while the boss brought in bales. A set of turkey vulture septuplets sailed down over the barnyard and the same setting sun gilded the lighter parts of their under wings with golden fire. Who would think that a close up of such ugly critters could be so stunning? We stopped to watch them teetering back and forth until they headed west to their roosts on the mountain.


All in all it was a normal day of up and down and good and bad.....that's farm life for you. Insane but beautiful.

The Girls on Grass

These were taken a few days ago...they have slicked up and the grass is a lot better now.

Leap Day Story

Below is a story I entered in a contest for leap day stories. I don't expect that it will win, but I am sharing it with all you kind folks anyhow......

Although our leap day story may not be the funniest it is probably a bit different. You see we are family farmers and own a small herd of registered dairy cattle, mostly Holsteins. The kids all grew up showing their pet calves at the county fair and were always eager to have a show calf born on the first of March. 

This is because the first of March is the earliest birthday for calves to be eligible for the Junior Heifer Calf class at the fair. Calves born at the start of the three month period that falls in that class are likely to be the largest and most mature in their group...both very desirable in the quest for a blue ribbon. Junior Calf is a very popular and hotly contested class among the young folks, because the babies are quite young and easier for them to handle than older, larger animals from the other calf classes.

Thus when our old cow, Byrony, who was due to calve on the first, instead had a lovely heifer on the 29th of February in 2000, our son was quite disappointed. The calf, whom he named Balsam, was a really nice baby though. 

Therefore he entered her in her proper class, Intermediate Senior Calf, anyhow, even though she was born on the very last day of that class eligibility period and would probably be the smallest one in the ring.

He was delighted though when he got to the show and discovered that Balsam would be placed in the Junior Calf Class after all. Seems the show catalog said that calves had to be born after February 28th instead of on or after March 1st as is the case at most shows. 

Balsam went on to win that class for our son, who was ten at the time, and had a wonderful career as a pet who just happened to be a show cow too, and a mother and grandmother of many much-loved animals.

Oddly enough, today she stands at one end of one of our lines of milk cows and her oldest granddaughter, Broadway, stands at the other end......though she is actually twelve years old, grandma Balsam has only had three birthdays (or will have on the 29th) and her grand baby, known affectionately as B-Dub, has had six!

Balsam is still a great big pet who will stand and wait to have her head scratched when we are turning out the cows, even though her herd mates are hustling out the door to get to their pasture.

Feeding

We start out with a great big bale. 


We pull off forks full of hay until we have an itty bitty bale. 


The itty bitty bale is taken inside. 


Everybody eats.


All is well.

Ocean-View Dispersing the Herd

I was shocked to read that Ocean-View Holsteins in Windsor, California will be selling their over 600 cows on May 2. The farm is a true icon of Holstein cattle, having bred such famous bulls as Ocean-View Sexation, Zenith, Zander and many others.


Liz was lucky enough to visit the farm and meet the owners during a college field study to California to learn about farming there. She loved seeing Zandra and other well-knows cows.

Mandy, an Ocean-View Zenith daughter and two-time junior champion at Altamont fair, 

being milked in the fair parlor.

Here at Northview we have many daughters of bulls from that farm, including Liz's retired show cow, Mandy (Ocean-View Zenith), and Becky's Lemonade (Ocean View Extra Special), Camry, same sire as Lemmie, and several others.


I guess there comes a time for all things to end, but we will miss Ocean-View and their beautiful cows and high-transmitting bulls.

Heifer Wrasslin'

**Alan took this last summer with his phone and I stumbled upon it yesterday while cleaning out my inbox. I believe it is the Kingpin daughter, Bayliner, down below the barn yard gate, having escaped in order to eat box elder trees. I don't know what it is with that family, but they all will do whatever it takes to get to the darned things and eat them....and personally they could eat every single one on the farm right down to the roots and I wouldn't get mad.

We had three springing heifers, Rosie, my milking shorthorn show heifer, and one open heifer to bring into the cow barn yesterday. (Well actually we had several open ones, but they didn't cooperate.) 


At first they didn't even want to come down off the hill at all. They didn't want to be driven. They didn't want to come when called. They wouldn't even come down when they heard the skid steer which brings their food to them.


After waiting for a while (in the bright, crisp sunshine, not too much of a punishment) I went and got a bucket of grain. 


That got their attention.


We kind of wanted to bring all of them down and put those that are not springing up to calve in a pen in the back of the barn where can keep a better eye on them. However, Shamrock, the Jersey, Rio, a milking shorthorn, Cevin and one other Holstein wanted nothing to do with us so they are still out.


Getting the others down to the barn was only part of the equation. Getting them first into the barn was one project, then getting them into stalls or the pen, depending on how close up they are to calve was another.


It was good to have Al home. He caught some with a halter and just pulled them in and put them where we wanted them, and tolled the others with that trusty grain bucket. Liz got back from work and helped too, so although it took quite a while it went pretty well.


 Nothing like young folks to make a job go a lot easier.


Now we will have to watch them close to make sure they can handle their new locations safely. Cows can be pretty godawful dumb sometimes. I'm glad they are in though, because we need to watch the close ups real closely.

