Category: Faith

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Chasing “New”

chasing new heifers

It’s breeding season on the farm and we are in full swing! We have been super busy with cattle breeding. It’s always fun to plan for the next year’s calf crop, but it is also a little stressful! Should we or shouldn’t? That is always the question. Who to breed who to? What bull should we use? It also seems that we, along with every other cattle breeder, are always chasing new bulls. Who’s the next “great” bull? Who’s new?

We put a lot of time and homework into choosing the “right” bull to breed to each cow. It takes a lot of planning and we try to have a wide variety. It does always seem like we find ourselves chasing new bulls, new pedigrees and trying to make something great happen. This year we had a couple of different options and some of those made us stop and really think. One of the items we like to look at is progeny. What do past calves of the animal look like? Are there a lot of calves registered to a particular bull? If there aren’t, it makes you wonder why not?

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Cattle Troughs & Christmas

heifer cows at the cattle trough

This time of year we are feeding cattle. In the fall season and moving into winter, the summer grass is dying and mostly gone and the winter pastures aren’t ready for grazing yet. Cattle are fed everyday. Hay has to be put out and cattle troughs become well used on the farm.

A portion of the cattle are getting fed daily. Someone has to fill 5 gal buckets daily to take out to the pens and fill the cattle troughs. The weaned heifers and bulls are fed to help them continue to grow once they are no long being fed by the cows. Then there are the feed out cattle. They need to eat and grow as much as possible to get ready for slaughter.

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Check on Them

check on them it's calving season

With everybody out of town except for me, a lot of the duties of the farm fell my way! I had to feed up every day, put out hay, and most importantly, I was on mom duty! I had to check on them. It is calving season and every day, sometimes multiple times a day, I had to go out and check on cattle. Not only do the expectant moms need checking, but the recently calved as well. Calves need to be checked to ensure that they are growing getting what they need!

Cows are just like humans in a lot of ways….not every new mom knows what to do and not every baby either! We had one kid that couldn’t figure out nursing and had to move to a bottle and cows are no different. Most of the time, nature does know how to take care of itself, but every now and then there’s a calf that has issues or is too weak or just can’t figure out how to nurse! There are times that cows have trouble giving birth, calves can be breach or even com backwards!

So having cows at calving time means riding around and checking the moms. While everyone was gone, I had two calves come easy, one set of twins and one that was born and fell in the pond! It was a crazy two weeks!

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