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 

Daffodils up in February!

Just a dusting of snow this morning. It snowed off and on all day yesterday too...when it wasn't raining that is. Still, Peg's daffodils are peeking out, tucked into the corner of the foundation as they have been faithfully since long before I came here. Bulbs are like money in the bank, except that they pay interest by making the place look nice, which is hard to spend, but mighty enjoyable just the same. Actually I think the clumps beside the house were here before the family bought the place over forty years ago, and for who knows how long before that.

Another Farm Side deadline has come and gone; this week compensation for unfunded takings of private property, in particular regulation of what the view looks like, is the focus. It was pointed out quite strongly to me recently, by a local agri-pundit, that the folks driving by the place don't own the view and are really reaching when they tell you that you can't put wind generators in your back fields because they don't like the look of them. Let's see what response that opinion brings!

Our January 31st present in 1988 

At Peck's Lake cabin one 

I know just where I was eighteen years ago this morning and exactly what I was thinking. It was clear and warm and very springlike for so early in the year that morning too. (Today I awoke to unexpected darkness. Yeah, I know it's always dark that early in January, but last night there was snow to brighten things up. This morning it was raining hard, banging the tin porch roof like a kid with a new drum. Perhaps I should check the weather channel now and then. Going to have to dig out the boss's extra rubber boots for the barnward slog this day.)

In 1988, I was debating at this hour of the morning, awake and who wouldn't be, how early I dared call our dearest friends who were going to take Liz to spend a few days with them, while the big doin's went on at our house. We lived in town then so the boss went up to the farm to milk and do chores and left me alone. (Good grief I was an independent fool.) I guess it was around nine thirty that they came and picked up our little one for her "vacation" with her favorite people. She actually took her first steps at their house, not so many months before that day. They didn't mention it because they thought we knew. It was wildly funny when I called Caroline a few days later and said, "Elizabeth is walking," and she said, "Oh, wasn't she walking before?"

Anyhow, by the time they came I was enthroned on the sofa in the living room, wishing the boss would forget the darned cows and come and get ME. St. Mary's was calling me loud and clear and it was TIME with a capital T.

By noon-thirty Liz had a sister. She was sure a keeper. Happy eighteenth birthday Becky, our quirky, funny, quiet one, Emerson Drive fan extraordinaire, middle kid, that oh, so hard spot in the family lineup. We thank you for all the years of help and fun and cooking us great dinners, especially your best-in-the-world macaroni and cheese. Many happy returns new voter, soon to be driver and ready for college young adult. We sure do love you!

DG on a roll 

View From Cat Head Mountain 1979 

Walking back to the house at night, finished with work and ready to rest, is always a special time for me. I stop by the heifer yard, look up at the stars or across the valley to the town lights and just unwind, dial down, reflect and get ready for the end of the day.

Last night the moon was dark and it should have been a good time to gaze at Orion making his endless quest across the winter sky. Sadly, I could barely make out the stars in his belt. Smoggy air and light from those same towns diminished the night's starlight almost into oblivion.

I remembered decades ago before farm and cows, camping at Tirrell Pond, which is actually a gorgeous lake in the Adirondack Mountains. We spent the evening hours standing (on the beach that you see in the picture at the site above), looking up at the whole Milky Way Galaxy sprawled across the sky in glorious abandon. You could pick out tiny stars so far away that they were no more than specks of sky dust. It was worth hiking in October and camping cold to see such a sight mirrored in the glassy little lake. Then today I saw this story on the Associated Press that told me what I already knew.

If you live in the city, or even near it you miss a lot.

This was the day to take Nick's stitches out. Perhaps this should have been a job for a veterinarian who has the proper tools. You know, a brightly lit table, hemostat clamps, teensie-weensie little scissors, professional help and all.

Oh, well, it takes about twelve bucks worth of gas to get to the vet's and back, plus eating up half an otherwise useful day, so Alan and I undertook to get 'er done ourselves.

First the table. The kid has been sleeping downstairs on his camping cot, because his room is cold as a polar bear's den in the winter. That made a table. Then some electical tape to help ease the pup's urge to rip our throats out if we got a little clumsy. Not that Nick is that type, but, hey, you never know.

