Monday, June 4, 2007

Today turned out to be a very interesting day. I talked to Anna last night when we were all roasting marshmallows over the gas grill. She said that Mondays are usually quiet but that you never know what will come up. Well, today was one of those days. I got there are 7:30 and Anna said there were 2 heifers born last night, but both were dead. She said when it's a bull calf you don't mind as much (since it will leave the farm anyway-bull calves aren't much good for making milk), but when it's a heifer, it hurts. The first thing we did was move the 2 cows to the milking barn. The cow in the picture in Sunday's post was the mother of one of the dead calves. She had a really hard calving and the calf just didn't make it. She also had a very weird, very large mass in her uterus that she passed before the calf. The technical term is 'undifferentiated mass.' It's like a fetus that turned into a tumor. Very strange. The vet even said he'd never seen anything like it. They weren't expecting the other cow to calve for another 2 months because the vet had though she was pregnant off a 2nd breeding that was 60 days after the first. It turned out she was pregnant off of the 1st breeding and they moved her into a calving pen in the nick of time. We got the first cow loaded on the trailer to move her, and we were trying to load the other one, but she slipped out of the barn! Luckily there wasn't really anywhere she could go and in a few minutes we had her back in the pen. That was the first excitement of the day.

After we got those 2 cows moved, I walked through the pen in the dairy barn that holds the cows that just calved. These cows are called 'fresh.' We check their temperatures and make sure they are doing well. In the same pen are cows that have to be on any drugs that would be present in the milk. Their milk does not get sold. These cows usually get one or two drugs, Naxcel and/or Banamine. Naxcel is an antibiotic and Banamine is a pain reliever. They are injected into the muscle, and I get to give those shots. Another condition cows can have is ketosis. This makes them very lethargic and is a result of the liver trying to break down more fat than it can handle. It can also happen to people who go on the Atkins diet. These cows get propylene glycol, which is basically straight carbohydrates to try and get their bodies to digest carbs instead of fat. There is a dosing gun and you squirt it right into their mouths, and I got to do that today too. All of that was before lunch!

After lunch, we went over to the greenhouse (where the younger calves are) and I watched Wanda (the program director) choose the calves that we could show. One that I really liked was approved for showing, so I think I will get to pick her. Her number is 1371. She has a dark face with a little patch of white. I will have pictures as soon as possible! I'm considering Clover for a name. It seems like a good cow name to me. After that, we went back to the dry barn, where the heifers and soon-to-calve cows are, and dissected the weird mass. It was basically a bunch of fluid filled sacks. The girl with the hat is Katy and the other girl that's not me is Melisa. After dissecting it, we had to take it to the compost pile. It's been raining off and on since last Thursday, so it was pretty muddy. Consequently, we got the truck stuck. We tried for almost an hour to get it out, and while we got it turned around, we just could not get it to budge any farther forward or backward, even though we thought we had it in 4-wheel drive. Katy is sitting on the hood and Kristy is in the blue shirt.
Finally, Anna came looking for us and we all tried to push while she drove, but it still wouldn't move. We rode back to the farm in Anna's truck to go get a tractor to pull it out. Mark, the guy who brought the tractor out to the compost pile, took one look at it, and turned these little knobs on the front tires that you have to turn to get it into 4-wheel drive. Then he got behind the wheel, and promptly drove out of the mud. The offending knob (you can only read LOCK and FREE because I wiped the dirt off):
When we got back to the barn I helped Anna finish ear-notching and vaccinating these heifers. They take a little piece of the ear and send it away to be sampled for something, but I didn't catch what. The vaccine was for rabies, and that's what I did. I'm getting pretty good at it, I think. It's a lot easier to push 2 mL of rabies vaccine into a thin-skinned heifer than to push 20 mL of Banamine or Naxcel into a big thick-skinned cow. There were a lot of heifers in that pen, and it felt like a very productive day when we finished.