Remedial 4-H

January 4-11, 2008

2008-05-07T20:41:00.000-07:00

Miner reunion!

I came up to Vermont and stayed with Wanda so I could ride along with Dr. Henderson and the others at Northwest Vets. I watched a LOT of pregnancy checks and palpations. I think I will make it my goal in life to be as good at palpating as Dr. Henderson is. It’s all the more impressive when you think about the fact that a cow’s ovaries are only the size of pecans, and first you have to find them, and then you’re feeling them through layers of gloves and intestine. I also saw a lot of DA surgeries, 7 LDAs and 1 RDA. I helped prep for all of them, by clipping and scrubbing the surgical site. We dehorned quite a few calves, too, and I got to give the injection of lidocaine and Rompun that numbs the horns and sedates the calves. But that was just the boring stuff!

There was a farm that had almost 100 calves come down with a bad respiratory infections, so we did tracheal washes to try to figure out what was causing it. To do a trach wash, you have to insert a needle through the wall of the trachea, then thread a catheter through that needle. Twenty or thirty mLs of sterile saline are injected through the trachea, and then you try to recover as much as you can so it can be cultured. What I learned from that was that I hope I never need one done to me.

One of the most interesting cases was a post-mortem exam. We found huge blood clots, which indicated the cow died from acidosis or rumenitis, but I’m not sure how a stomach problem could cause blood clots. Maybe it’s that ulcers developed and then perforated.

One of the farms we went to had cows with horns—that was scary! I stayed entirely out of the way until the cow we needed to work on was tied up. She turned out to have pneumonia and a uterine infection. That same day, at a different farm, we did a DA on a cow with a terrible uterine infection. Dr. Henderson drained at least a gallon of pus from her uterus.

The most fun cases were ones I could help with. I placed 2 IVs that week, which I supposed might get boring eventually, but right now, I still think it’s cool. Whoever came up with the idea that you could stick a needle through a creature’s skin and find its blood vessels and let blood out? Placing IVs also reminds me of one of the perks large animal medicine has over small animal and human medicine: huge veins.

My favorite part of the whole week was visiting Miner and seeing Anna and Cricket.

It was terrific to see everyone again! Claire and Lindsey were there, too, and we called Blake and he told us about getting into vet school, which is awesome. The coolest part was the Cricket really seemed like she remembered me. Later in the week, I went to a conference with Anna in Burlington. It was the Poulin Grain Dairy Producers Conference on Feeding and Forages in the New World. Most of it was over my head, but some of the parts that dealt with chemistry I understood.

All in all, it was a great week and I was so glad I got to visit Miner again. I’m hoping to make a trip up this summer, maybe for the fair. Doing my thesis project on mastitis this year has given me lots of tastes of dairy farming, so that has been nice. I have to reiterate what I said in my last post: farming agrees with me. This spring, I have really felt that strongly. What I’m loving about it now, with the changing seasons, is how it is tied inextricably to nature. No matter how technological agriculture gets in the next decades, crops will still have to planted in the spring and harvested in the fall, and I like that.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

2007-08-14T15:09:00.000-07:00

Well, it's officially the beginning of the end. I've started packing, and I wish I'd written down what I packed in each bag and box. It's like trying to do a puzzle without looking at the box top. It's impossible not to think back on the summer as I fold my Carhartts and wonder where I'm going to pack the armload of books I have. Big things stand out, but it's the little things that round out any experience and make it real. Like my friend Chris says, it's the little things; there's nothing bigger. It is the little things that I hope I'll remember:

The sound of the milk truck braking to turn into the farm driveway.
The train whistle, and hearing it get closer and closer and then farther and farther.
Coming home smelling like hay after merging all day, but mostly from pulling armloads of it out of the merger when it clogged.
Seeing the Milky Way on a clear night.
The sweet smell of the corn when it tassled, hanging over the whole farm.
All the different ways manure can smell, from just the way a barn should smell, to eye-watering.
Listening to country music lyrics that describe our days: "...cruisin back and forth to the Tastee-Freez..." "...he gets up before the dawn..." "...take the tractor another round..." "...it ain't always pretty, but it's real..."
The chicory that is my exact favorite shade of blue growing the whole length of the cornfield.
Dressing in the dark and eating breakfast by the light in the microwave.
Getting up with and going to bed with the sun.
The way getting mail could make an already good day 100 times better.
Picking sweet corn and eating it less than an hour later.
Eating tomato-basil salad with tomatoes and basil that I grew.

Based on these photos Mom emailed me, it seems I was always destined to end up spending at least one summer with dairy cows...
A paper mache cow with a rubber glove for an udder that we made at home. I was 6.

A visit to the University of Illinois ag research farm one summer. I was 7.

Friday, August 10, 2007

2007-08-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

I had a lot of time to think this week, sitting in the tractor, and spent most of it musing about farming. I even wrote some of it down:

Farming agrees with me. The combination of familiar routing and never quite knowing what each day will bring gives a comfortable stability and consistency that are never really boring. I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to run a farm, and in the process, learned a fair amount about myself. I like working outside. I love animals. I like working with people and the sense of accomplishment you get from cooperating to get a job done. I like the self-sufficiency of growing crops to feed our cows, and using our cows’ manure to feed our crops. I like how we strive everyday so our cows can do their job (making milk) better and easier. I like country music, especially now that I’ve experienced more of what the songs are about. These are experiences that are unique, yet I share them with countless people across the country and throughout the world, people who make it their business, their life’s work, to put food on the table for the rest of us. I like the way farming grows kids up and gives them a sense of purpose and direction. Never was I more sure of this than listening to two guys not any older than I am discussing how much fertilizer goes on their fields. I like the risk and the gamble of betting your life on Mother Nature’s whims. Maybe I am only fascinated by this aspect of farming because I’ve never experienced the loss it can produce, but farming wouldn’t be the same if, at the very bottom of it all, the ability to coax more corn out of the ground and more milk out of the cows didn’t matter.

As I enter my last week here, I am amazed by how fast the summer has gone by. Even with the corn as a very visual indicator of passing time, it doesn't seem possible that 3 whole months have passed. I am eager to get home and especially back to Chestertown, to my friends, professors, and eventually, my thesis, which I am proud to say has a topic that was inspired by my experiences here. Briefly, when our cows come down with mastitis, we have a range of antiobiotics available to treat them. Organic farms do not have this luxury, and thus concentrate their efforts on prevention. I want to compare the treatment and prevention of mastitis on conventional and organic dairy farms, and hopefully also compare which pathogens are present on the two different farms. Wanda invited me to conduct some of my research here at Miner, so I will be returning some time after Christmas to ride along with Dr. Henderson so I can interview some of his other clients.

It has certainly been a fabulous summer, and I am already looking forward to returning.

Thursday, August 9, 2007

2007-08-10T21:08:00.000-07:00

All this week I have been sitting in the tractor, stirring the manure pit. I finished both Farmer Boy and Harry Potter by Tuesday, tried to read James Joyce on Wednesday, and settled on James Herriot's Yorkshire for the rest of the week. So basically, stirring the pit for many days in a row is pretty boring, but not boring enough to read James Joyce.

