What is it? 

What is it?

The guys found this out in one of the buildings. I am sure many of the farmers who stop here will recognize it, but everyone is welcome to take a guess.

Leave an answer in the comments section if you would like.

Here it is

Several Northview readers have suggested that the next step after mandatory national animal identification will be the same for us human folks. Here is the New York Times, (who else) advocating just that and sugar coating it enough to give a whole herd of Holsteins a three day sugar high. It never ceases to amaze me how far the Times will go with its social agenda.
National ID

At College Today

One of Liz's friends found out that the reason her apartment mate had not been back to school in a while was that she had been arrested in NYC.....for allegedly murdering her last roommate. The person in question is out on bail and back in school, so the friend moved in with another mutual friend. Whew! Liz said that she felt like coming home and kissing her brother and sister, just for not putting her through stuff like that. There is something to be said for living at home.

A couple of other NYC kids sat in the lounge today complaining loudly about how terrible their recent visit to the cow barn had been. The cows stink and they are big and mean and ugly. And how can anybody stand to work around them...and on and on about how awful the ag portion of the school makes their lives.

After a few seconds they noticed the thickening silence around them. Then one very large, solid, good old boy informed them that he was a farm kid, quite liked cows and did they want to make something of it. The city kids quickly appealed to the rest of the folks in the lounge. After all there couldn't be more than one cow lover on campus could there? And cows really do stink don't they? However, they discovered that every single other person in the entire lounge was an aggie. They decided to leave while the going was good and the ag students had a good laugh. I wonder what part of ag and tech school they missed when they enrolled.




agriculture school

Mike looks like a serious boy, doesn't he? but there is a tennis ball just off camera between his front paws.  

The golden time just before dusk when every tree stands out in its own sharp shadow 

Another try

Okay, today I am going to write this in Word

and cut and paste. Thanks to all the kind folks who suggested that I try Firefox. I did use the earliest version for a while, but had trouble with sites that wouldn’t load. If this business with Netscape doesn’t improve, I will have to download the newer version, which is said to address that problem.

Anyhow, back to yesterday afternoon

. I was Sundaying it up in fine fashion and acting very un-farmerly. Feet up, handmade (by my wonderful mother, who never met a stranger) lap robe keeping off the chill, first book of the Outlander series in hand, I was enjoying a few comfortable chuckles and some genuine, pure-D relaxation.

Enter my son, in an incoherent panic

, "Mom, will you talk to the sheriff for me? They are over there at the barn yelling at dad."

Well, I got out of the chair

a lot quicker than I got in. Visions of my volatile husband in a one-man standoff against the local authorities leapt to mind. He was armed only with a skid steer and a bucket load of corn, but handicaps like that have never stopped him before. It is nothing for him to get in a screaming match with trespassers bearing shotguns when he is totally unarmed. So far he has come out ahead, but I worry.

When I finally got the kid calmed down

, I discovered that someone driving a Jimmy had come creeping up the barn drive and, when he saw the guys, took off in a swirl of gravel. He drove into our sand pile trying to get gone. He saw the boss coming down to confront him and screamed some words that will not be typed here and threatened to run over him. That is when the kid ran for the phone.

Anyhow, the policeman

who answered my summons was a wonder. In this increasingly urban area you don't find too many people who understand just how much trouble prowlers can get into on private farm property. This officer was real understanding though and I sure appreciated that. By the time he arrived the guy in the Jimmy had stopped cussing and was claiming to be looking for Argersinger Road. (Yeah and there is a bridge downstate that I could sell you cheap too.) Argersinger Road is a nice, smooth, paved, public highway. Our barn driveway washed out in all the rain we have had, so it consists of a couple of nearly impassable ruts winding straight up the mountain. You can barely get a tractor up it. And at the bottom, there is a FARM SIGN for Pete's sake. It does not say Argersinger Road on it, I promise.

