Happy Calf
April 6th, 2015 · No Comments · Posted in farming
Our new boy calf, Del (short for Delmonico), celebrated his two-week anniversary yesterday and he seems to be doing just fine. When he isn’t nursing, he’s snoozing in a pile of hay or bounding around the paddock. He likes hanging with the sheep. They’re more his size. Maybe he thinks he IS a sheep.
My nephew Quinn flew in over the weekend from Chicago for a visit with his sister, Julia, who attends college in Burlington. I loaned him a pair of boots and suddenly he looked like he was born to farm. But don’t be misled by the photo. Del is not a pet. He doesn’t come when you call him. In fact, he normally shies from human contact. Quinn just happend to catch up with him while Del was nuzzling his mom. Next step is to turn him into a steer. Not much longer for that.
Meanwhile, I continue to milk Emily twice a day. Cows have four quarters in their utter, each filled separately with milk. Del seems to prefer the front two quarters. So after I test those to make sure they’re in good working order, I move around to the rear. First I lead Emily into the pen we set up in the walk-in shelter, then attach her to a very short lead in one corner where I set her feed bucket with fresh grain. Emily is still fidgety when it comes to being milked. As long as she’s eating, she’ll stand still long enough for me to mostly drain those two rear quarters.
After a few minutes, my hands usually scream out in protest. I have to take occasional breaks to rub the cramps out of them. It’s all the more difficult because Emily’s teats in the rear are shorter than the ones in front. There’s not a lot to grab onto. For the time being, I’m just milk her onto the ground. We’re not so far along that we’ve actually started collecting and processing the milk. We want to get her good and trained, then we’ll try attaching our new mechanical milker and see how that works.
As our friend Jim pointed out when he first saw the new milker over the weekend, the time we save milking with a machine will probably be spent cleaning the machinery after each use. But that’s okay, since we gain a lot more in sanitation not milking by hand into an open bucket. And, we’ll save the wear and tear on our bodies, already stiff and sore from farm work. In addition, we can be pretty confident of draining out Emily’s udder completely, meaning collecting all the cream and butter fat.
Now we have to think about how much we want to share Emily with he calf. On most dairy farms, the calves are separated from their mothers fairly quickly, then fed off a bottle or out of a bucket. Our farm isn’t exactly set up for separate cows. We’ll just have to see how that part plays out. We don’t plan to turn Del into steaks for another year and a half. Meanwhile, Emily would be due to get pregnant again and have another calf next spring to continue the milking cycle.
Sound complicated?
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