Tonight Anna and I went to the Franklin County, NY Fair in Malone. This is the same fair where the Wilder's would have shown their animals, crops, and needlework. The cattle show is so big there that they have to split it between the Holsteins and the other breeds. The Holstein show ended Wednesday so we didn't see any of them, which meant we also didn't see any of the families we made friends with at Clinton County Fair. However, it also meant that we saw more of the other breeds than I have ever seen in once place, even Milking Shorthorns. So now I have seen, in person, all the dairy breeds. The main attraction (outside of the dairy barn) was bull-riding and it was pretty fun. Unfortunately it was dark and I didn't get any good pictures.

Saturday and Sunday, August 4-5, 2007

2007-08-09T14:25:00.000-07:00

Saturday I went out on the boat with Cory, his friend Keith, and Katy. It was a fabulous day, sunny, breezy, and clear. We put the boat in at Point Au Roche, about midway between Plattsburgh and Chazy, and then we took it to the Plattsburgh City Beach, anchored, and walked on the beach a little bit. Saturday night I went to Field Days again, this time with Anna, to see the tractor pulls. There was plenty to see other than tractors, too, like this corn that towered over my head. This little 4H heifer was named Mystery for the question mark on her face.
These were a team of Holstein steers named Teeny and Tiny. They were the biggest cattle I've ever seen! Each one weighs at least a ton and they aren't even finished growing yet. This picture really doesn't do justice to their size.
This tractor pull was much better than the one at Clinton County Fair, because the tractors were actual farm tractors, not souped up so much you couldn’t even tell they were tractors. Some of the tractors at Franklin County looked like they drove in straight from the fields.

Sunday I went to the Almanzo Wilder Homestead in Malone, NY. It was very cool to see the farm in real life, even though it had been years since I’d last read Farmer Boy, the story of Almanzo Wilder’s childhood. I bought a copy of the book at the gift shop and so far have enjoyed reading it with the images of the real farm in my head.

The Trout River where Almanzo fished and where sheep were washed.
Damselfly enjoying the beautiful weather.
Pumphouse. The
The original home of the Wilder's.
This tree is old enough to have been there when Almanzo was growing up.
The barns.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

2007-08-08T19:38:00.000-07:00

I was on equine today. In the morning we feed and much stalls. We finished pretty quickly so Christina and I took Sara driving.
I got to drive, too, which was really cool. Since you can’t use your legs to make the horse go faster, you have to use your voice (and the horse has to be trained to listen to you voice). Sara even knows the difference between “trot” and “trot UP” which means faster. In the afternoon I rode Reggie again.
This evening was Sean Stebbins’ farewell cookout, because he’s been working at Rover’s all summer but Wednesday is his last day there and then he goes home to VT. I made peach-blueberry cobbler again and everybody loved it!

Saturday-Monday, July 28-30, 2007

2007-08-08T19:20:00.000-07:00

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!

Friday, July 27, 2007

2007-08-08T19:12:00.000-07:00

The usual with Anna in the morning, then Ag Seminar at lunch. After lunch, Rick Grant met with the farm management students to go over the observational study we’re going to be conducting in our last three weeks. The goal is to come up with some recommendations about the freestalls. We will score the knees and hocks of the cows, and possibly score lameness for a few cows out of each pen. The scoring is based on the condition of the joins, whether they have rubs or sores from laying in the stalls or not. The lameness score is based on the ease or difficulty with which the cow moves. Then we will measure the amount of sawdust in the stalls at different distances from the fans at different times (e.g. immediately before new bedding is put in, immediately after new bedding is put in, and several hours after new bedding is put in). This is to determine the amount of sawdust blown away by the fans. Based on the condition of the hocks and the amount of bedding loss, we are supposed to recommend changes that will improve the condition of the hocks (we already know there are too many cows with sores or swelling).

Thursday, July 26, 2007

2007-08-05T17:59:00.000-07:00

Today is dry off day, which means we stop milking the cows that are 60 days from calving so they can have a rest and get ready to calve. It also means Thursday is moving day, because the cows we dry off come from pen 5, the low-producing pen, so cows from the high producing pens move into pen 5 to replace the ones we dried off, and cows from the far dry pen (60-30 days from calving) move to the close-up dry pen (30-0 days from calving). The cows we put in far dry and close up all need to be weighed and get shots, so it makes for a pretty full morning at the very least.

In the afternoon, Wanda’s husband, Jerry, gave a talk on cow evaluation. He works for Select Sires, which is the company that provides semen to us. Part of their job is to evaluate and score cows and bulls on 17 traits so that cows can be inseminated with bulls whose traits will improve upon the traits of the cow. The 17 traits are stature, dairy character, strength, body depth, rump angle, legs-side view, foot angle, fore udder, front teat placement, front teat length, rear udder height, rear udder width, udder support, udder depth, pelvic width, legs-rear view, and rear teat placement. For some of the traits, a high score is desirable, such as for strength and dairy character, although these should be balanced. For other traits, like rump angle and fore udder, a moderate score is ideal. It was very interesting to see the power point Jerry had, with extremes and ideals of each trait, because after paying attention to all of it, I could really see the differences in cows once we went out in the barn. It’s just knowing what to look for. For instance, dairy character means the cow has sweeping, angled ribs, a long neck, and fine skin. I didn’t even notice that our cows ribs were angled (in comparison to beef cattle whose ribs are nearly perpendicular to the ground) until it was pointed out.

The image below is from the Canadian Holstein Association website and it is the closest thing I could find to the chart we looked at.

Wednesday, July 24, 2007

2007-08-04T09:41:00.000-07:00

Wednesday is Dr. Henderson’s day to do pregnancy checks and check any other cows that need looked at by the vet. The big excitement of the morning came when he checked the heifer Anna bred last time I had herd health, and she was pregnant. Then we had vet discussion, and we talked about how cows that stay in the milking herd too long because they aren’t getting pregnant cost a lot of money. We figured this out by looking at the average days in milk. If the average is 210 and the goal is 180, it costs the farmer more than $170,000. This is because the longer a cow stays in milk, the less milk she tends to make, so the income from her milk probably doesn’t pay her bills at the farm.

In the afternoon, Ev took us on a driving tour of the Quebec mucklands. These are very flat, low-lying areas of soil that was deposited when the region was underwater. They are extremely fine, rich soils and they are used only for growing a handful of vegetables: onions, carrots, celery, and lettuce. It was very interesting to see those crops growing in big fields on the side of the road the same way you see corn and soybeans in most other rural areas (at least the ones
I’ve been in).

Baby lettuce.
Harvesting green onions.
Irrigation.
Lettuce field. If you look closely you'll see a lot of lettuces heads didn't make the cut to be sold in stores.
Carrots or celery, I forget which. They look pretty similar.

Monday, July 23, 2007

2007-08-04T09:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Wanda let us pick what we wanted to do today because she hadn’t had time with the fair to make our schedules, so I picked herd health with Anna because I hadn’t had it since my second week. There wasn’t too much to do. One thing I did was spread predatory wasp eggs, as part of our fly control regimen. They are very small, about ¼ inch long, and do not pester people or animals. They lay their eggs in the same places pest flies do, and the predatory wasp larvae eat the pest fly larvae, stopping their development. They work extrememly well and are environmentally friendly. The company sends 2 quart size bags every Friday. We spread them in the places flies breed, which is anywhere moist, not just near manure. Also, we keep our manure liquefied in pits, and it is too wet for flies to breed there.