We will probably

never know whether he was looking to pick up a heifer calf, as some local youths recently got caught doing, or if he wanted to get into the abandoned farm house half way up the driveway. Had he not threatened to run over the boss and actually pulled his car right up to him, we would have just told him to light a shuck and let him go. The sad thing is that he had kids with him. Nice example to set for them.

At any rate

, he will be going to court next week, down in town, and even if he only gets a warning, hopefully he won' be back.

Trespassers and the browser from hell

I would tell you all about the trespassers at the barn today, who flat ruined my Sunday off, and darned near ran over my husband, oh, and the nice policeman who came and arrested them. And trying to find a phone number for the police, but discovering that 9-1-1 is all there is. And Alan's message when he came in the house in a panic and how I thought the police were trying to arrest his dad, and he was standing them off armed with with nothing but a skid steer with the bucket full of corn.

However, Netscape, the browser from HELL, has eaten, not one, but two, carefully constructed posts and I flat give up.

While you wait for details, I will write them an irate message and try to calm my heartbeat down after all the excitement. Talk about adrenaline overload!

More Ravens

I want to thank Karbon Kounty Moos for stopping by and telling me that ravens are a problem for calving cows out in the west. Here they are merely something unusual to see on a cold winter day, and from the sounds of things I hope they stay that way. Moos left a link about them that is worth visiting so I moved it up from the comments section to make sure that you didn't miss it.

Here in the Northeast, we have had little problem with predation by birds, although we have more than an adequate supply of extra-large coyotes and coyote-dog hybrids to keep us busy.
However, there is a large colony of turkey vultures that nest a few miles up the road at Little Nose Mountain. (It is on the left in the picture. Back when Magnum was alive I rode the trails pictured in the story at that site. It is an amazingly wild area for being only a few yards from a major highway.)

The turkey vultures followed the interstates north a couple of decades ago, feasting on road kill as they came. It is said that black vultures are following their path and that worries me. They are known for harassing livestock and doing serious damage.

However, last summer even the turkey vultures pinned a pair of newborn Holstein calves under a feeder wagon and were very hard to discourage. There is no doubt about identification either.

I hope this isn't the start of a trend. It is hard enough to discourage predators on the ground without having them dropping in from above as well.
vultures
ravens
livestock predation

An Unexpected Crop

Guess what the eighth most valuable crop in Washington State is. It ranks behind apples, which are number one, and ahead of sweet cherries, which it kicked out of their former ranking.

I will give you a clue. The agriculture department doesn't have anything to do with recording it, but law enforcement agencies do.

Shameful

TFSMagnum featured this story of appalling treatment of young women wishing to legally purchase firearms. Profiling of young men of Arab descent is not allowed at airports; they search small children and little old ladies as if they were known terrorists instead.
Just to be fair mind you.
Yet much worse treatment of young women, especially blacks, is being permitted if they are purchasing fire arms at a gun show. Some really ugly activities by the ATFB in these circumstances are described in this story. It is worth a read if you are interested in Second Amendment issues.
Heck, I am a woman and I have purchased guns. I'm glad they didn't follow me home.
Gun shows
Racial profiling

Ravens

We had ravens here today. The boss noticed a commotion going on over the top of heifer barn, when we were out in the milkhouse tearing down. (Otherwise I would not have seen them.) A bunch of crows was mobbing a pair of them, really tearing into them, and they were trying frantically to get away.

It was quite a sight to see, as the wind was really ripping and all the birds were having trouble aiming. The crows were surely winning though. They would swoop in from above, one after another, and pluck at the larger birds' backs, darned near landing on top of them. One raven perched on the heifer barn roof, where he sat like a weather vane until the crows found him. They pounded him so mercilessly that he actually flew in through the high window where we put hay in the mow and hid in there for a minute.

