About Cows 2007

My how times have changed – even when we talk about cows.  When I grew up on this farm we owned one cow.  In that day and time a cow was a necessity – we depended on the bovine for our milk and butter.  We could even swap the peddler butter for whatever we needed.  Back then the pasture was small and filled with something called bitter weed. Needless to say, the cow would eat that in the summer which made the milk bitter and we couldn’t drink it.  We had a neighbor who made his children walk the pasture and pull the bitter weed up so they could use their milk – smart man.  Feeding the cow was important, too, she ate cotton seed night and morning and also we shucked corn and gave her the shucks.  Then she had to be milked twice a day as well.  When breeding time came, the cow had a rope tied around her neck and Daddy walked her to a neighbor’s farm to have that done.  Of course, we were without milk for a spell before the new calf was born.  The term “the cow’s dry” was a common term heard around these parts back when modem meant what Pa had done to the hay fields – he mowed ‘em.

With all that said, the cattleman today has a pasture full of cows, but he goes to the store to buy his milk.  Most young children think milk comes from a carton.  Well, John no longer has cows of his own – the farm is leased – but you wouldn’t know the difference .   He looks after these cows just as though they are his.  He does almost everything, but get the check from the sale barn when it’s selling time.

Rather than a small pasture and growing row crops as we did years ago, the pasture covers most of the forty-acre farm.  We bought some acreage that borders us on the south side and it, too, is fenced and has a beautiful and quite large pond so the cows have access to water.  That pond has a spring in it – unlike the little pond up near this house. I remember visiting the folks who lived down near the large pond years ago.  Their house sat on a hill and they had to go down the steep hill to the spring to get their drinking water.  On wash day, they took the clothes down to the spring to do the washing rather than to have to tote the water up the hill.

Fence repair is an on-going job and as old as this fence is now – that makes for a real job. In fact, most of this fence today is electric.  Even one can buy a charger that is solar operated – doesn’t have to be plugged into electricity.  What do you suppose they will think of next?  There is one little red calf that knows just where she gets the least shock (or I guess that’s it) – she keeps getting out and when she sees John coming, she runs back in at the same place she got out.  He says she gets the “juice” because he can see how she reacts.  I guess the shock is not enough to turn her back and, too, when they learn they can get out it’s harder to keep them penned up.  Even the whole herd broke through the hot wire and enjoyed plundering and eating from the large hay rolls recently.  The wire gets “shorted out” at the least provocation, too, and they are always walking to see where a weed has touched the wire.  Trees fall across the fence, too, and that poses another problem – especially when it’s at the edge of the pond where it almost impossible to get to with a chain saw.

Feed for the winter months is another job to be reckoned with for the cattle farmer.  The grass has to be cut and baled during the summer. There is usually not enough rain or it rains after the grass has been cut, but before it is dry enough to bale.  Ah, the woes of a cattle farmer.  Chicken litter or some kind of fertilizer needs to be applied to the hay fields so they will produce more grass and that has to be done at the right time, too.  Chicken litter is used by some farmers as part of cattle feed, but that isn’t done here and I’m glad.  That seems cruel to me and then we eat that meat. Ugh!  In years gone by the hay was baled in square bales and then manually put in the barn loft — and that was hard labor to lift the bales from the wagon up to the loft.

The cattleman needs to be a doctor of a sort, too. Cows get sick and need attention just like humans do.  Close attention has to be paid when they are near calving – cows do sometimes die trying to have their calves.  In John’s younger days he could enter a calving cow up to his elbow to turn a breeched calf around.  Wow!  Imagine the pain for the cow.  When we first bought this farm and started getting into the cattle business, I heard John’s uncle tell about tying his cow to a tree and then tying a rope around the calf hooves and pulling it with the tractor.  Awful!!  But perhaps he saved the cow and calf that he would have lost otherwise.

Cattlemen were recently up in arms when the talk was about being taxed heavily because the cows were causing problems with global warming.  Yes, flatulence (expelling gas) was or is considered a problem that adds to global warming and it was rumored (?) that a tax was going to be put on the cattlemen because of this.  Can you imagine?  We assume that all started with Al Gore and his talk about global warming.  I think at the present time that has been put on the back burner, but should it ever happen I imagine lots of cattle farmers will go out of business.

So much for the talk about cows, but being a cattle farmer is more than just hauling the calves (and cows) to the sale barn and collecting the check and this article has only scratched the surface. But now you have a glimpse of how it is with a cattleman’s style of country living.

The Cow