This morning I went with Roxanne to Cha-Liz farm, where they are conducting a study on the effect of diet during the dry period on health after calving. This involves taking blood samples from 20-25 cows every day. It’s actually very simple, because we draw blood from the tail vein. It’s harder to miss the vein than it is to find it, and the cows don’t need more restraint than just standing in the stall provides. When we got back to Miner, Anna said we had a cow that had suddenly gone blind. It turns out she has the cow version of pink eye. Part of the treatment included giving her a sulfanomide antibiotic in her vein, and I got to place the IV. The interesting thing about sulfanomide drugs is that they are secreted from the body in the tears, among other routes, so we know the drug will attack the infection in her eyes. I went up to the hutches to say hi to the calves and here is a picture of our C-section calf, who is making good progress.
Sunday morning, I did fresh check by myself. It was pretty straightforward. The most exciting part was when I listened to 1144. She’s been on glycol all week and was still not making very much milk. We had expected her to have a DA but she had good rumen movement. We’ve listened to her everyday, just in case. I was telling Ralph about her, and decided I better listen to her just in case. Well, sure enough she had a DA, finally!
I milked Monday morning, and then we had a meeting with Wanda about our management project. She went over how to score the hocks and then we printed a list from Dairy Comp of all the cows. We split up the dairy barn and also did far dry and close up. That took most of the morning.
Here is a tomato update:
Ripe!
Ripe!
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