I darned near froze out there watching them with no coat or gloves on, but I have never seen them here at the farm. We counted one on the Christmas Bird Count two years ago and I have seen them in the Adirondack Mountains, but never this far south. Oh, well, we knew it was cold, just not THAT cold.
Ravens
Crows

Cold twilight

The sun is setting north of the barn now 

I Hate the Wind

This morning it was calm and sunny. Skinny wisps of cloud slid across a tranquil blue sky. It was so warm we had all the barn doors open and the fans were running. However, we watched the forecast before we went to the barn and knew that the weather wasn’t going to be pretty. In fact I spent a good part of yesterday covering things up and weighting them down in preparation for all this. It was mostly a waste of time. Big wind doesn’t stop for anything; It goes through rather than around and takes whatever it wants with it.

At nine thirty when it hit, we were over at the cow barn. From the milkhouse door we could see the big old spruce in the house hard bending almost in half. I was real sorry that I forgot to move my car before we went to work. One of these days that big green beast is going to come down and I am not going to have wheels anymore.

Every thing that was not weighted down between the house and barn lifted on circling winds. The rabbit coop Alan is building blew over. The woodpile canvas sailed into the heifer yard. Slabs of tarpaper lifted off the old hen house and vanished. The sheep, who normally never come inside, crowded into the barn and cowered in the aisle behind the cows.

Later we found all the insulators and tools from yesterday’s fencing fun spread in a circular pattern all over the yard. They had been put neatly away in the corncrib, but the wind sucked them out. I will pick up that mess when it all stops, but I am not going out there now. It is just too ugly. Liz called from college and she is going to stay at school until it blows over, even though this is her "early" day. I am glad. That little truck is like a skateboard in the wind.
I wish it was over. The dogs are terrified because of the intermittent rolls of thunder. Elm trees that the guys have been afraid to fall, because they were so rotten and brittle, are lying in the mud in the lane. I can see the young stock looking out their door. They want to eat, but they don’t like the storm either.

I hate the wind.
farming
storm

One thing is for certain

One thing is absolutely, positively, for certain sure. If you have animals, you had better not be arrogant enough to think that you can ever make meaningful plans. Today I needed to get a lot of things done. A friend was stopping by to leave a border collie that I bred here for a couple of weeks while her family vacations. The milk tester is coming tonight. I needed to get some cleaning done, button things up outdoors ahead of the big wind we are expecting tonight and all that sort of stuff. I had a full day planned.

Then, I looked out the window and there was a big, fat, heifer, named Frieland Zebra Stampede, down by the fence around my front garden. She was NOT inside the heifer yard. The boss and I ran out and caught her and set to work rebuilding the electric fence.
It has been down for a while and we just didn't get around to it before, figuring that the page wire would do the job, but it was certainly time today. It was a lovely day to be working outside, the sun shining warm and mellow, the air sweet and summery. We actually had a very nice time working out there together and soon had the satisfaction of watching the stock rediscover what the fence was all about.

The boss headed out belatedly to get the cows fed their corn and I came inside to get at my work.

Perhaps five minutes later I heard the piercing whistle that means trouble on the cow front. Mary, a little Rex daughter, had just torn the whole darned fence back down. There was wire everywhere and insulators had flown half way across the driveway. It was not nearly as much fun to build it the second time, and it seemed to take forever. I didn't really get much else done today. However, I think the stock have figured out to leave the wire alone...or at least I hope so. Still, my work awaits.

In fact instead of doing this I should get out and water Rita, our visitor, before it gets too dark. She is Nick's sister, but is a pretty little long-haired girl, where he is a "bare skinned" dog.
farming
cows
building fence

This Doesn't Jibe

I got my online issue of Drover’s Alert today and was confused by what I read. One story announced,

"Farm income predicted to drop in 2006.The USDA estimates that farm income will
drop this year by $18 billion."

