Boy, spring broke in like that polar bear who stuck his head in around here last December. I don’t have any cows to feed or have much about agriculture to worry about, but my friends have lost calves in the arctic weather, something we have not seen in many recent years. It used to be that you could go to the sale barn to buy an orphan dairy calf and put it on a cow that lost one and still have something to sell next fall. It isn’t like that now. Plus, that trick could become a lot of work. We once had a Shorthorn/Hereford cross cow that lost her calf so we bought a big Guernsey cross calf to put on her.
She knew from day one that wasn’t her calf and she wanted no part of it. My partner Monty said, “Don’t worry, she’s a good mother. She will accept it.” So morning and night we locked her head in a stanchion and I guess swore at her stubbornness for not accepting Willy. But she never liked him and after several unsuccessful turnouts, we’d take her back to the barn, lock her head up and let her un-adopted baby suck.
The last time we turned her out Willy was getting pretty big but to no avail she would not accept him. Out in the pasture one of us swore at her, she stopped and let him suck. He wasn’t going to miss a meal, boy, he was there and getting his share. So twice a day we had to threaten her verbally and she stopped for him. She was so mad that we made her do that she would actually tremble while he was nursing.
We sold Willy that fall and he weighed about 400 pounds. Not bad for a calf that looked straight Guernsey. From then on she raised her own calf each year. A real good beef cow whom sure resisted adoption.
In our efforts to start a beef herd we bought a weaned brindle-white face heifer at the sale barn. She was a big pet that was obviously raised and bottle-fed. She didn’t cost much as I recall and she grew out well. But when she calved she had enough milk for three calves. We even hand-milked her to ease her troubles. We didn’t intend to do that very long so we hit the sale barn trail and bought two small cheap calves.
We put them in with her calf in a horse stall and turned her in twice a day until they bawled for her and her for them. She loved and licked them all and was very motherly, she led them around bawling until the last one came to nurse. It looked liked like a parade as they came across the pasture, one white-faced and two brindles after him. They were all one content family. When you’re a two-bit rancher you do lots of things to survive.
The first two gilts I ever farrowed was another story. They were big good-natured sows my sister-in-law raised; we bought and had them bred by a neighbor’s boar. I built a nice farrowing house with a heat lamp on a 50-foot extension cord or maybe longer from the house. They worked fine. As they were bedded with straw in pens side-by-side they both decided to have pigs at the same time when a real blizzard blew in. They must have had 10 pigs apiece at the same time. Pat and I were taking them to the house but they were dying faster than we could run to the house with them. I bet there are lots of you can relate to those wrecks. They call it farming or ranching. If things can go wrong, they do.
God bless you, your family and America, Dusty Richards