I stopped to visit Cricket on my way back and I think she's happy to have some friends.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

2007-08-03T15:25:00.000-07:00

Today was the last day of the fair. We had an easy morning because we didn’t have to wash the animals as carefully since they weren’t going in the show ring. We had to use this stuff called Hocus Pocus to get the Prime Time adhesive out of their toplines. All for vanity! as Steve would say. I spent most of the morning reading my book, and most of the afternoon, too. I walked around with Anna and got fresh-squeezed lemonade, one of my requisite fair foods. Around 2 o’clock, Adrianna (Steve’s daughter) came to get us to take the animals to the trailer. They all seemed very happy to be heading home, and Cricket hopped right into the trailer as if she was born to do the county fair circuit. I held down the fort while Blake and Steven took them home and nearly finished my book. Blake and Katy and Kristy met Steve and I at the garage to unload all the show equipment, and then Blake and I went back to watch the demolition derby. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, but it was pretty amusing. You could easily see how a bunch of guys were sitting around and one said, “Hey, let’s find some old cars and crash them into each other!”

Corn update: tassles!

Saturday, July 21, 2007

2007-08-03T14:26:00.000-07:00

The day after the fair was a little like the day after Christmas. Certainly, the whole atmosphere of the barn was much more relaxed, but you do miss the energy and excitement of the day before. Blake and I were up early, as usual, to bring donuts to the fair. Since the show was over, there was very little to do. Everyone else in the barn was suddenly free to socialize. It's not that people were unfriendly before the show, just that nobody had any time to spare between getting their animals clipped and keeping them clean. Two people from other farms came over and chatted with Blake and I for a little while. They were Connie Gerow and Mel(vin) Irwin. I really enjoyed talking with them because it made me feel like a part of the community. I also spent some quality time with Cricket.I mentioned to Blake and Anna that mom and dad were going to Burlington and they both said I should go, so I did. We took the ferry from Port Kent, NY to Burlington. We went as foot passengers because we just wanted to walk around Burlington.

It was a beautiful day and there were boats all over the lake.
It was the day after the new Harry Potter book came out, and I saw at least 5 people reading it over the course of the day. Two girls on the ferry were sitting right next to each other reading it.
Burlington from the ferry.

This is the top of Church Street, which is the pedestrian-only street with all the shops. I assume this is the church after which the street is named.
This guy was riding a unicycle on a slack line. He was pretty funny. He got all the people clapping and then he kept saying louder, louder, but people just clapped faster until he said, Louder, not faster!
I showed them City Market, where Claire took us, and they got just as big a kick out of it as I did. Mom said it was very similar to a co-op they were members of in CT before I was born. There was a farmer’s market and this local artist, Dug Nap was there selling his prints and Mom got me one that has 2 cows and at the top it says “Girls not gone wild.” I got a T-shirt with Holsteins on it from Ben and Jerry’s, and a couple of post cards and a mug with cow art by the same artist (Woody Jackson).
Some nice Vermont scenery from the ferry on the way back to New York.

The Port Kent ferry terminal.
The Port Kent Amtrack Station. That's all there is to it.

Saturday night at the fair was the tractor pull. There is a huge range of “tractors.” There are regular old tractors, which are called farm stock, there are tractors that just have souped up engines, then there are tractors that look like drag race cars. I liked the farm stock tractors best.

Friday, July 20, 2007

2007-07-28T13:35:00.000-07:00

Today was the Open Dairy Show. The classes go in order of age, from youngest to oldest, so mine was the first class. We start by walking around the ring very slowly. The judge looks at all the animals and one by one, stops them to examine them more closely. When one animal is stopped all the rest have to stop, too, so here we are waiting our turn.
The judge had us line up in a row so he could compare individual calves against each other more easily. I tried to stand Cricket next to a calf that was shorter than she was.

Cricket got 6th place. I was very excited to get a ribbon, and she was very well-behaved. I’m so proud of her. We all got ribbons except Blake, but his class was big and very competitive, and he wasn’t last, so that’s something. This is Blake's class lining up.
Anna giving Beatrice a pep talk before their class. There were only 2 other heifers in that age group, and the one who won the class was 6 inches taller than Beatrice! Height is a major factor in the judging, especially in junior animals (2 years or under) because if a heifer is a lot taller than her peers, even considering age, it means she's growing well and will be a big cow and hopefully will be a good producer. The cow that won that class was also Grand Champion Holstein.
Anna in the show ring.After the individual cows are show, they have group classes. We were entered in the Junior Best Three class. Each farm picks its three of its best young animals, and they are judged together against the animals from the other farms. Wanda picked Katy, Adrianna and I to show our calves again in this class. We didn't get ribbons, but we weren't last either, and to me, that counts for something.
Our successful show string.
A class later in the day, Senior Best Three, I think.
As soon as the show is finished, there is a rush to the milking parlor. None of the cows have been milked all day, because they need full udders to look good in the show ring.
The show is done!
I honestly don’t remember where the rest of Friday went. I guess I watched the rest of the show, ate lunch, napped, and then took Katarina (Wanda's daughter) and her new friend Lauren on one ride. I let them pick it, which was a big mistake because the picked the spinning-est ride there. I felt like someone was swirling my insides around, trying to make a tornado like you can in a cup of water.

Wednesday and Thursday, July 18-19 2007

2007-07-28T13:31:00.000-07:00

Today after we got home from the fair I had crops. I helped Henry spread manure and I drove a whole load by myself, from backing up the spreader to the spout, driving to the field, spreading, driving back, and backing up again. Bethann made me back the trailer up one time last week and it was very frustrating but it forced me to figure out the whole process, even if it isn’t second nature yet. Now I know if I look at my front tires I can figure out which way the back of the truck or tractor will move, and then the trailer or spreader will go the opposite way. After lunch, I painted the inside of the fertilizer box with graphite paint. That was an interesting experience. First I had to use a wire brush to get all the rusty spots clean. Mark put a ladder in there so I could reach the upper edges. The box is shaped like an upside down pyramid with the top sliced off. The flat part at the bottom is pretty small, just big enough to stand on, so you have to clamber on your hands and knees over all the sides to reach everywhere. This is no easy feat, because last season’s graphite paint is still there, making the entire inside of the box more slippery than ice, hence the need for the ladder. I kind of enjoyed figuring out how to manage the ladder, the paintbrush, the can of paint, and myself all at once.

This is just a picture of the Massey, my favorite tractor to drive.

When we went back Wednesday evening, Wanda said the FFA folks were looking for a calm and gentle Holstein calf to use in their “Little Britches” show on Thursday, and she offered them Cricket. I guess that's when I really felt like I accomplished something with Cricket, for Wanda to think she would behave well enough for a small kid to lead her. She sure didn’t look very small next to the kid who helped show her! She did great for her first time in the ring.

Monday and Tuesday, July 16-17, 2007

2007-07-24T19:15:00.000-07:00

We spent Monday getting ready to go to the fair, packing straw and hay and supplies and equipment into the little trailer. Then we went to the fairgrounds to set up. The place where the animals are now has a layer of sawdust followed by several layers of straw, all packed down. It seems very comfortable! There will be 7 cows. Anna is showing a young cow that the farm just purchased from UVM. Blake is showing a summer yearling, Pinky; Kristy and Katy are showing winter calves, Tweddle Dee and Tweedle Dum, I’m showing Cricket, and finally, Katharina (Wanda’s 7 year old daughter) is showing Clarabell, a Holstein spring yearling, and Starlight, a Jersey spring calf.

