Calf Chores

With Captain going long days planting corn, the calf chores at home have fallen to me.  I get to do this for a few days every spring and a few days every fall.  Just enough to remind me I’m very thankful I don’t have to do it twice a day every day.

We buy baby bull calves from local farmers, and we raise them to market weight animals for butcher.  That’d be where you get your tasty steaks and burger, my friends!

We don’t usually get the calves until they are several days old, meaning they are no longer drinking from a bottle and therefore have to take their nourishment from a pail of milk.  Personally, I don’t mind bottle feeding calves, because they get the concept when you shove a bottle in their mouth.

Pails of milk...yeah, not so much.  

They don’t understand they need to put their noses DOWN into the pail to get what they want, so you have to trick them--I mean teach them--differently.  This involves sticking your fingers in their mouth and once they start sucking, put their head in the pail of milk.  

Of course, by doing so, I now have one arm elbow-deep in a pail of sticky milk, one hand holding the pail of milk which is also clamped between my knees to, hopefully, prevent the inevitable head butt.  All this in a stooped or hunched posture because my arms are too short to do otherwise.  I must make quite the picture to passersby.

A neighbor did tell us a trick years ago that was easier.  Use rubber duckies.  No lie!  If you put a rubber ducky in the pail of milk, the calf is intrigued by it, tries to suck on it, and in the process learns that if his nose is in the pail of milk, he gets to eat.  Weird, but it actually does work.

I couldn’t find any spare rubber duckies last night, so I had to resort to the old-fashioned approach to it.  And yes, in that stooped posture over a pail of milk and a hungry calf, the inevitable head butt causes more of the milk to flume out of the pail and into my face, hair, and eyes than sometimes get into the calf.  Now I’m also wet and stinky.  Joy and rapture.  

But sometimes they are so darn cute, you just can’t get mad!  Well, yeah, I can...but I get over it fairly quickly.  How can you look at this face and be mad?

My mom told me when I was helping her feed calves when I was a kid, that the calves head butted like that because when they were nursing from Mama Cow, that head butt would stimulate milk flow.  I bought it at the time because--hey--I was just a dumb kid and didn’t know better.

Now that I am older and wiser and have done some nursing of offspring myself, I am here to testify that if I had been head butted like that during nursing, I’d have dropped the baby on the floor and curled up in the fetal position crying.  That cannot feel good to a cow!  

Anyway, I am on calf duty for a few days.  This is always interesting.

Captain approaches this quite differently than I do.  He mixes all the milk (water and powdered milk replacer) in a 5-gallon pail in our milkhouse in the barn, and he carries the pail to Calf Country where he divides the milk into individual pails.  This is all well and good for him because he is a big strong man.  Me?  I’m a weak, out-of-shape woman of a certain age.  I have to mix the milk in the individual pails and carry those out to Calf Country.  

I can carry four of those smaller pails at one time, which works out well if we are only feeding, say, 8 calves.  We get up over 10 calves, and that is a lot of trips back and forth from the milkhouse to Calf Country.  I try to be positive and think of it as my exercise program.  I don’t always convince myself, though.  

Once everyone’s tummy is happy in Calf Country, all those pails need to be washed.  Not a big deal you might say, and you might be right if the milkhouse had a working floor drain.  Alas, ours does not, so the wash water needs to stay contained in the 5-gallon pail while the smaller pails are dunked and scrubbed in it.  After the final washing, that water needs to be carried outside and dumped out on the ground.  It’s not complicated, it’s just harder than it needs to be.  But it is doable, and I got it done.  

I’ll do it again for the next few days.  This is my contribution to the farming thing while Captain is otherwise occupied.  I can’t drive the tractor and planter, so I have to do what I can here at home.  If you want to find me, look in Calf Country!