Then tiny, hooked sewing scissors, a seam ripper and my little bitty electrician's needle-nose plyers.......now where the heck were they?

Oh, yeah, still in my tackle box out in the front hallway. They work the nuts for messing with lures and such and for taking hooks out of sunfish, which have the tiniest mouths of any fish I have ever seen.

I opened my big green box and the scent of rubber worms and WD-40, Skin-so-S0ft and slowly melting swimming grubs burst out. The smell of good summer afternoons on the lake, catching a bazillion rock bass or evenings swaying with the rocking of the boat as we waited for those huge rainbow trout to suck up a worm and begin the battle.

It fired me right up for the task of removing those little black knots of thread from little Nickie's back knees. He was such a good boy, just lay there thumping his hard black tail on the cot as we dug around trying to grab the threads and snip them. Alan wound up taking out most of the stitches because I couldn't see them well enough. Now our border collie boy no longer has his cone head on and is relieved of the itching of those pesky stitches. For myself the unexpected flashback to the best times that Alan and I spend was pay enough for playing dog doctor first thing in the morning.

Inside the wood furnace, night. Photo by Alan 

Please, please, please, take a minute and read this post at Thoughts From the Middle of Nowhere. Maybe one of you can tell me just what the USDA is thinking of, trying to import chicken meat from China, where bird flu is rampant. I can't seem to think of a logical reason why we might want to do something quite that dumb.
Thanks

Liz and Sequoia, one of her cow buddies 

Just as we were about to head upstairs last night, the house filled up with smoke. It smelled like it might have been coming from the woodstove, kind of sweet, and grandpa's pipish, but we couldn't be sure. So we looked. The upstairs was innocent, no tinge of smoky air there. We therefore descended deep into the bowels of the cellar.

I hate it down there. The stairs are steep with a wobbly railing. It is dark and crawly and full of weird things left behind by previous tenants. I just don't like it. However, there was no doubt that the smoke was thicker down there, although it didn't trigger the smoke detectors.

The scent was evasive, clearly there, but not traceable. The boss took off the back of the oil furnace, the fan of which runs air over the plenum from the woodstove, to turn hot water into hot air to warm us. The belt that drives the fan was severely cracked, not much more than flapping idly at the pulley, so he replaced it with one that was hanging from the chimney and turned it on.

Bang, it sprang into action faster than it has run in years. Dust billowed out of the registers all through the house. We have had at least THREE different repairmen look at three different problems with that old air furnace in the past couple of years, including an annual tune-up, wherein they are supposed to find problems like that. None of them spotted the cracked belt. It has certainly been that way for a long time, as the furnace is pushing more air than it ever has in the four years we have lived up here. Boy am I going to have some dusting to do. We checked all the smoke detectors and left Gael the run of the house. She will wake us up if a heifer so much as bawls off key, so we figured she would be a good addition to the more traditional safety technology.

Then as a last resort I went outside with a flashlight to see if I could find the source of the smoke. Sure enough there was a soft, gentle, southerly breeze blowing. The plume of steamy smoke from the stove curled quietly up over the apple tree and right down to the cellar window. Talk about a wild goose chase. Oh, well, I FINALLY got the boss to show me how to change the furnace filters and we found the bad belt. We should be warmer now.

Just one question on this morning's topic. When are they going to start sneaking a little peek into the character (or lack thereof) of the folks they hire to teach, coach and monitor our kids at public schools? You have to undergo a background check, finger-printing, wear a badge etc., etc., etc. to "cool out" hot horses at the race track. I know this because I used to do that little job, and the maps of my calloused finger tips are no doubt still on file somewhere. However, you can look after innocent children without doing any of that stuff because teachers have a heck of lot better union than hot walkers.


Anyhow, here is another sex offender and this time he was working at OUR school! He was coaching the swim team, teaching fourth grade and, for an extra-curricular activity, hitting on the children placed in his care...right where we personally entrust our two younger children every day. Nice huh? I suppose I should be glad this his alleged victim was a sixteen year old rather than one of his fourth grade students. And glad that none of our kids was in his class or on the swim team.

Rumor among the students says that the girl's father beat the stuffing out of him. Good move.

People ask us all the time, "Why do you have a big scale in your dining room?"