That pile of straw is from half a bale. It fluffs up a lot!
We had to borrow some sawdust from the show ring...
Packing the layers...

Ready for cows!

Tuesday morning was spent making the final preparations for taking the animals to the fair, like packing the tack box, making sure the trailer was clean, getting more hay, and stuff like that. there were also two calves, both heifers, FINALLY! We checked on the heifer that was calving and she was doing fine so we went to get hay and when we got back, the calf was on the ground. That one was tiny, probably less than 50 pounds. I had no problem picking it up and carrying it to the calf pen. The other calf was born backwards but alive, luckily. It was much bigger, so big that Katy and I could barely lift it off the ground to get it to the other pen.

After lunch we finally loaded all the animals onto the big stock trailer and went to the fair! First, we tied them up in the straw while we got the rest of the stuff unloaded and our little base camp set up.

Then, we had to give all of them baths. After that we got to relax a little bit. Our goal while we’re there is to make it look like none of the cows poop, ever. Later in the evening, I helped Wanda clip Cricket again, this time a special way to make her look slender and angular (the way a dairy cow is supposed to look). We clipped along her shoulder blade to emphasize the angle, and along her hind legs to make them look slender. On our way back from the clipping station to our area, we stopped to let a crowd of fair-goers pass, and Cricket greeted each and every stroller, reaching out so each toddler could pat her nose. She is the model public relations committee!

Wednesday-Sunday, July 11-15, 2007

2007-07-24T16:15:00.000-07:00

I was on calves this week. We’ve had quite a run of bulls lately. Friday, we finally had a heifer! The last foal of the season was born Saturday, after a grueling week and a half of foal watch by the equine students. I saw Claire for about 15 minutes when I got home before she left for foal watch again. Horse people are notoriously more interested in being there for the birth of a foal than cow people are in being there for the birth of a calf, but ironically, mares are notoriously harder to catching foaling than cows are to catch calving. A mare about to calve will wait until the person watching goes to the bathroom, while a cow will lay down and look at the person to say, "Don't just stand there, PULL!"

I've been working with my show heifer every afternoon. For the show, they have to walk very slowly, and when they stop, their front feet are supposed to be square (right next to each other) and the hind leg opposity the judge is supposed to be a little farther forward so the judge can see the developing udder. She’s coming along quite well and everyone is looking forward to the fair.

Monday and Tuesday, July 9-10, 2007

2007-07-20T19:16:00.000-07:00

We had a 2-day artificial insemination (AI) training class. AI is how all of the cows at our farm are bred. It's safer, cheaper, and allows the farm to use better quality bulls without paying for the cost of their care. However, learning the technique is not easy. It’s very frustrating. You have to palpate the cervix through the rectum and then manipulate the cervix to place it over the tip of the insemination gun. The diagrams make it look easy, but most cows haven’t read any literature on bovine reproductive anatomy. These are all the supplies. (From left to right, liquid nitrogen cooler holds deep frozen semen, heated thermos holds warm water for thawing semen, small bottles of lube for outside your glove, baby powder for inside your glove, paper towels for cleaning the vulva, blue shoulder-length gloves.)This is the shape you make your hand when you first enter the rectum. It reminded us of sock puppets.
Hands-"in" learning!

Saturday, July 7, 2007

2007-07-20T18:31:00.000-07:00

Roxanne and I went to Montreal today. We chose a few sights to see, bought the all-day tourist card for the metro, and had a great time. We ended up mostly looking at churches, St. Joseph’s Oratory in Mount Royal park and Mary Queen of the World Cathedral in downtown. Another church we tried to see, the Notre Dame Cathedral, was closed because someone was getting married there.
But both of the ones we saw were beautiful. St. Joseph's stands very impressively at the top of a huge hill. The interior was surprisingly modern.

MQW was modeled after St. Peter’s in the Vatican City.

I guess we were tired when we made it to the historic district because we didn’t walk around much there. I enjoyed figuring the whole trip out by myself and being able to read French and find our way around.

This was just a very fancy hotel that I thought looked cool.

Dairy in the News

2007-07-04T07:45:00.000-07:00

Don't Cry over rBST Milk

This is a link to an editorial that ran in the New York Times June 29, 2007. I strongly encourage everyone to read it, because it gives a sparkling clear argument in favor of milk produced with rBST (recombinant bovine somatotropin), otherwise known as bovine growth hormone. Basically, farmers can produce more milk with fewer cows, and the author of the editorial, Henry Miller, lists a number of benefits that arise from that simple fact. What it comes down to is that fewer resources, whether they be food, water, or fuel, are used to produce the same amount of milk when rBST is used, and that makes rBST environmentally friendly. Milk that is rBST-free is indistinguishable from milk produced using rBST; when you purchase milk labeled "rBST-free" you place your trust in the farmer who produced that milk, because there is no test to tell if milk has been produced with rBST.

Coincidentally, our farm received a letter from Agri-Mark, the co-op that buys our milk, telling us that they are having a hard time marketing our milk to processors (the companies that turn raw milk into dairy products) because we use rBST.

Please do not get drawn into thinking that rBST-free milk is better because it is more expensive. Do not buy milk or dairy products labeled rBST-free. You will simply be supporting false advertising.

(Image from nytimes.com)

Don't Cry over rBST Milk

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

2007-07-04T06:33:00.000-07:00

Happy 4th of July!Forget about "knee high by the 4th of July," we're waist high!
I milked with Neil on Saturday. He is hilarious. The cows were staring at the floor because it was buckling because of the heat, and I was saying to them, "Don't look at the floor, just walk." Neil said to Ralph, "You should see Tonie in the parlor! She says to the cows, that floor is none of your business, quit sniffing it and get your butt in the parlor so I can throw the milker on you!!" He made up all kinds of tall tales like that about our shift. He was telling Blake and Ralph all of them while we were having break and we were all dissolving in gales of laughter.

On Sunday, we drove up to Rouse's Point to see their parade and fireworks. This is the view across the lake (that's Vermont over there!). I hadn’t been to a parade in years so I was pretty excited. It was a good one, too. Not something you see in parades back home...
You can't have a 4th of July parade without local politicians.
There were three pipe and drum bands. This was the first one.
There were more tractors than I could count, old...
And new...Every firetruck from miles around...ever seen a blue firetruck before?

There were firetrucks from Vermont, and even one from Canada.
This is our very own Chazy, NY firetruck. Shriners are another parade staple. There was another group after this one, driving miniature racecars. What are Shriners anyway?
This was a jazz group that called themselves the Blues Brothers.
There were 2 marching bands, both from Canada, a high school band and a middle school band. Afterwards there were fireworks, which I always enjoy no matter what. This was a small town with a proportional display but I still loved it.

I'm feeding with Ralph this week. I like riding around with him, but boy is it early (I get there at 3:30 AM). It took 10 days of getting up at 3:30 but they finally made a coffee drinker out of me. On Monday we pulled 2 calves in quick succession, one upside down and one with its leg and head tucked back. Both were bulls, which is always sort of a disappointment. Another bull was born in the afternoon. I clipped my show heifer Monday afternoon. It’s a much bigger job than you expect, but she was very good and now she looks sparkling clean. A thunderstorm went through and there was a rainbow when I was heading back to the dorm. It went all the way across the sky and there was a second one starting.

More corn pictures...my old picture-taking spot does not show off the corn to its best advantage.

Here you can really see how tall it is.