I didn’t have any trouble believing that. What with higher fuel prices, rising fertilizer costs, declining milk prices, declining government programs and the new milk tax, I am sure that the pundits are correct. Especially when you factor in imports, corruption in the Department of Agriculture, conglomerate farming and all the other hurdles facing the conventional farmer today.
But the very next headline read,

"Projections show growing demand for agricultural productsThe USDA’s long-term
baseline projections for agricultural commodities indicate that domestic and
international economic growth and gains in population will strengthen demand for
U.S. food and agricultural products over the next 10 years. "

There is something wrong with this picture. If demand is growing and is predicted to grow still more, shouldn’t the income of the folks producing the product grow too? They called that the law of supply and demand when I was in school. Today I guess it is more like the law of legislate, regulate and devalue the farm dollar by whatever means is necessary as long as the consumers find tasty stuff on their grocery shelves and don't have to go broke buying it.

farm
income

Crow time 

It is getting springish here 

The Vice President and the Patient's Right to Privacy

The boss pointed out an interesting discrepancy in press coverage of Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident. During the uproar over how information was served to them, they seem to have completely forgotten the patient’s right to privacy.

When I call the insurance company about something about our health coverage of either my husband or one of our two live-at-home, teenaged, but over eighteen year-old daughters, they will not talk to me. Same goes for the doctor. I have to call the person in question to the telephone, even though I am bookkeeper in chief, check writer in chief, and wife and mother too. I still must have a signed release on file to allow them to talk to me about my own family. This is private information, no matter what the ties between us are.

The same law applies to information about Mr. Whittington too. Do you suppose that every single reporter has a release from Mr. Whittington allowing him access to his health records? I am sure they don’t. Most of what they have demanded from the v ice President, White House staff and the hospital is privileged information.

And when all is said and done and the tumultuous uproar over this sad accident is finished, in what way could it possibly matter if the press was informed promptly or not? This is simply an accident, plain and simple, not a matter of national security. I wish they would find something else to whip themselves up over.

Vice President Cheney
hunting accident
privacy

Another shameless bunny photo 

Some of the reasons that we keep at this challenging job. 

The End

Today marked the end of an era. The small, but enduring, milk marketing cooperative to which we have belonged for quite a number of years voted to dissolve itself in order to join a bigger coop. We were told that we had no choice, that they would not allow our milk into their plants if we didn't do this deal. I have spent a lot of time on the phone since just before Christmas when I found out that this was being cooked up behind closed doors, from someone in another coop. However, the speakers for the new bunch are as persuasive as they are evasive and they convinced the members who bothered to show up (sixteen out of twenty-six) that there was no hope of survival without falling in with the big guys. It was interesting to see that, although the same fellows presented much the same program as I reported upon last week, they had taken out all the slides referring to their debt load. Ralph asked them some real tough questions on that topic at the other meeting. They did not answer them then and looks like they didn't want to hear them today either. It was pretty much all moot anyhow, as this was obviously all settled long before we even knew it was in the works.

We will probably not go along when the move is made. There are other markets out there, not great ones, but we can get a nice, new milk inspector and keep our old milk truck drivers if we change separately from Canajoharie Coop. It is gone now anyhow. Oddly enough, the Canjo coop is required to have an annual meeting even though it is in the process of dissolution. Therefore we will get our roast beef dinner with door prizes just as if nothing was happening. We are going despite our feelings. I can't wait to see who wins the quality awards. Since the boss and I took over the farm we have been in the top five every year, but I'll bet we will mysteriously fall from favor this year, despite somatic cell counts miles below the national average. Kicking in an unpopular direction does not pay.
Dairy
Farming
Milk

New Photoblog

I have started a new blog for the many photos we are taking with the new camera. You can find it in the sidebar blogroll or at The View at Northview.

This is what the Mill Point Bridge looked like in 1987 when flood waters from the Gilboa Dam took it and the Thruway Bridge out killing ten people. 

Gilboa Dam

So what happens if the dam breaks?

