Da Troof and Nuttin but da Troof

Not the truants, just some cows and heifers eating breakfast

Yesterday's post featured the girls leaning on sorting sticks and about a football field's worth of temporary electric fence. If you haven't read the comments suggesting possible scenarios...they are excellent and worth your time.

Speaking of temporary, that fence was VERY temporary. Within ten minutes after we finished using it there was nothing to show for its ephemeral existence but a bucket full of rolls of wire with a LOT of surveyor's tape on it and a couple of bundles of fence posts.

See lightning fried one of the fencers and let the big, horned heifers out into the night. 


I am honestly afraid of those big horned heifers. They are big, and, well, they have horns.

Thus even looking for them wasn't high on my agenda. However, they very obligingly, after eating some hostas, wandering all over the lawns leaving fertilizer, and putting hoof prints all over everything, went up in the unused pony yard and lay down.

All we had to do to catch them was close the gate. 

However, they couldn't stay there. No watering trough, no shelter, way too small etc.

How to get them down the great distance between where we wanted them and where they were. Four driveways, multiple stretches of lawn, only a few of us to chase them, no horses, no ropes, no working dogs any more.

And I am afraid of them. It was an uncomfortable conundrum.

I thought about it all through milking and breakfast after chores and finally came up with an idea. Maybe we could build an electric fence out of the lightest wire we could get, some step-in posts, which we already had and flag the heck out of it so it looked like a lot more than it was. We could make a sort of alley to guide them back to the heifer barn.

We proceeded to construct just that and lined up the cheap help for the melee. 

There actually were a few moments of excitement...enough for this week's Farm Side at least, but they did mind the "fence" and we got them back where they belong without too awful much drama.

Can we say thankful....why yes we can.

Liz Wants a Blog Post

This morning we had some up close and personal veterinary work to do on five strong, flighty, more than a year old, heifers.


They are not sick, this was just routine stuff, but it had to be done. They are housed in the old sawdust shed, which was built to keep the sawdust from running away. It served that job quite well, but despite the addition of some sturdy gates, it won't bear having heifers tied to it,  or slammed against it, or handy-dandy gate moving or anything like that.


Thus these heifers had to be caught and held without the benefit of good equipment.


The boss tried. He has always been a strong, capable man, leaping tall buildings at a single bound and all. However, he has been injured a lot of times over the years, plus he broke his shoulder and dislocated it a couple years ago and it just doesn't do what he needs it to. And he is well over sixty.


Thus he couldn't just grab them by the nose and hang on like he would have done even a couple of years ago.


This work absolutely had to be done.


There was no one here but us wimmen and him. His lariat has a broken catch on it and is essentially worse than useless.


So Liz took an old calf halter, undid the nose band to form a makeshift loop, handed me her engagement ring and got in the pen.


After all the fruitless previous efforts by her dad, and there were many, in about fifteen minutes she roped all five heifers, held the rope with one hand while she did the work on them with the other, then turned them all loose. Then she took back her ring and put it back on.


She was covered with manure, bruised, battered, and has one finger that may not have been meant to bend that way originally, but the work is done and everybody is still standing up and taking nourishment.....she told me she expected a blog post out of it at the very least.


So here, it is...Upstate NY, where the men are men and the women are scary.

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.

Our first thought was

A mix of red and black Angus too...but what are they crossed with that gives them those dangly things on their chests?

They feed baleage from the wagons....just put that pic in to show you how many they have although they have a lot more than are in the photo.

Thanks everyone!

West Comes East

The kids stumbled upon a large and prosperous looking beef farm a couple of hours from here. Saturday they took me to see.

Miles of fences, hundreds of animals, an impressive array of feeder wagons. All you knowledgeable ranchers out there, what on earth are these cow? And what are those things? Dairy farmers everywhere want to know.

Cows Hate Mud

So you can just imagine how they are loving this summer. We pay extra when we buy their grain to have a special kind of zinc included to strengthen and improve their hooves and help them fight lameness. Still a few of them are getting tender feet just from walking in the godawful swamps produced by all the rain.

They also get a fancy (and expensive) mineral pack added to their grain so that every bite they eat helps them stay healthy and do the best they can. Their selenium is the best organically derived kind too. (Meanwhile their valets buy generic vitamins at Wally World).

A balanced diet is so important to them, so we shop for the best grain we can find.

The Way They Are

I love cows. But they are not the creatures of Disney.

This is a terribly sad story, and demonstrates just what they can do if frightened, injured, or just in a bad mood. Deputy killed by cow.

Here is an article detailing fatalities caused by cows in four states. Scroll down to the table .......