Northern Farmer

The last couple of days we’ve gotten some very nice rains. It was starting to get a little dry, so the rains came at just the right time. The corn is just emerging and the pastures are lush and green. I have cattle on pasture at home and also on a small pasture that I rent from a neighbor. The neighbor has been very enjoyable to work with. We supply him with milk and we buy hay from him This neighbor has roughly twenty head of cattle in complete confinement. He does not clean out his cattle pens very often and when the rains come, the water tends to wash into the cattle pens. Only a few feet away from his confined cattle, my cattle get to have fresh grass and romp around outside. I rotationally graze this pasture and the cattle on it do very well. This year the neighbor decided to put some cows with their calves out onto pasture. At first I wondered if there would be enough land to support all the cattle I wanted to put on the pasture, plus the neighbor’s cows. Fortunately the neighbor is allowing me to fence in a larger area that will be big enough to support all the cattle on pasture. But this means building and maintaining more fence on the neighbor’s property – a task that falls completely on my shoulders since the neighbor is overwhelmed planting corn and soybeans on 700 acres. I am putting up electric fence since much of the fencing needs to be temporary. Much of the fence will go in an area where there is a lot of deer traffic, so I will have to figure out a way to avoid the deer destroying portions of the fence. I am planning on hanging portions of tin cans containing small amounts of peanut butter on the electric fence – hoping that they are curious enough to go for the peanut butter and get shocked on the nose. Last year I had some temporary fence in the same high traffic deer area and had portions of the fence utterly destroyed a couple of times.

I think the neighbor was prompted to put cattle onto pasture because one of the newborn calves was starting to scour even though it was with its mother. An older dairy farmer told the neighbor that he had better get the mother cow out on pasture so that its milk would have some vitamins. I am now trying to convince the neighbor to keep just a few cattle and keep them on pasture all year except during the winter. During spring and fall field work, he has a hard time keeping up with everything. If you don’t take care of the little details and stay on top of things, animals can go down very quickly. Last week one of the neighbor’s cows had triplets. The triplet calves were all born dead – probably because they were premature and their lungs weren’t completely developed. Each calf weighed about 50 pounds, so this cow produced a lot of baby. The neighbor decided to not milk her out because he didn’t want her to get milk fever. Probably as a result of not getting milked out, the cow then got gangrene (it doesn’t smell good). This morning when I went to check the cattle on pasture, this cow was dead - $1000 down the drain. I am taking this as a warning to make sure that I don’t take on more than I can handle and that I should do my best to stay on top of things – keeping my livestock clean, healthy and well cared for.

Jim V

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 10:10 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.