Here is a post from Upstream: a Mohawk Valley Perspective, that even people who don't live around here will probably find amazing. Can you imagine New York City maintaining a police force here in upstate NY, which makes arrests, performs raids without notifying local authorities and keeps watch over an antiquated dam that is threatening to flood half the region?
I was shocked and I thank Dan for the heads up. We are 174 miles from the city here and have more than enough layers of government of our own, thank you.
We sure don't need city cops telling us how to do business.
And as for taking care of the damn dam, had it been properly maintained in the first place, we wouldn't be discussing the concept of adding flood alarm sirens to our valley.

There have long been jokes about building a fence somewhere around Poughkeepsie and forming two separate states. I am all for it. Agriculture is New York's number one industry. We have nearly eight million acres of farm land. However, you would never know it from the way we are governed.
agriculture
Gilboa Dam

Today's guest editor 

Barn breakfast 

The business end of Frieland LF Rainwater 

Frieland LF Zinnia back at work after her surgery last week. 

This is what happens with ear tags. This is the kind that the government wants to use to track cattle.

Local Animal ID

Yesterday, early, before milking even, I was out scrambling around on the ice, rapidly congealing pen in hand, (black ink only) participating in our personal brand of animal ID. As I tried to sneak around on each side of my victim I wondered why the heck our registered herd of Holstein cattle needs fancy tags and yet ANOTHER database to make them traceable.

See, Bariolee, daughter of Baton Rouge, calf of Beausoliel, daughter of Pat Berretta, daughter of LV Banana (and that is just from memory WITHOUT opening the herd book in the office) jumped out of the sawdust shed and went to see the bull. In order for her to get her registration papers, the Holstein Association needs a map of her spots. I was out in the just above zero temperatures drawing that map with a pen that was freezing up every couple of seconds. She should have been registered months ago when it was warmer. However, no one likes drawing the spotty ones and she is covered with little jiggles and speckles and such.

Now that she is "drawn" she has been turned in with Magnums Promise, our (also registered) milking shorthorn bull and both are enjoying a vigorous honeymoon. Hopefully a curly headed little black calf will show up in about nine months.

But can anybody tell me why these two animals need more identification than they already have. Not only is Lee, as we call her, purebred, registered, mapped AND already eartagged, but I can recite her pedigree back four generations without even getting out my notebook.
And tagging doesn't carry a lot of weight anyhow. We have a pen with eleven yearlings in it. All were tagged with the same type of tagging system the government advocates. THREE still have their tags! THREE! There must be something on the feed through that is snagging them. No problem though. All but two are registered and thus mapped, so all we have to do is look at their papers. Any anyhow, Liz knows most of them and I know the others.

And then there is the fact that about twenty years ago an animal from here triggered a test at the state when we sent her to the auction. There was nothing wrong with her, they had just changed the test and it was so super sensitive that there were a lot of false positives. You know what? They were on our farm testing the whole herd the next day. No forty-eight hour traceback, more like eighteen! They don't need a new system to traceback cows. They just want more control over our personal property.

Bah, humbug. At least the new camera will make it unnecessary for me to draw spotty calves any more. If the batteries don't freeze that is.

My bird watching assistant. She is not much help with the close ups.  

Robins

We had robins today, the first of 2006. They were a mix of the bright russet and almost black ones we normally see locally and the paler Canadian ones. The light colored ones are distinctly different and very pretty. I tried my darndest to get a nice photo with the new camera, but my assistant made that impossible. Maybe they will come back some time when she and her partner aren't hanging around. Every time I tried to sneak up into the bushes to get a shot, they were right behind me wanting to join in the fun.

I wouldn't have seen them at all if my dear friend hadn't gone outside for a minute and spotted them. We had a great day, getting the bookkeeping up to date, having soup as is our tradition, and catching up on each other's doings. I meant to send some soup home, but forgot.