Yesterday I watched a DA surgery after lunch. DA stands for displaced abomasum. The abomasum is the part of the cow's stomach that is on the bottom, and it can sort of float up and flip over the top of the stomach. It's uncomfortable for the cow and has to be corrected. Dr. Terry was the vet. I asked her about the finances of vet school and she said, if it’s what you want, don’t worry about it. You’ll make it work somehow, even if you have to live like a student for another 5 years.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

2007-07-04T06:13:00.000-07:00

GRAPHIC PHOTOS ALERT

Milking as usual but a very exciting morning afterwards! We had a cow that was down because she had a sore foot, and she started trying to get up yesterday and may have broken her leg. She was 3 weeks from calving and they wanted to try to save the calf, so Dr. Henderson did a C-section before they euthanized the mother. It was very cool. I got to help by cutting the uterus open and rubbing the calf’s head. Dr. Henderson said he heard somewhere that when the mother licks the calf’s head, it releases adrenalin in the calf’s body which helps get its heart and lungs going, so I had to rub its head very briskly to induce that adrenaline rush. Anna tickled its nose with a piece of straw to make it cough, and Dr. Henderson lifted its ribcage like a bellows to get air into its lungs. It sputtered and snorted and sniffled and blinked and was alive! And it was a heifer, which made all that effort very worthwhile.

Last Sunday we went to Isle La Motte again and this time I had my camera.
Samuel de Champlain.

We always laugh at this sign, which is on our way home. So far we have only chosen New York, but I hope we go to Canada soon.
We stopped at the grocery store and parked next to this very cool car.
And finally, the corn update. It's been hot; now we just need some rain.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

2007-06-23T20:19:00.000-07:00

This post is unofficially sponosored by Carhartt, because today Anna and I drove an hour to St. Albans, VT, to go to Lenny's Apparel and Shoes, possibly the only store that carries women's Carhartts. Carhartt is the unofficial uniform of farmers. They even have their own color: Carhartt brown, and now they make a clothing line specifically for women. I bought two pairs of pants, which I will consider my first vet school expense, because my justification for buying two pairs was that, eventually, I will be a vet student and will wear them a lot then as well as this summer.

Anna and I also found a produce stand that had fresh strawberries. They are delicious! After I got home and had dinner, Christina, Claire, Roxanne, Eric, and I went to the Plattsburgh mall and hung out. We were going to see a movie but we didn't leave soon enough. I got a few other things on sale at Gap and Old Navy, and some bargain books from Borders. It's really nice to hang out with everyone, especially since none of us work together so it's not like we're bored with each other's company by the end of the day.

It turned out that by going to the mall, we missed one of the mares foaling. We drove to the barn to check on her, and her foal was mostly dry and standing up on VERY wobbly legs. It's a little chestnut filly and they are calling her Annie, because we all stopped at Auntie Anne's Pretzels before we left the mall. She has a very long face and is a little funny-looking, but we all think she will grow into herself. It was pretty cool to see such a new foal. Her tongue was bright red and she tried to suck on my fingers.

Friday, June 22, 2007

2007-06-22T16:21:00.000-07:00

Tomatoes! I still stand by my prediction that we'll have ripe tomatoes by the end of June, especially at the rate these guys are growing!

I don’t have too much to say about Crops. I merged on Tuesday and Wednesday, and helped with the Ag-Bagger. We got the last of the first cut hay chopped and bagged on Thursday, and second cut starts Monday! It should not take 3 days to get 15 acres of hay chopped and bagged, but that’s what happens when it rains.
Front of the chopper.

Back of the chopper. It even says Miner Institute on the side but it's a little hard to see in this picture. We got most of it mowed and merged on Tuesday, but then it rained, so Wednesday was spent using the merger to flip over the stuff that was already on the ground so it could dry out again, and we didn’t finish chopping until Thursday afternoon.
Front of the merger.
Back of the merger, see where it says HayBuddy?
In the downtime, the guys worked on fixing the new merger, and I did odd jobs like greasing all the equipment with the grease gun, which is mildly fun, and sweeping the whole shop and washing all the tractor windows, which are not that fun. Today, I spent the whole morning sitting in the tractor attached to the manure agitator. Luckily there’s a radio or I would have been bored out of my mind.

At lunch, Steve Mooney talked about some research he’s presenting at a conference later this summer, and the only parts I understood were when he said, “The acid donates a hydrogen.” Thank you, Dr. Creegan.

The weather here continues to amaze me. The past 3 days have had highs in the 70s and it was cool enough this morning that I had hot chocolate at breakfast. It’s supposed to get down to the 40s tonight. I have milking at 4:30 am next week, which may make a coffee drinker out of me at last.

MoCo the mower.
The big, new, fancy tractor that no one likes because it doesn't shift smoothly. But I can drive it!
The tractor that used to have the merger hooked up to it but now it has the manure agitator.

Monday, June 18, 2007

2007-06-18T17:40:00.000-07:00

Beautiful corn! Above, sun going down, looking southwest toward the horse barns. Compare the picture below to the one from last week! I promise they are only 7 days apart.
I started the Crops rotation today. We had 20 acres left of timothy-clover hay to mow, merge, chop, and bag. We don’t bale any of the hay here; it all gets turned into haylage. Instead of being preserved by drying, like baled hay, haylage is preserved by fermentation. It either gets packed into a bunk like the one I helped cover last week, or into an Ag-Bag, which is a huge long tube of plastic, probably 10 feet in diameter, and as long as you need it to be. I learned to mow and merge today. The mower is called MoCo and the merger is called HayBuddy. I mean, they actually have these names painted on them. They are the actual names of the equipment. We mowed all 20 acres before lunch, and merged them all after lunch. Merging is when one windrow (row of mowed hay) is picked up and piled onto the next one. It’s done so the chopper doesn’t have to make as many trips around the field. To mow, first you do 6 circles around the perimeter or the field, working your way in. Then you just go back and forth. You have to swing the mower from one side of the tractor to the other each time you switch directions, but you do that with a lever inside the air-conditioned cab of the tractor while you’re listening to the radio. :o) The merger follows directly behind the tractor (an older model, with a clutch!) You just drive straight down the center of a windrow; the merger picks it up and places it on a conveyor belt, which shoots it onto the windrow to your left. I got to do merging all by myself, which including stopping to unclog it every so often. You have to keep a constant watch to make sure it doesn’t get clogged, because if you catch it early, you don’t have to get out of the tractor. If you watch straight ahead and don’t check the merger for one second too long, it will have a huge clog that requires you to turn everything off and get out of the tractor and pull armloads of hay off the conveyor belt. The best thing about these jobs is how quickly time passes. I’m sure having the radio helps out a lot with that. Anyway, it was a very productive day and I feel very accomplished.

Also, I forgot to say last week that I mastered driving the old Massey-Ferguson tractor, and that I got my first bloody nose ever! The Massey is at least 30 years old and has a standard transmission. I can drive it anywhere now, and use the manure spreader. I got the bloody nose when we were weighing cows. There is a gate attached to the scale that forms a chute the cattle walk through to the scale. Well, there was a cow who didn’t want to go on the scale and she swung her hips into the gate, and I was standing right on the other side of it and the top rail hit me right in the nose, really hard. First time for everything, right?

