"Weighing" Luna

Luna, our little Jersey heifer, was born in late October 2015.  She is small in stature. We have a registered Jersey bull named "Chuck" on the herd, but we have had Luna separated from him until she was big enough to safely breed.  Chuck roams with Daisy and Rosie and Clarabelle.  We recently had our veterinarian make a farm call so that he could palpate the cows.  We found that Chuck had successfully bred both Rosie and Clarabelle.  Daisy was still 'open,' but we saw activity during Daisy's last cycle and think she was exposed.  Hopefully she is now bred.  We'll have to wait and see.

Here's the thing: Chuck is getting big and is starting to get mean and ornery.  He likes to hit you with his head when you walk out in the pasture.  Jersey bulls can be very dangerous and we don't want him on the pasture for much longer.  Our goal (and why we named him Chuck) is for him to breed all of our cows and then send him to the slaughterhouse.  This leads us back to the subject of this post - Luna.

As I was saying, she is small.  Tricia is concerned that she is too small to breed.  The only way to know for sure is to weigh her.  Since we don't have a scale, we use the next best thing - a weighing tape.  This tape has weight markings on it for Holsteins, Guernseys, and Jerseys.  The Jersey markings are the markings on the bottom row. If you look closely, the verbiage along the bottom says, "Lightest Jersey Breeding Weight."  The black line says that the lightest weight for Jerseys is 530 pounds.

You are supposed to put the weighing tape around her body right behind her front legs.  Then put the tape together and the weight is where the tape meets.  In this case, we see that Luna weighs 550 pounds.  She is 20 pounds heavier than the lightest Jersey breeding weight.  Although she is small, according to this, she can safely breed.

This is good news to us.  At some point next week, we will likely put all the cows and heifers together on the pasture.  The next time Luna comes in heat and if Daisy comes in heat again, Chuck can service them.  If successful, we'll have four baby Jersey calves within the next year, some coming as soon as in about 5 months.

Luna has been cordoned off it her own pasture up to this point.  Now that she is of calving age and size as confirmed by the weigh tape, we can introduce her to Chuck.

Tale of the Tape

During the months of December and January, we will be exposing all of our Jersey cows to our Jersey bull so that they all calve within a month of each other. Obviously, since both Daisy and Rosie have been bred numerous times, as soon as we see them come into heat, we've put them into the bullpen with Chuck, the Jersey bull.

The reason we don't just open the gates to the bullpen and let the cows and bull intermingle for the next two months is because of Luna, our Jersey heifer.  She is too young to breed.  Therefore, we keep her cordoned off away from the bull.

Clarabelle, our Jersey heifer, raises another issue of concern.  She's young and has never been bred before.  She was born in June of 2015.  Jerseys' minimum breeding weight should be 550 pounds, but how do we determine the weight without a scale? Well, there is a tape that you put right behind the front legs and it gives a pretty accurate indication of the animal's weight.

You loop the tape around and put it together to give you the weight.  The tape has markings for Jersey, Guernsey, and Holsteins on it.

The Jersey weights are shown on the very bottom of the tape and this clearly shows that Clarabelle weighs 620 pounds, so she is well above the minimum breeding weight of 550 pounds.  Now that we have that determined, we feel much better about putting the bull with everyone except Luna.

Clarabelle weighs 620 pounds

Here is ol' Chuck.  He's happy to be with the ladies as he hasn't been in the same pasture with them for months and months.  In a really strange turn of events, he ran to Rosie, his mother, and began trying to nurse on her!  Rosie began kicking him away.  That is a good thing as he is almost the same size as her and we don't want him drinking our milk.  He continued bothering her and she continued kicking her away.  Unfortunately, during evening milking, Rosie kicked and kicked as Tricia tried to milk her.  I guess she assumed that Tricia was her bull calf, Chuck, trying to get her milk.

Hopefully we'll get all the cows except for Luna exposed to the bull to be bred.  That will give us calving dates of September - October 2017.

