Everyone is Pregnant!

Very pregnant "Frenchy" couldn't fit into the cattle chute.
 

My large animal vet, Dr. Gano from Orchard Veterinary Practice in Wilmington, spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon worming, vaccinating and pregnancy checking the herd.  I am happy to report that all the girls are pregnant.  Valentine and Vera B. seem to be carrying their AI'd calves and should calve March 23 to Burbank.  The others will calve  between March and June with calves from either BTAP Thor or CEH In Focus (Bobby).

Running my animals through the cattle chute is always a difficult process. They all know from past experience that time in the chute means pain and some indignities (pregnancy checking). And too, the chute is a tight fit for my big Limousin cattle.  Yesterday, the chute was too small for several of the more pregnant cows.  French Silk Pie, better known as Frenchy was a case in point. She doesn't have a deep body like Violet and Valentine. Frenchy is round like a barrel and the closer she get to calving the rounder she gets.  She refused to squeeze into the chute and instead tried to do her imitation of a deer and jump the corral. 

Unfortunately for the corral she was too pregnant to make it over. Big tall Frenchy reared up on her hind legs and tried to jump over the corral gate but only managed to get her self hung up on the gate with her pregnant belly holding her back. For about five minutes she teetered on the gate  - which she bent beyond repair, first her hind feet on the ground, then her front feet on the ground, unable to get her belly over the gate. She was cutting off her air and getting panicked. It took three of us to get the corral panels detached from the gate so the gate would collapse and release her.  An 1800 pound pregnant cow hung up on a gate puts a lot of pressure on the gate fasteners, but we finally got her free and she happily returned to munching hay like nothing had happened. The vet assured me she had not damaged her unborn calf.

BTAP Thor, coming two year old bull

BTAP Thor, the coming two year old bull, hadn't been in the chute since he was a calf.  When it was his turn he ran down the runway and into the chute thinking he could run right through it. Imagine his surprise and fury when he was caught in the head gate. He fought the chute like a demon, trying like crazy to get out, but all he managed to do was make a lot of noise and rock the chute from side to side. He got his vaccinations and worming pour on despite all the ruckus. Next year he will be too big for that chute, but next year hopefully he will be living on some other farm!

At the end of the day I headed for the house exhausted and achy from man handling all those 1500 to 1800 pound frightened babies.  The former show girls who had been halter broke were much easier to handle then the general range cattle - like Frenchy - and I renewed my determination to halter break this years calves.  Already ZZ Tom has a major "bull" attitude and little BTAP Zooey, who had her first time in the chute and didn't like shots and ear piercings at all, is as wild as a deer.  As I reached for the Advil bottle I silently vowed to get those two locked up in the barn this winter for some serious manners training.

Garden Gone to Bed

Breaking dawn, about 7:45 this morning. Chores are finished.  Notice the oak tree on the right. It doesn't shed its leaves until spring.

Heavy frosts this last week have taken their toll on the garden. It is almost December after all, but I hate to see the end of the season.  The Swiss chard and the kale are looking very droopy and the cabbage and broccoli haven't grown in a month.  I did manage to find three smallish beets out of the entire beet patch.  Something is not right with my garden and beets.  Perhaps my cow and chicken manure rich compost is not good for them. Time to do some research!

Green Oak Leaf lettuce

I cut the last of the fall lettuce - which was the green Oak Leaf variety. That was the only one of the fall lettuces that grew well. I still have the patch covered with floating row cover but I doubt the plants will put on any new leaves this late in the season.

Round bales of hay, each weighing about 700 pounds. Twenty six of them arrived last Sunday morning. Forty three more to come. We are feeding 25 head of cattle who eat an average of 25 to 30 pounds of hay a day. You do the math!

The calves who live in the field next to the garden stand at the fence and beg for chard, kale, broccoli and cabbage plants.  Everyday I pull three or four plants and toss them over the fence. They are getting a good diet of grass hay and crimped corn (not cracked, which has had the good parts removed) which will help them grow to their full potential, but a little extra vitamin rich greens go down well.

The calves in for their morning feed.

 

 Ghoulish morning picture eyes!  Left to right, ZZ Tom, the Angus heifer and the little Angus bull.  ZZ Tom is twice the size of the Angus bull and he's only three weeks older. If I every questioned my decision to raise Limousin cattle over Angus, this set of three calves shows why people buy my bulls to breed to their Angus and crossbred cows. The Limousin bull calf, ZZ Tom is twice the size of the Angus bull calf and he's only three weeks older! If you are raising feeder calves to sell at six to nin months and you are paid by the pound, which calf do you think you'd want to be selling?  In a year or two the Angus  may be the same size, but that's a lot of time and feed in between.

Drought and Poison Pasture Plants

Poison Hemlock- kill this weed whenever you see it - even use harsh herbicides if you must, it is that bad for you, your children and your pets.

We moved to our farm in 1955 when I was just four years old.  My Dad took his day off from his medical practice on Thursdays and he devoted the day to chores on our farm. He and my mother kept a small herd of Hereford cattle, some chickens and a small herd of sheep.  We kids went with him while he mended fences and walked the fields checking on the cattle. Those trips around the farm are what developed our love of nature. 


Ground cherries, one of the poisonous nightshade family of plants. We love some of the non-poisonous ones such as white potatoes and tomatoes.

While we walked the fields my Dad would pull up weeds, cursing under his breath and naming them as we walked.  Canadian thistles were always a problem and he worked diligently to root them out. But his most hated were things like milkweed, jimson weed and horse nettle, another of the deadly nightshade family.  We learned to pull those weeds whenever we saw them and to never ever put anything we found in the pastures in our mouths.  Dad wanted to keep those weeds out of the pastures just in case a cow or sheep got a hold of one by mistake. They were all poisonous to our livestock. We worked diligently at eradicating those weeds and to my knowledge Dad never lost an animal to poisoneous plants.





We all love to blow these fluffy seeds in the wind, but don't do it!! Yes butterflies like the flowers but the plant is poisonous to livestock and those seeds scatter and grow everywhere.

 



Drought causes most of us some distress because our flowers, lawns and vegetable gardens all suffer from lack of rain.  It causes crop farmers stress because their crops don't grow well or not at all. Livestock farmers worry about our animals having enough pastures grasses to eat, but we also have to worry about  poisonous weeds that may have been crowded out by lush grasses and clovers in good rain times, but thrive when those same grasses and clovers go dormant in drought times. 

This fall my sister lost one of her  sheep to poisonous plants.  Her sheep are very old and don't like to travel far to graze.  When their pastures began to dry out and go dormant in late August, they traveled a little farther afield then usual and found some still green ground cherries and poison hemlock that had snuck into a small, seldom used corner of their pasture.   A trip with one of the sheep to Ohio State Veterinary hospital confirmed the problem.  Blackie died of a lack of thiamine (one of the B vitamins) , a critical nutrient in sheep. The thiamine was blocked from her system by the poison in the hemlock and the ground cherries.  The poison made her brain swell, blocking her optic nerve and causing sudden blindness. Then it went to work on her central nervous system and caused her to loose the use of her legs. A younger sheep might have survived with emergency treatment, but Blackie was over 20 years old and her system couldn't recover.

Needless to say, my sister went after those plants and destroyed them. More drought is predicated for 2013 and you can be sure we will all be walking out fence rows and pastures this coming spring, summer and fall rooting out any of these poisonous plants.