Here is some of the wildlife I have seen so far:

A turtle Chad brought into the break room at the dairy barn.
A cedar waxwing that apparently flew into a window and was collecting itself on the ledge below the window. I had never seen a bird like this before but I showed my roommate the picture and she knew immediately. She said when they migrate south they stop in Burlington, eat all the berries on their campus, and leave.

Sunday, June 17, 2007: A whole week's worth of news!

2007-06-16T18:52:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, Claire, Christina and I went to Burlington. Claire needed to look for a job (she goes to school at UVM) and Christina and I wanted to go somewhere other than Plattsburgh. Burlington is a great place. It is hippie paradise! Claire says none of her friends from school eat meat, and she said every restaurant in Burlington caters to the vegan lifestyle. We went to the awesome grocery store, City Market, to get sandwiches from their deli. Right next to the deli is the tofu and hummus, in the labeled “Hippie Cooler.” Also near the deli was the bread section. I’ve never seen so much organic and natural and wonderful looking bread in my life! The whole store was like that. I could have spent an hour just wandering around looking at what they had. I wish we had something like that in Chestertown. After lunch, we walked up and down Church Street. Church Street is pedestrian only and it has cobblestones. We went to Ben and Jerry’s and the Discovery Channel store. It is similar to Main Street in downtown Annapolis, but a little smaller. It was the Jazz Festival, so there was live music at almost every restaurant, and all the restaurants have outdoor seating. Finally, we went to North Beach Park, a little beach on Lake Champlain. It was starting to get overcast by the time we got there but we still sat on our beach towels in our swim suits for an hour or so.

An update on the corn: it is still growing and seems like it grows faster every week. The picture above was taken Monday and by Wednesday I bet you could tell the difference (if I took a picture on Wednesday). It will be knee high this week (well before the 4th of July, as the saying goes). I love how you can look right down the rows.

These are 3 yearling horses that ran over to the fence to act startled by my bike.
This week I had the Calves rotation. The two main jobs are feeding the calves and cleaning the barns. The youngest calves live in hutches, like giant doghouses. They have to live by themselves because this reduces disease transmission (were one of them to get sick—right now all of ours are healthy!). They all get milk replacer twice a day plus grain. Right now the oldest one is being weaned off the milk replacer, and she’s not happy about it. She starts mooing when she sees the farm truck pull up, and doesn’t quit until we leave. There were three calves born Sunday night, two heifers and a bull. Two were twins but the two heifers were born in the pen so they weren’t sure whether they were twins or whether it was a heifer and a bull. This was a problem because when there is a heifer-bull pair of twins, the hormones of the male twin circulate through the female twin’s placenta and this causes her to be sterile, and she is called a freemartin. It doesn’t do any good to have a sterile heifer on a dairy farm, so we had to find out so we didn’t send the wrong heifer to the sale.

On Tuesday, I helped pull another calf, a big white bull. He was almost 2 weeks early, and for the first couple days was really unsteady on his feet. That made it really difficult to train him to drink from a bucket because his balance and strength weren’t good enough for him to stand up and drink the whole bucket at once! He’s a pro at it n

Wednesday was Kristy's birthday and we had a surprise cookout for her. She had no idea we were planning it. Here is the whole bunch of us. Top row: Eric, Monique, Christina, Blake, Steven Mooney, Kristy. Bottom row: Claire (my roommate), Lindsay, me, Roxanne, Melisa, Katy, Anna.
On Thursday, I picked out one of my show heifers. Here she is:
I had a list of names like Clover and Daisy, but she seemed spunkier than that. Then she jumped out of her pen. The next day I thought of Firefly, and then I thought, she's more like a grasshopper than a firefly, and then I thought of crickets, so Cricket it is. She's Cricket the cow. Also, I went to bed at 8:30 so I could get enough sleep to function on Friday after doing cow watch at 4 am.
There is no better way to get to know cows than to just watch them for a few hours at a time. I think I have already mentioned that I think they are more like dogs than they are like horses. Lindsay said they have great senses of humor and I think these pictures demonstrate that well:
Resting her head on her neighbor...

Fell asleep and her tongue is falling out of her mouth...Rolling her tongue...
Sleeping all curled up...
The other cool thing about being up on the catwalk from 4-5 am is that you get to see into the feed truck:
Friday there was an open house for the grand opening of a new exhibit at the farm museum, of antique vehicles. There was a barbecue and everyone who works at Miner was there. The vehicles were cool, too. There were 2 carriages and 2 sleighs, a horse-drawn school bus, and a sprinkler wagon. After that, the crops guys needed help covering the feed bunk they’ve been filling with first cut haylage. That involved dragging huge pieces of plastic up the hill of chopped hay and weighting it down, first with 50-pound gravel bags at the top and sides and then with old tires every where else. We all got really dirty from the tires—there’s no way to store a tire that it won’t get rainwater inside, and these tires were really gross! I will definitely need new sneakers now…

Saturday and today (Sunday) I only had to work in the morning, and yesterday was really sunny and hot, so Blake, Christina and I went to the beach. It was another beach on Lake Champlain, on Isle La Motte at St. Anne's Shrine. We napped in the sun, swam in the lake, the ice cream truck came...it was a fun afternoon.

Saturday, June 9, 2007

2007-06-09T14:45:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to Plattsburgh with Sean, Christina, and Monique. Sean is working as a lab tech in the environmental science labs here, and Christina and Monique are in the equine program. We went to a bar called Monopole, which is supposedly the oldest bar in Plattsburgh. It has an upstairs and a downstairs, each with a bar, and there are pool tables and darts. It reminded me a lot of Andy’s in Chestertown, without the free popcorn. There was a band playing upstairs. They are called Lucid and Sean had seen them a few times before (he goes to SUNY Plattsburgh). They were a jam band but they covered some songs too, like Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic. They were pretty good.

This morning I went to the Farmer’s Market in Plattsburgh. I bought a tomato plant. It is called Patio hybrid. It already has a few blossoms we should have tomatoes by the end of the month. I feel like Chestertown is just a few hours away from here. The landscape is so similar. There are the same farms and farmhouses and John Deere dealerships and tractors in fields and there are even Scenic Byway signs. For much of the way to Plattsburgh, if you take Route 9 (the back way) there are gorgeous views of Lake Champlain. On my way back, I stopped to look at Point Au Roche State Park. I told the girl at the gate I just wanted to look around and she didn’t charge me the admission price. There are tons of picnic tables and grills, and there are indoor restrooms, but the beach is small and obviously manmade. I think I will go a few times this summer when I need a beach fix.

Friday, June 8, 2007

2007-06-09T11:03:00.000-07:00

Today I watched a cow give birth to her calf! I'd never seen anything being born before. When she came out her eyes fluttered a little and she snorted a couple times and then she was awake. It was like watching her come to life. Incredible. We just happened to walk the dry cow barn, where the cows close to calving live, first thing today. The cow had already laid down in the middle of the aisle in the pen, so we moved her to a calving pen (much cleaner) and went to do the fresh cow (cows that have just calved) check. We came back 45 minutes later and the feet were out.

You can just see the calf's nose above the feet. It looks purple because the amniotic sack is still covering it. We ended up helping the cow out by pulling the calf, because we could see its tongue and it was starting to turn purple. Here is the newborn heifer (female) calf!

I really have nothing else to say except that it was just incredible to witness the whole thing.

The feed guy, Russ, comes on Fridays to discuss any adjustments to the diet. It's called Friday Therapy because all the farm employees vent about how the research scientists complicate their routines. One thing Russ does is take samples of the different components of feed to check protein levels, among other things. Here he is taking a sample from an alfalfa bale. I tried to do it to but the bales are packed really tightly and I couldn't get the corer to go in!