His Work is Never Done

A singer/songwriter named Robert Earl Keen and his buddy, Lyle Lovett, wrote a song called “The Front Porch Song” and in part of the lyrics, he sings about a bull:

                                                        

This old porch is just a big ol' red and white Hereford bull
Standing under a mesquite tree in Agua Dolce
He just keeps on playing hide and seek with that hot August sun
He's sweating' and a-pantin'
Cause' his work is never done
Aw, no
I've known a whole lot of old bulls in my life
And their work is never done

It is summertime and although our bull, Chuck, is a registered Jersey bull and not a Hereford, those lyrics paint an accurate picture of the old boy.  He plays hide and seek with the hot August sun, lounging in the shade of the Chinaberry trees against the south pasture before venturing out when it is a little cooler to eat grass.  He likes to lay in the mud around the water trough.  It helps cool him off.

Chuck, like most bulls, likes to scratch his head on posts.  Unfortunately he really likes to rub his head on the water trough in his pasture.  It is made of a 30 gallon bucket that was originally a molasses tub.  If we allow it to get half empty, Old Chuck knocks the water trough over, spilling 15 gallons of water into his mud hole, and then pushes the tub into the fence destroying it.  Of course that means he’s out of water until we get there and get another tub filled with water.  Not very smart on his part!

Yesterday I asked the boys to come help me.  Chuck with all his head scratching, somehow was able to remove his halter.  I walked through the whole pasture until I found it lying in the grass.  I tried to put it on him, but he wasn’t cooperative.  Russ and Benjamin helped me run him into the corral and we were able to put a rope around his neck and put his halter back on.  Old boy is growing.  He’s muscular and solid.  He is going to be a force to be reckoned with.  I won't turn my back on him.

Chuck (El Toro)

Then we put him back in the pasture that he shares with little Buckwheat, our Nubian buckling goat.  We keep the males sequestered in their pasture, “male jail,” because at any given time, at least one of our cows and goats are in heat and it becomes a circus out there with hormones flowing and everyone jumping on one another.  Crazy, I tell you.  Keeping the males separated helps us manage breeding. 

We want to plan calving and kidding so that everyone delivers at the same time.  That way calving, nursing, and weaning all happens at once versus staggered out.  We didn’t do that this year and it sure made things difficult, making it hard for us to get away for a few days.  We won’t make that same mistake again, if we can help it.  Chuck will be a year old in December.  We'll try to put him with the girls when he turns one year old and shoot for September calving.

Robert Earl Keen’s song about a bull’s work being never done is accurate on a larger herd where the bull is in charge of an entire herd of cows to service.  Chuck only has four cows in his “harem,” so his work will be done relatively quickly.  Same thing for Buckwheat and his three goats to take care of.  But one thing’s for certain – ‘ol Chuck is playing hide and seek with that hot August sun, sweating and panting and longing for fall.

Building a Fence

No, this is not a blog post about a means to curb illegal immigration!  It is actually about our 7 month old bull calf named Chuck.  With five Jersey cows on our little homestead farm all going in heat at different times, there’s a lot of hormone action going on.

Chuck

Chuck has hormones of his own and when he’s not using his head to destroy things such as water buckets in the stall and corral, well… he wants to be closer to Daisy, Rosie, Amy, Clarabelle, and Luna.  The other day he successfully breached two strands of electric fence and ‘got with’ one of the calves.

In 1973 Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn teamed up to sing a song called, “Louisiana Woman – Mississippi Man.”  It was a catchy tune and contained the chorus below which suggested that when you’re in love, an obstacle like the Mighty Mississippi River (or an electric fence, in this case) is an ineffective barrier to keep them from getting together!