Chicken Wrangling

Those danged chickens will not stay off the back porch. They seem to have developed a taste for cat food that just won't be quenched. Today I took out herding them away with all three border collies and what a sight that was. Four chickens, two hens, two roosters, with three black dogs in "driving" mode, pushing them away from the house. It might have seemed like overkill, but those birds are determined. They kept trying to cut back around the dogs, but three was just too many for them. They finally left and stayed away the rest of the day.

Driving is less natural to a border collie than gathering, that is bringing the animals towards you. Nick did me real proud, for a young dog with very little formal training (and none on hens). A short year ago he thought chickens were just made to be chased, and preferably popped like feather balloons. Today he worked like a pro, even though he is still limping from the hit by a car incident. He only angled around in front of them once, and then came right back "inside" when I called him in.

Mike showed what kind of dog he is, driving chickens with obvious disdain and turning towards the bull on the other side of the fence every time I called, "lie down". He knows what his calling in life is supposed to be and it doesn't have anything to do with poultry. I have never let him work the shorthorn bull, but he measured him as a threat and wanted to go put a whup on him so bad he was quivering with eagerness. I am unfailingly amazed by these dogs' ability to read stock and pick out the ones that mean harm. I can't let him go after the bull though, because of his age and the deep mud out there, but I sure would love to. That bull could use a little formal education. He doesn't like me much.

Editing Congressional Style

Here is a very interesting little story about members of our US Congress and their staffs doing a little freelance editing. Seems they hit the oh-so-changeable online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and changed their own biographies, as well as "vandalizing" those of rivals. What good and honest sportsmen they are.

How bout this story?

This is amazing.

Hoofs and Honors

Liz made the dean's list again, third semester in a row. This is a good thing. The not so good thing is that she is having trouble with her transfer from the two year program into the four year Bachelor of Technology program, where they were supposed to put her when she enrolled in college in the first place.

But they didn't so she has to go through all this garbage. Other colleges are recruiting her like crazy; even Cornell keeps sending her stuff. However, her own school, where she is one of the better students, (Phi Theta Kappa and all), keeps sending her back and forth from office to office with no result. No one seems to know how to do an internal transfer. I guess they lose such a large percentage of their students at the two year point that they forgot what to do with the few who stay. She wants to stay so she can live home and take care of her own cows.....which works for me.

Meanwhile, she is taking hoof trimming at school, trimming cadaver feet right now, and we are all fascinated with the play by play. Who knew that cow feet could be so interesting?

Cold February Moon 

Milk and Meat good for you after all.

"These studies are revolutionary," said Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University in New York City, who has spent a lifetime studying the effects of diets on weight and health. "They should put a stop to this era of thinking that we have all the information we need to change the whole national diet and make everybody healthy."

Our industries, beef and dairy, have been terribly harmed over the past few decades, by activist food police who have screamed and screamed and screamed that fat will kill you.

Whaddayaknow? They were wrong.

Liz aged 6, first fair ever 

Aged 19, this summer's fair 

Dear Abby

There was recently a letter in that column from a zoo keeper complaining about the idiotic things people tell their kids about animals, rather than getting the straight info from the zoo staff. I had to agree with the guy. Kids deserve good answers. If the parents don't have them, well then, what better time to teach the little folks how to find out, than when they really want to know something? We always took time to give the gang the best answers we could come up with, no matter where we had to look it up, and it paid off in a big way in school and 4-H.

Today the column ran a bunch of responses to that letter, including several wherein parents whined that they thought just taking the kids on an outing ought to be plenty, so why should they bother to actually take the time to learn anything?

My favorite though was from someone who had shown cattle and described some of the things they had overheard. Like that the ones with horns are bulls. And that brown cows give chocolate milk. Those hit home in a big way because I also have heard them too many times to count.

I spent at least one week a year for a good solid dozen years taking the kids to shows and fairs with the string. They never went without a parent until Liz turned 18 and started running things herself. At first they needed a lot of help with clipping and handling the stock. As time went on my contribution became more along the lines of nagging than helping, until most of my week was spent in a lawn chair with a good book and some nice, greasy fair food.