Thursday, June 7, 2007

2007-06-07T14:52:00.000-07:00

Today was the last Farm Day for Fifth Graders. We only had one group after lunch, as opposed to three on Tuesday and Wednesday, which was nice. We had another dead calf today, a bull this time. He was his mom's first calf and he was really big and she was really small, so they think maybe she got tired of pushing and he suffocated. The other calves are all doing great, though. Soon we'll separate the animals we're taking to the fair and we'll be able to work with them whenever we have a spare minute. They are also talking about giving the students night watches, so that if a heifer is having a hard time calving the calf doesn't suffocate. I certainly wouldn't mind doing that.

There is much to like about Chazy (shay-ZEE) and Miner. I'm feeling less like a stranger and more like someone who knows their way around the farm every day. Everyone here seems to get along. Last night a few of us grilled out, and even people who weren't cooking came and sat outside just to hang out. We were going to roast marshmallows but then we ran out of propane. We all sat outside until it got dark and the GIANT mosquitos drove us inside. Will Bruce called them MOOOOsquitos. :o) Sounds good to me. I like how many stars you can see. You can even see the Milky Way. I like how we can hear the train. I must not have noticed it the first couple of days but I think we hear it 5 or 6 times every day. It reminds me of the siren in Chestertown. We also have seagulls here, because we're just a few miles from Lake Champlain, and that reminds me of Chestertown, too.
My favorite thing that cows do is sleep all curled up, just like a cat or dog. Anna says when they sleep like that, they are in the REM sleep cycle, so I told all the fifth graders that the cows curled up that way are dreaming. The black cow whose side is in the foreground wouldn't move out of the way and kept trying to eat my camera.
Sometimes they can't get their heads all the way around and compromise by resting them on the stall dividers.

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

2007-06-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

This week we have Farm Days for Fifth Graders, where kids from all over come to get a tour of the farm. The official name of the farm is Heart's Delight Farm at the William H. Miner Agricultural Research Institute. We tend just to call it the Miner Farm. There are 8 stations that the kids rotate through: Horse behavior, field equipment, 100 years ago, horse care, calves, feeds, dairy barn, and cannulated/fistulated cow. I was working the dairy barn station with Melisa, a research intern who actually has more farm experience than I do.

Melisa mostly talked about the milking parlor: it is a double-12 parallel parlor, meaning 24 cows can be milked at once; each cow produces 15-30 lbs of milk, on average, at each milking; the cows are milked three times a day at 4:30 am, 12:30 pm, and 8:30 pm; it takes about 5 hours to milk all 272 cows; we have 2 milk tanks that hold 2,000 gallons and 3,000 gallons; the milk truck comes one a day; the milk here is used to make cheese; a Holstein makes enough milk in one year to 54 families, assuming a gallon of milk per week; all the milk produced in the US goes to make 1 billion pounds of butter, 7 billion pounds of cheese, and 1 billion gallons of ice cream.

Then we took the kids to the dairy barn and showed the the stars of the show: our Holstein cows. Our barn has 272 free stalls; each stall is 52" wide, which is wider than the industry average and enables the cows to rest in a more natural posture; they rest from 12 to 14 hours per day because making milk takes a lot of energy; there are automatic insulated sidewall curtains that are raised when the temperature outside dips below 40°F; the temperature in the barn this winter never dipped below freezing; there are automatic aisle scrapers running continuously, which helps keep the flies down; there is a fan and sprinkler system used in the summer to keep the cows cool; all the cows wear a neck collar with a transponder that has a pedometer to track their activity and is also synched with the milking parlor to keep track of how much milk they produce.

This is the floor plan for the dairy barn. The top of the picture is the front of the barn. The milking parlor is on the right, just at the 'Y' joint towards the top (whminer.com). This picture was taken from the catwalk in the dairy barn and it shows the aisle scraper as well as several very happy cows (whminer.com).

Monday, June 4, 2007

2007-06-04T15:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Sunday, June 3, 2007

2007-06-03T19:03:00.000-07:00

Last night for dinner we went to this place called the Country Corner. It was this teeny tiny “diner” about 10 minutes away (make a right at the first stop sign and it’s on the left at the next stop sign). We walked in and there was a counter with stools and one table with 2 chairs. There were 2 women working, one of whom was Chad’s mom. (Chad is another boy who works at the dairy.) So we all sat down at the counter. By the way, everything was purple. The counter was purple, the stools were purple, the menus were purple, the wallpaper had purple flowers. I can’t remember if the floor was purple. The cups the coleslaw came in were purple. It was funny. The food was good and we all cleaned our plates. Across from where I was sitting was a big fridge with a clear glass door and inside were pies. There was brownie peanut butter cup pie, éclair pie, rhubarb pie, 3-berry pie, blackberry pie, peanut butter pie, snicker doodle cheesecake, cherry cheesecake, banana split pie, banana walnut pie, chocolate pie, pumpkin pie, and custard pie. Whew. So that’s what I stared at the whole time I was eating dinner. Almost everyone got a different slice. I got banana split, even though it had pineapple chunks on top. It also had cherries and strawberries. The filling was banana pudding with slices of banana and the topping (under the pineapple) was whipped cream. Delicious!

I had milking again today but there's not much else to say about that. I took these pictures on my way there.

These are some hungry heifers.The calving pen. There will probably be a new calf by tomorrow morning.
Caught her in the middle of chewing her cud, aka ruminating if you want to be scientific.

Saturday, June 2, 2007

2007-06-03T18:50:00.000-07:00

I’m already getting better at milking. Cory is way faster than me at stripping, but I started to really get the hang of that today. Yesterday he could strip and wipe his 6 cows in the time it took me to strip my 6. Today, he was finishing his 6 as I was starting to attach the milkers; he would go to the other end of my 6 and we’d each attach 3. Watching Cory, I realized he held the bottom of the milker in his left hand and reached outside the cow’s hind legs at least to attach the first milker. If she’s kicking or dancing around it’s hard, but otherwise that technique works pretty well. Cory seems to do everything without looking, which I guess is what happens when you milk 272 cows by yourself 6 days a week for 6 months.

When I got back I took some pictures of our little campus:

Miner Center, where the computer lab and cafeteria are, as well as all the research labs.
My bed and bookshelf.

Our back window, with my and my roommate's plants (the camera was sitting on top of the bookshelf)
Kitchenette
Outside the dorms

Same window later on

Friday, June 1, 2007

2007-06-03T18:43:00.000-07:00

Today I milked! The boy I worked with was Cory. It takes about 6 hours to milk all 272 cows. It was definitely the most physically demanding work I’ve done yet. You are on your feet the whole time. My arms got a little tired at times, because the automatic milkers are heavy and you have to hold them with one hand while you put them on the udder with the ‘udder.’ Haha I crack myself up! Okay, so the place where the cows get milked is called the parlor. There is a pit where we work and the cows’ udders are about at eye level. There are 12 stalls on each side.

First, there is a gun/wand thingy that makes iodine foam and we dip all the teats with that. Then you strip (hand milk each teat once) and then you wipe. You have to use a clean washcloth for each cow. (There are a washer and dryer just around the corner from the parlor, and we do 2 loads of washcloths for every shift!) Finally you attach the milkers. When the udder is empty, they detach automatically. I’m milking all weekend, so I hope I’ll have it down by Sunday.