Louisiana woman

Mississippi man

We get together

Every time we can

The Mississippi River

Can't keep us apart

There's too much love

In this Mississippi heart

Too much love

In this Louisiana heart

Yes, there is too much love in that Louisiana Jersey Bull’s heart.  Fortunately, Chuck is not fertile yet and when he broke through the barrier, he was not successful in impregnating the calves.  I read somewhere that a bull becomes fertile beginning at 8-10 months, so I knew that fence construction must jump to the top of my priority list.  He is a good looking little bull and he’s only going to get bigger and harder to contain as the months go on.  Our plan is to use him to breed all of the cows, but on OUR time frame, and then get rid of him.  Despite the fact that Jersey cows are docile, gentle animals, Jersey bulls are crazy and will hurt you.

There's too much love in this Jersey bull's heart...

So we must build a fence.  We assembled all of our supplies and each afternoon after work, Benjamin and I would work until the sun dipped behind the horizon erecting and stretching the East-West length of a permanent bull/goat pasture within the perimeter of our existing pasture.  This area was always grazed, it was just separated by a (porous, for a bull at least) electric fence.  Now it will have 4 foot tall, 4x4 goat fence, with a strand of barbed wire on top.

Pulling the fence tight

After some additional hard work, we squared off the bull pasture.  You can see this below.  You can also see the two strands of electric wire in the foreground.

We put a 12 foot gate in the pasture that will enable us to drive through, when needed.

Chuck is an elitist and  lives in a gated community

And finally we added a 10 foot gate at the opening of the chute that connects the barnyard corral to the ‘bull pasture.”  It hinges so that it contains the bull safely in the pasture as shown below, or it can be opened to allow the bull into the barnyard corral when needed.   I must tell you that it was nice to work on the chute as it afforded me the opportunity to work in the shade.  Building fence in the July sun is a hot job.

The Shady Chute

This set-up will allow us to effectively manage the segregation of the bull from the cows, or the segregation of calves from momma cows when weaning, or keep the trouble-making goats in their own place.  We should have done this a long time ago, but better late than never.  It was a hot job to build this fence and I’m glad that work is done!  Now to the next item on the project list…

Cut off the Horns of the Wicked

Psalm 75:10 (KJV) All the horns of the wicked also will I cut off; but the horns of the righteous shall be exalted.

A commentary tells me that in this Bible verse, horns are literal, not figurative, and what it means is that the horns are defined as the “power, the might, the glory, the haughtiness” of the wicked and will be brought down, while the power of the righteous will be lifted up.

We’ve found that there are times on our little homestead where literal horns must be cut off.  Case in point is Chuck, our Jersey bull.

Young Chuck sitting on the ground (Ground Chuck?)

As with all of our animals, within the first couple weeks of their lives, we use dehorning paste to kill the little horn buds, so that their horns won’t ever develop.  Horns are dangerous to people, to other animals in the barnyard, and horns also wreak havoc on fences.  There are times in which for one reason or another, things don’t go as planned.  We put the same de-horning paste on Luna and her horns were killed.  For Chuck, however, one didn’t grow, but the other started to grow.  This presents a problem.

It’s too big now to use de-horning paste.  We’d have to load him into a trailer and bring him to the veterinarian to undergo surgery to remove it.  That is costly and time-consuming.  There is another option…

There is a device called an electric dehorner.  It essentially is a circular heating iron that heats up, and you apply it to the entire area encircling the horn bud.  It will kill the horn bud.  A friend of ours owns an electric dehorner and agreed to let us borrow it.  Actually, he was in the area and came by and took care of the procedure for us.

I’m not going to show pictures of the process.  We tied him up tight where he couldn’t thrash around.  Then we put the nose pliers in his nose to make him compliant.  Finally the cherry red heating element was used (similar to a brand).  The barn filled with smoke when the heating iron was applied, but Chuck was only uncomfortable for a minute.  He was running around acting normal in no time, although I’m sure his head was sore.

In checking in on him a few days later, you can see the round ring that the heating element made around his horn bud.  You can also see where the little horn is about to fall off.  With this method of horn removal, there’s no bleeding.  The ‘roots’ of the horn are dead and will not grow, ensuring the safety of us, other animals and our fences.

Ouch!

