Northern Farmer

Looks like we have entered mud season. The temperature has stayed above freezing through the last couple of nights, which always melts lots of snow. The area that the cows are in is now quite muddy, although it is not as bad as it could be. Tonight I was reminded that the rubber boots I wear in the summer have holes in them. We took some bales of overly mature rye grass hay and spread them across some of the mud. There are a lot of seed heads in this hay, so spreading this bad hay should eventually result in some rye grass growing in the area.

Tonight I talked with Dr. Paul Dettloff, a veterinarian that specializes in organic/alternative treatment of livestock. My 15 year old daughter wants to get veterinary technology training and would like to learn alternative approaches to the treatment of livestock. I thought Dr. Dettloff might have some ideas on how my daughter can get this training. As I suspected, he said that you will not be able to get this sort of training in the normal veterinary programs, although some of the content in normal veterinary programs would be useful. He said that the only way to develop expertise in organic/alternative treatments would be through reading and searching out things. He recommended books by himself, Hubert Karreman, and C. Edgar Shaeffer. As far as I can tell, the books are:

“Alternative Treatments for Ruminant Animals”, by Dr. Paul Dettloff.
“Holistic Veterinary Care”, by Jerry Brunetti and Hubert Karreman. (actually a video)
“Treating Dairy Cows Naturally” Thoughts and Strategies”, by Hubert Karreman
“Homeopathy for the Herd”, by C. Edgar Shaeffer.

He said that treatment of dogs and cats with homeopathy is catching on and that there are a number of books on this subject. My daughter is primarily interested in large animals, so we will probably skip this area, at least for the time being. Dr. Dettloff said that learning animal nutrition, for example the mineral needs of livestock, as well as understanding soils is important. He recommended that my daughter read some good books on soils, a number of which are sold by Acres USA. Dr. Dettloff also offers a two day organic veterinary workshop, which we will probably have my daughter attend at some point. We had my oldest son attend this workshop when he was 13 years old. I have also thought about sending my daughter to AI training. This past week I looked into getting the book “Mineral Levels in Animal Health - Diagnostic Data”, by Robert Puls - which was recommended by Gearld Fry. I think something like this would also be good for my daughter to study. Unfortunately this book comes in a three volume set costing $195. The entire set also includes “Mineral Levels in Animal Health - Bibliographies” and “Vitamin Levels in Animal Health”. Individual volumes are available only by returning the ones you don’t want. Looks like I will have to start saving my pennies so that I can get books and training for my daughter. I did ask Dr. Dettloff if there are any veterinarians in southern Minnesota that he thought could help my daughter get the necessary training. He laughed and said that he grew up in southern Minnesota and everything is a corn and soybean rotation with the whole world getting sprayed with chemicals. In other words Big Ag has a large influence in my area.

Jim V

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Jim V. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.