With an abundance of milk comes an abundance of uses. One easy way to not waste fresh milk is to find something to feed it to. My family of four, 3 dogs and 10 chickens are not enough to consume what this dairy cow can put out. We realized this last year and prepared this year by bringing in an extra calf a few days before Mabel delivered. The idea is to give the new momma an immediate second baby so she doesn’t know any different. And that, we did.
Mid March is not the time to buy bottle babies as they can be a bit expensive, but when you are overflowing in milk, it is the quickest solution. We purchased two additional calves on top of the two we already had. Growing extra calves on Mabel’s milk generally returns a profit in the fall when it is time to sell them. Mabel would produce that much milk whether we had extra calves or not and so finding something that generates an income seems like the wisest option.
The first calf we purchased was an easy graft, a little twin that had a slow start. With only one more to find before Mabel decided she was done accepting new children, I grabbed the first opportunity that came up. Looking back, I will consider this a lesson learned. The calf was 10 days old and while that might not be the biggest issue, top it with the fact that his momma was crazy and you have a dumb decision. The calf was only about a mile away and I figured it couldn’t get any easier than that! As I backed the truck in, the seller informed me that he was taking his cow to the sale the next day due to her udder not fully functioning (she only had two good quarters which wasn’t enough to raise a calf). What I should have been concerned about was not her state, but her actions. She looked like she wanted to eat me for dinner even though she was in a pen alone. I know a nervous cow who just wants her baby, but this girl wasn’t just nervous, she was pissed. The guy went into a side stall to go grab the baby. A 10 day old calf is strong, but generally no match for a grown man. In this case, it was almost a match. Again, I should have paid attention and walked away. However, I did not …and brought the little ball of fire home.
I had a friend help me unload him into a stall and when he stood there, all I could think of was a Mexican fighting bull. He looked like a mini version of the pictures you see where they stand up tall with their eyes fixated on “dead” ahead. Regardless, I let him settle in and figured I’d introduce him to Mabel once my husband was home.
Evening rolled around and I went to show the boys the new addition. While getting stalls ready to house a new comer, my husband was moving feed through the entrance gates. This little ball of fire decided it was not his day to meet his new mom and he booked it out the gate between my husbands legs. From that point on, he never stopped running. Forget that his own species was in my pasture, this guy was not having it. He took off across the street and over the next 30 minutes he cleared about 15 fences, ran through 7 different properties and had an army of 3 of us after him. My husband was on foot and I was in a small utility vehicle while my mother in law blocked the road to the highway with her truck. We had many close calls, many “almost got him” but he finally found himself an open pasture where he won …and we lost. My husband never gave up and tracked him on foot until he got close enough to rope him. At this point I wasn’t sure if I would find both of them alive because I could only imagine what my “not so cow loving” husband was thinking. Lo and behold though, I took our ditch maintenance road through a few of our neighbors pastures and just as I was getting ready to head home, I saw them out of the corner of my eye.
Needless to say he was on house arrest/quarantine or whatever you want to call it…and he never went anywhere without a rope around his neck. He never did take a bottle, but he did take to Mabel…which meant he could stay.