Thus I was in the perfect position to hear all of the misconceptions that city people have about cows. It is certainly okay for them not to know, why would they, but it bugged me that they didn't try to find out the right answers before they passed bad information down to their kids. All they had to do was ask and any farmer hanging around sweeping up straw or making the edge would have been happy to answer questions. I actually liked to discuss farm and animal issues with the public. One friendly, helpful farmer can overcome a heck of a lot of bad press generated by activist groups. There were only a few times where people were unpleasant. Most of them either belonged to PeTA or had spent a little too long in the beer tent.

Maybe that explains the guy who stopped and asked if Liz was Dixie's calf. There was simply no way I could convince him that the young person in jeans and tee shirt, asleep on top of the big old Holstein was my kid and owned the cow in question rather than belonging to her. I do not lie.

We need this tonight. Winter is back. 

Soldier Statistics

Here is an interesting story. I am not sure that the statistics mean a darned thing to bereaved families, but it does serve to put matters into perspective....and to make you want to keep your kids off motorcycles

TFS Magnum

There is a good post over at TFS Magnum. It says, better than I could, what I have been thinking about the Moslem protests over newspaper cartoons in Europe. I think the perpetrators of these violent protests need to understand that the whole world is not theirs to rule and that disrespect is not illegal, or at least not in free countries. Oh, and that respect is earned. They sure aren't earning mine.

Home 

Jupiter again, early dog walking time 

New Blog recommendation

Sarpy Sam, who writes my favorite blog, Thoughts From the Middle of Nowhere, has put up a second blog, No mandatory Animal ID, with a collection of his posts on this topic.

If you are a farmer this is a very important issue. I have been writing about it in the Farm Side until I am sure people are sick of hearing about it, but new rules are taking form like a runaway steamroller. Thoughtful people need to get the information in the hands of stakeholders before it is too late and the government takes even more control of our lives and our cows...and pigs...and chickens...and even parakeets. Sam has plenty of good thoughts on the matter and it would be worth your time to read this new blog. He calls what he writes "a voice in the wilderness."
He also said and rightly so, " Remember, an ear tag, ID number, or premise ID, never stopped a disease. Proper health and nutrition by caring people, not factory farms, provide disease prevention." His is a voice that needs to be heard.

Get me outta here! 

Bayberry and the Post-operative Patient

This has been a real tough week, what with wondering if we will have a place to ship milk, talking about what we will do if we lose our market and all. Then yesterday we had to have major surgery done on one of my favorite cows, Frieland LF Zinnia. She belongs to Alan, and is actually a grown up show calf, but she stands in the string that I milk and she and I have an understanding. She is one of those cows that is no trouble at all to milk; she just stands there straight in her stall, is clean and doesn't kick, so even though her milk production is just average I am fond of her.

Unfortunately for her, she stands between two big old snake necks, who when she isn't feeling the greatest, steal her feed. Fresh cows (newly calved) seem to need lots of fiber, which they get best from dry hay. Zinny just had a calf a couple of weeks ago and I guess Char and Willow were eating most of her hay. Anyhow, she went off feed a couple of days ago, and our favorite vet diagnosed a twisted abomasum. That is one compartment of the bovine four-part stomach and when it twists no food can pass through. The result is one very sick animal until an operation untwists everything and the stomach is sewed in place where it is supposed to be. Most cows begin to eat within a few hours of their operation. Zinnia didn't. She looked real sorry for herself last night and didn't seem to eat at all, although she would lick salt, which was somewhat encouraging.

