Home, home on the Range...

Sorry for the hiatus in posting for the last two days, the family went to New Orleans for the weekend for a family wedding.  I'll try to maybe do some lagniappe posts to catch up in the next few days.

We've weaned Blackberry off of Daisy and she's pretty much on grass and plan to bid her farewell and introduce her back to the herd at the farm in Oberlin.  We knew that we had this trip coming up and would not be able to milk Daisy from Friday night through Sunday night.  So we moved Blackberry back into the paddock with Daisy and Rosie and removed her nose plate so that she could get Daisy's milk since we wouldn't be around to milk her.  The nose plate, if you remember from an earlier post, keeps Blackberry from being able to nurse.  This gives us all the milk and "encourages" her to switch her diet to strictly grass.

Here is a close-up on the nose plate weaning device.  If you notice the two arms on top with the orange balls on the end, those go in the calf's nose.  You can see that the one on the left is adjustable.  It is in the open position.  You hold the calf, put the device in her nose and close it.  This does not hurt the calf at all, although the nose on a cow is very sensitive. 


Wean a Calf Plate

Here is the another picture of the same plate but with the arms in the closed position.  Once it is closed, there is a carriage head bolt with a wing nut on the back side.  You can see where it fits in the square notch on the left hand side.  Once in place, you tighten up the wing nut and the weaning plate is good to go.  With the plate in place, the calf tries to nurse on the mama cow's teat, but can't get to it with the plate in place.  Now, if you really want to get medieval with it, you can pry open the triangular tabs on the plate shown below.  Those tabs will poke the mama cow's udder when the calf tries to nurse, provoking the mama cow to kick the calf off of her and not allow her to even try to nurse.


In the closed position

Ordinarily, God has given cows instincts which enable them to wean their calves naturally.  Sometimes, however, calves will continue nursing until they are as big as the mama.  It's almost embarrassing, really.  Sometimes, at between 5 - 8 months, it's just time for the calf to be weaned off the mama and allow her to dry off and build up her stores of energy for the new calf developing within her.  That is when this plate helps.

This was Blackberry nursing a couple of month's ago and this is what we were expecting while we were in New Orleans.  Blackberry, by the way is way bigger than this now.


Got Milk?  Yep.

Imagine our surprise arriving home and checking on the animals to find Daisy very, very fullof milk.  She didn't allow Blackberry to nurse and probably Moo'd (is that a verb?) for two days, driving the neighbors crazy.  There is an old saying, "Good fences make good neighbors."  In this case I'll bet that our neighbors wish the fence was a sound-proof one!  Daisy was so full of milk that she was leaking and I'm sure very uncomfortable.  Tricia quickly milked her and got a lot of milk.  Since milk production is based on demand, we hope that her milk production isn't affected.  We've dried off Rosie successfully and need Daisy to produce enough milk for our family until Rosie delivers her calf in December.  We'll have to wait and see.