The Things You Learn While Moving Heifers

The electric fence gate is indeed "hot". If you touch it while wearing thick rubber boots and gloves and standing on snow, you won't get grounded completely and knocked on your *ss. However, liquid fire will run over your skin and you will cuss in the general direction of the guy who built such a tight d*** gate! Ouch!


When you worry and agonize for months over how you will move a certain recalcitrant heifer with big horns and a bad attitude, from heifer barn to cow barn....... When you sweat and plan and lose sleep fretting over what she will do......


She will walk quietly, almost exactly where you want her to go, and stroll into the barn and let you lug her into a stall with only the most minor of disagreements.


As if to say, "Ha, fooled you, didn't I?"


And the best cow moving item I have ever found is an old worn out canoe paddle. I always keep something on the porch with which to direct cow traffic. I can't count the number of times I have looked out the window to see cattle coming at me where they don't belong. Or heard hooves and moos out of place. It does not pay to chase them unarmed, as they will laugh and leap around you, kicking up their heels as they race away.


However, as with any tool sequestered by the lady of the house, all my fiber glass sorting sticks became "walking" sticks (as in walking away..I have a walking hammer too) and are over at the barn. When the time came to move an animal recently there was nothing on the back porch to choose from but a hoe and the canoe paddle.


 I chose the one that fit my hand the best and carried the fondest memories. Much to my astonishment cattle respect that paddle. And do not challenge me when I carry it. Must be because they can see it so well and it makes me look wider (amazing) and more dangerous.


Anyhow, farmers love to recycle and I am going to recycle that old paddle!


**Thanks again for your prayers and thoughts. Dad had a good day yesterday and took two walks and ate hit meals. I think that is excellent progress.

For the Love of a Cow

Liz and her retired show cow, Heather. Heather is 12 now. You can see that they are pretty good friends after all those years.

Living Closely with Cow Families

Not an Astronaut offspring, but he could have been

In the comments a good friend mentioned genetics and inheritances in folks. 


Which got me thinking a bit. In well over thirty years of living every single day with generation upon generation of registered Holsteins, a few Jerseys and a handful of milking shorthorns, it has amazed me, how very much of the makeup of a cow, her performance, and especially her silly little quirks are inherited.


Of course anyone who bred registered cows during the right time period remembers the Paclamar Astronaut daughters...they were long and black and sharp and gorgeous....


 However, they were also a little bit, (well maybe even more than a little bit,) on the "nervous" side. 


Flighty even. 


Oh, heck, let's be clear here...the ones we bred were downright psychotic. We had a little black one whose name escapes me***. When you tried to milk her she would kick right over the top of the divider. That is about chest high for those not familiar with stall dividers.


She kicked like that every single day from the first time she was milked until she died calving while the kids and I were at camp one year. She hated everybody with an equal opportunity loathing that was downright impressive.


Other traits also seem to be much more heritable than the sire summaries would have you think. Like eating box elder trees. As members of the maple family box elders have fairly bitter leaves I do believe. Cows will eat them when especially hungry, but they are certainly not high on their menu preferences. Except Balsam's family. Every one of them will climb up on the jersey barriers around the barnyard to prune the trees on the bank. We have seen some feats of bovine gymnastics that would downright amaze you, all in pursuit of low hanging leaves. 


Getting out of fences is another proclivity not measured in the stud books that seems to run in families. Inspecting windowsills on the way out of the barn (although that may be a breed-specific thing as it seems to be mostly Jerseys who find it necessary to stop and check every single windowsill every single day.) Stealing calves. We have had a family since I met the boss that all stole calves....we still have some of them.


You can keep your TPI and your PTA and your daughter averages and all. If the proofs measured everything we noticed running in families in cows there wouldn't be room on the page to list them all.


***Liz looked her up and her name was Apple Crisp...she was crisp enough all right.

Sunny Day

Still having heating issues but the sun is shining, it is really nice outside and not bad inside. The fan motor is in Albany awaiting pick up. Barn chores are done, cows out and eating, stalls bedded for tonight and everything tidied up.

Still awaiting our first calf of the year from Pecan, and as always hoping for a heifer. Pecan is bred to a bull we had years ago, a son of Whittier-Farms Ned Boy named Foxfield Doreigh NB Rex. Besides the Ned Boy he had some Triple Threat back there on the dam's side and threw a lot of black reds. We bought him at an auction when Liz was a baby, and although he is long gone, we still have a unit or two left of him. His daughters were always kind of round-boned more than we like and not the nicest-natured critters on the farm, but they were tough and lasted a long time.


We were all sad to hear of the passing of Gaige Highlight Tamara, a famous New York Holstein, bred and owned by folks the kids have often showed with over the years. In fact her owner let Liz take her in the ring a couple of times at the Cooperstown Junior show when there were more cows going in than there were hands for the halters. She was a spectacularly beautiful animal.


Tamara has sons in AI, 15 EX daughters and was scored 4-E 97 in her own right, about as good as it gets.....truly one of the great ones. So sorry to hear of her passing.




***Very sorry about the old photos. With the death of the desktop most of my photos are hard to get to, so......