Happy cows being milked:

Thursday, May 31, 2007

2007-06-03T16:27:00.000-07:00

Today was crops with Henry. Henry is really hard to understand when he speaks but I had a nice time anyway. I drove a big tractor pulling the manure spreader. The hardest part is slowing down by downshifting rather than by using the brakes. I also couldn’t quite figure out how to back up to get under the manure “faucet” at the manure pit. Something to do with the spreader being a trailer and me turning the wheel the wrong way. I was getting pretty good at going forward by the end of the morning. After lunch, I had a break from tractor driving and power washed one of the pick up trucks. I do like power washing so that was fun.

At 2:30 we had a talk on forage by Everett, an agronomist. He talked about what makes good hay good, what factors go into deciding when to mow, what factors people use in deciding what hay to buy (facts and fiction) and the differences between different grades of hay. I took more notes than anyone and I guess we don’t need to since we’re not tested but I feel like this is valuable information that I don’t know and not that I won’t be able to find it elsewhere but why not just write it down now?

The red building is called the dry barn, cows that don't get milked live there. The tractor in the background is hooked up to the machine that pumps manure out of the manure pit to load the manure spreader. The concrete walls are part of the feed bunkers.
Some corn. I swear, that field looks greener every day.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

2007-06-03T08:34:00.001-07:00

Today was herd health. Normally it starts at 7:30 but the vet was coming today so we started around 6:15. The vet was really nice, he’s only 2 years out of vet school (Tufts). Before he got there, we had to check all the fresh cows (cows that have just calved). We look for elevated temperatures and stuff like that. Some also have mastitis so we check on them. Anna said the main cause of mastitis here is Klebsiella. (Thesis idea! What are the main causes of mastitis at Horizon Dairy Farm?) I helped take temperatures and give cows shots of Banamine (a pain reliever) and Ex-sel (A broad spectrum antibiotic). Then I helped check the list of cows that had been given shots of GNRH (gonadotropin-releasing hormone) to prep them for breeding, if they weren’t pregnant. These were also the cows that had to be preg checked. When Matt (the vet) got there we went into the barn and started checking. Matt talked about how he palpated cows and also explained their whole reproductive cycle. He was very good at explaining and I would like to have him for a professor (too bad he’s not one). For instance, he explained that estrogen and progesterone have names that makes sense: estrogen generates estrus, and progestoreone prolongs gestation. At one point he was talking about making decisions about whether a cow is open or not and he talked about it being a cost benefit analysis and that made me think of Chris. He is leaving in July for a small animal practice that pays better. I was sorry to hear that because it seems like no one stays in large animal and I hope I won’t have to leave for financial reasons. When we got to the heifer barn, I got to palpate a cow. That means I put on a long plastic glove and stuck my whole arm inside the cow and felt its organs through the intestinal wall. I think I found the uterus but I couldn’t feel the fetus.

Barn cats in the horse barn:

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

2007-06-03T08:08:00.001-07:00

Today was the feeding rotation, which starts at 3:30 AM. First we go and collect all the refusals (feed that didn’t get eaten the day before). They get put into the feed truck, which weighs it. The amount of feed for today is adjusted depending on the amount of refusals from yesterday. The feed truck also has a mixer in it, and a computer that knows the order in which all the cows get fed, and the ratio of ingredients in their feed. It even has a remote control! The feed is a mixture of pelleted grain, haylage, and corn silage.
These are the feed bunks where the haylage and silage are kept:
Haylage and silage are feeds that you would not give to horses because they have already started fermenting. I guess because cows have 4 stomachs and because they ferment feed in their stomachs too, it doesn’t matter. Some of the feeds also have alfalfa hay and wheat straw, some have molasses, and the feed for the cows that are within a month or so of calving has extra minerals and soy protein.
These are the smaller bunks, 4 in all, with alfalfa hay, wheat straw, and 2 types of grain:
We dropped the first batch of feed around 6 am and finished that barn around 8 am. We had a break then, which was good because I was getting really drowsy from the thrumming of the big truck and front-end loader engines plus the heat. We finished completely around 10 am. After that, I had my first lessons in the Skid-steer (baby bulldozer) and the front-end loader! I actually liked the loader better because it steers with a steering wheel and has pedals for your feet, like a car.

The cafeteria was open today (it hasn’t been since I got here because of Memorial Day). Lunch was delicious, in part because I was so hungry. After lunch I immediately went back to my room and slept for 3 hours. It’s going to be really important not to nap too much when I have feeding for the whole week, because otherwise I won’t be able to fall asleep early enough.

I don't have any pictures of the feed truck or what it's like waking up at 3 am, but here are some just of the farm:

Monday May 28, 2007

2007-06-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

Today was calves rotation. I got up at 5:30 and was at the dairy by 6. Fed calf milk replacer in buckets to about 10 calves. Helped bucket train one by placing my fingers in her mouth so she would start sucking, then placing my hand in the bucket of formula so she would drink it. Got formula all over and it is sticky. Walked through a barn with cows close to calving to check for signs of impending labor and delivery. Signs include bagging up (udder swelling, teats swelling), relaxation of muscles around tail, “perching” (front legs in stall, hind legs in aisle), and tail held up in the air (labor has begun). Cleaned some cow barns today. Pushed a lot of cow manure around with a snow shovel. Beth Ann (the woman I was helping today) drives the little bulldozer and it has an aisle-scraper attachment made out of old tractor tires. All the manure gets scraped out of the aisles into this “pond” behind the barn. There are signs up that say “DROWNING HAZARD.” Definitely don’t want to drown in manure. There is another small barn called the green house that is for calves older than 8 weeks or so. After they’ve been weaned off the milk replacer (“up on the hill,” i.e. in the hutches) they get moved to the green house. Young heifers get hay and grain, older heifers get TMR (don’t know what that stands for yet, but it’s a damp, chopped grass/hay stuff, that smells sweet) and grain. The babies on the hill get sweet feed mixed with pellets; the heifers in the green house get pellets only. The pellets are a custom mix. We had a break around 9:30, which was nice, and I met another student name Katy. After the break, Beth Ann and I bottle fed colostrum to twin calves that were born yesterday. Both are heifers, one is very small and the other is quite large.
Large:Small:

After that we moved them up on the hill. Neither are very steady on their legs yet and I don’t think they’ve figured out how to go inside the hutches, so I hope they stay warm tonight. There are three calves up there that have just been weaned and I think I might choose one for my project calf. There is one that is very dark brown rather than black, and her whole head is solid except for a comma-shaped patch of white over one of her eyes.
Another of the weanlings:

After we moved them we fed the heifers in the green house and cleaned their barn. Then we drove out to a back field and picked up some gates that were on fields that weren’t being used anymore. The gates will be used to make pens for the show heifers. I came back to my room for lunch, and after lunch, we gave rabies vaccines and 2 mixed vaccines. I got to give all 3, which was cool. I also got kicked by a calf today, not too hard, but hard enough to leave a bruise.

Later in the afternoon I went with Claire and Eric to play with the new foals. The bay is called Newt and he’s about a month old. (Bay is the name for the color of a horse that is brown with a black mane and tail.) The black one is called Charlie and he’s only 4 days old!

Newt:

Charlie:

Newt's favorite game: chase Charlie!
One of the stallions in the barn: