Well, the weather broke from winter early again this year. With calving season approaching quickly it was a rush to get the fences up and working across the creek to let the cows out before calves came. Between work and farm we have been crazy busy and I haven't had a break to share much. I decided to take a minute tonight to update everyone and realized that more than a month has passed already since my last post.
It wasn't long after that the calves started coming. So far we have had 15 cows have their calves. Here are some of them. First up is the son of one of the Belted Galloways!
This one is a daughter to Thaleia. She is a purebred Shorthorn show heifer that I traded two calves to get a little over a year and a half ago. She was bred to a Lineback bull that I borrowed off of my cousin. Lineback is a duel purpose heritage cattle breed that is primarily used for dairy. We used him cause he was smaller and the heifers would be able to hold his weight. The side benefit was some pretty awesome looking calves!!
The same day, literally within minutes of each other, another purebred shorthorn named tiger woods after her dad, had a little girl as well. She is most definitely a daughter of the Lineback bull and has a very classic and almost perfect Lineback breed color markings.
A picture of a bunch of the babies together.
Here is another of the Lineback calf. This one is a bull and is also from a shorthorn bred to the Lineback bull.
This is most definitely a legacy calf!!!
Baby girl finally had her own baby. A huge bull calf and she did it all by herself.
Now, with all the good things that have been happening we have also had some sad things happen as well. We will start with Baby Girl's baby boy. He started off ok but only lived for a few days. We are not sure if he got sick or if he got stepped on but ended up dying. The weather turned cold and very wet shortly after he was born and remained that way all week. We ended up having two more born, including a bull to our first cow Fifty, both of which only lived a little over a day. We also had a pair of twins born, both of which didn't make it. At this time we are not sure what is going on. We are thinking it is a combination of Selenium deficiency and cold wet weather coming together to cause the calves to be too weak to eat properly and not getting the ever important Colostrum. We have adjusted to giving vitamin and selenium shots at birth from here on out. However, we have another little girl that was born late last week in the early hours of the same rain storm that is not doing well today. She has been given all the shots and now we must wait to see if she will pull through or not. Only time will tell. At this time we have had 16 calves born to 15 cows and we currently have 10 left. Not a great year so far. Next year we will be pushing calving back some more to mid April to allow the pastures to be farther along and the weather to be much more reliably nicer.
Now, with all the unhappy events going on we still have plenty to be excited about and to discover. This is a fairy shrimp and they naturally occur in vernal water pools in this area each spring. They are not very big but are cool to see just swimming in the water pools in the pasture! You can see a video of them swimming on our Conser Run Farm Facebook Page.!
Another spring animal making its appearance right now is the spring peeper!! This tiny little frog makes a very enormous amount of noise while calling for a mate! The sound is so loud that it can literally hurt your ears when you are in an area with lots of them around and peeping at the same time!
Zeus was with me to run to town the other day....can you tell that he really was happy to be along for the ride???
The owner of one of the fields I rent had a contractor come in and clear back the edges of the field. The previous tenant that farmed this field didn't farm nor clean the field to the edges and the trees were grown out in places up to 40 feet into the field. While clearing and cleaning they uncovered a rock that they couldn't move and only had a small part (4'x2'x2') sticking out of the ground. It took me about 30 minutes to dig around the entire rock and loosen and roll it out. Now I just gotta get the edges worked down and seeded as soon as the wet weather breaks!!
We got the kids each identical bikes a few years back. They have put many miles on them to date and they are pretty worn out. So Saturday we went to town and they picked out new bikes! They have upgraded to bikes with gears now!!! They have finally figured out how to shift them. Lisa has a seven speed and Alex has a six speed.
It is getting late and I must be off to bed, 4:40am comes quite early!
Let hope the rest of calving goes without any more losses. We really hoped to make it past 20 calves this year but now we will be lucky to have as many as we did last year with 7 more births than we had last year.
Good night everyone and have a great week!
Kenny