I dreaded going to the barn this morning. I didn't want to find her dead or beyond recovery. However, as I walked past the heifer yard, Alan's other show heifer, Bayberry, came over to the fence and I noticed that she is developing a nice little udder. This was cause for some real serious rejoicing as I had pretty much given up on ever getting her pregnant. She has been serviced AI a couple times and run with the bull off and on (off to go to the fair) since June. She looked like she was bagging up in the fall and then just stopped. I was really afraid we would have to sell her. I ran back to the house to give Alan the good news.

However, all through milking when I stopped every little while to watch Zinnia, she didn't look promising. She just lay there disinterested in everything, including her feed.

I seem to have to do that, stare at the sick cows, watching their every move, trying to figure out how sick they are, what with, and what I can do to help them. It is a real compulsion and I will go look at them every couple of minutes when I am in the barn. When we can't get them right it bothers me intensely. When they do come around it is a huge relief, not to have that urgent need to take care of them and get them better.

The most movement Zinny made was to lick desultorily at her salt once or twice. I felt pretty awful and envisioned the ugly task of dragging a valuable and much liked animal up on the hill to be composed. Then, just as we were finishing the last couple cows, she hopped up on her feet and began to gobble her straw bedding. We gave her some of our old hay and she began to sort the best pieces out of that too. Funny, we buy real pricy, high nutrient hay for the cows, but if they are the least bit out of sorts they much prefer our stemmy old grass hay. I came over for breakfast in a better frame of mind than the past few days, I'll tell you. The good news about Bay, and seeing Zinny back to eating just made my day.

More on yesterday's meeting from Hell. The point of the program was to convince a few key (read squeaky wheel types like us) producers to join the new cooperative. There were many slides with program data, historical performance data on the new coop, and its debt structures displayed for our enjoyment. However, there were NO printed handouts, the slides were flashed too fast to copy the material (and I can take notes real fast) and the speakers were usually talking about something other than what was on the slide that also needed to be listened to and written down. Therefore it was darned near impossible to come home, haul out the old calculator and come up with a meaningful picture of just how bad the story is. However, with what I got from my notes, I think there were several expert proctologists among the speakers. Just a sense that I got when they were bragging about all they had done for farmers, all the while telling us that we ought to be delighted to take less money from such an august organization. I used to sit on the board of the coop we belong to now and they always said that equity in a milk was "something you get off a toilet seat." I heard a lot of glad handing and backslapping, butI didn't hear anything that changed my thought on that.

Anyhow, obfuscation seemed to be the word of the day....at least from where I was sitting.

We attended a very unpleasant meeting today. The independent cooperative where we have marketed our milk for quite some time is being taken over in a hostile manner by a larger one. We have been selling some of our milk to their cheese plants and they say they won't take any more if we don't join them. Shades of the big coops, the bullies of dairy farming; that is how they are taking over the industry. What a shame to see the "independents" playing the same game.

They are offering us a very substantial cut in payfor the privilege of selling our milk to them. Where the coop we now ship to has one of the most competitive quality premium structures in the region, this new bunch is so restrictive that basically they offer no premiums. Quality premiums are one place a conscientious farmer can make a few bucks. Here at Northview we have qualified for awards every year since we took over the farm and make the highest possible premium more months than not. We would not qualify for ANY from the new guys. The only carrot the new guys are offering is a place to ship our milk. That's it, just a market, but a lot less money. Our old coop only marketed milk, so they took no equity. The new guys own four plants and take a whole bunch of nickels here and assessments there that look to me to equal over two bucks less a hundredweight if you figure in premiums. Which, of course we do figure in, as they have been enough to pay for our quality program here. DHIA, sanitation, etc. has pretty much all come out of the premium check.

It is pretty worrisome and the only guys who like it are big producers, who will get volume premiums, which will make up a little bit of the loss in quality payments. Of course we are far too small to get those either. From our point of view there is now little to choose from between continuing to sell regionally, or just biting the bullet and joining another, even bigger, monster coop that everybody loves to hate. It comes down to a lose/lose or just sell out situation. Dang.

Green outside and in 

Snow tracks