And that brings a gentle reminder to me that we need to decide what to do about the triplet’s horns.  Do we want to remove them?  If so, by what method?  We tried using a castrator band on Annie’s horns.  While it worked, scurs (partial horns) grew back and we’ll likely look to another method.  The electric de-horner for a calf looks to be way too large to use on a baby goat.  They make electric dehorners for goats.  Maybe we’ll let Chuck weigh in with his opinion?

"Don't Get me Started..."

Well, maybe not…

Checking in on the Calves

In 2015 our three Jersey cows gave us three calves, two heifers and a little bull.  We haven't given a progress report on them lately and figured we'd summarize how they are doing.  First we'll start with Clarabelle.  Clarabelle is Rosie's heifer that was born on June 20, 2015

Clarabelle at 7 months old

Clarabelle is a beautiful little heifer and has a gentle disposition, perhaps the most gentle calf we've had.  She is clipped up for the District Livestock show in Lake Charles this next weekend.  She also has a weaning plate in her nose to wean her. She has managed to pop it out of her nose on at least four occasions, but has not robbed Rosie's milk.  I think she is content eating hay.  She leads beautifully with a rope and has the A2/A2 genetics that we were hoping for.  She's definitely a keeper!

Here is Luna, sitting comfortably in the hay that her mom, Daisy, manages to waste.  Luna got her name because she was born on a full moon on October 27, 2015.  She's three months old now and has a nice blue halter.  She gets to drink Daisy's milk all day long and then she gets separated and we get Daisy's morning milk.  In the picture below, you can see Daisy's big bag.  You would think that it is full of milk but actually, it isn't - it is scar tissue.  One of her quarters was ruined when she was just a heifer by Rosie.  We were weaning Rosie and had her separated from her mom and she began suckling on Daisy.  It caused Daisy to begin producing milk and by the time we caught it, one of her quarters was ruined.  Daisy still makes great milk that has a high percentage of butterfat, but only from three of her quarters.

Luna in her 'nest'

Luna, like Clarabelle, is a registered Jersey and has the A2/A2 genetics that we were hoping for.  This afternoon it was a beautiful January afternoon with temperatures in the mid-70's.  I put a lead rope on her and led her out into the yard and we made several long laps around the yard.  She is a spirited little thing, but is pretty much broken and leads without having to drag her.  While out in the yard today, she was introduced to her first patch of clover.  It was love at first sight!

Luna searching for a four leaf clover

And last but not least, we have little Chuck.  Chuck was born on December 5, 2015, so he's about two months old.  He's almost as big as Luna, though.  He was born to Amy and is her first calf.  He rushes out of the stall in the morning and hits Amy's bag, hoping to get more milk to drop for his breakfast.

Chuck' breakfast

Chuck is a muscular little guy.  He has lots of energy and is wild as a March hare. Before he gets too much bigger (and stronger) I intend on putting a halter on him and begin working on breaking him so that he'll lead with a rope.  We also need to get him registered with the American Jersey Cattle Association and check his genetics for the A2/A2 gene.

The only boy

I don't like to keep a bull on our little herd.  We're really not set up to handle all the drama that goes on with numerous cows going in heat with a bull around.  Our intent is to keep this little guy for right at two years and have him breed all our girls, then we'll sell him or process him.  We've actually had one bull calf that would charge you and try to hurt you.  We had to walk in the pasture with an ax handle for protection.  We don't want to go through that again.

A face to face encounter

We de-horned Chuck and you can see that his little head is healing up nicely.  He's drinking plenty of milk and have noticed that once he empties Amy's milk, he makes the rounds, robbing Daisy of any milk that she might have leftover after Luna has nursed.  Maybe that's why he's almost caught up with Luna in size.

Chuck, the milk thief

It is quite a rodeo to get everyone separated and situated at night.  We've been thinking about putting up a new corral to add a couple more areas of containment for our growing animal family.  Three cows and three calves on three acres.  That is a lot of animals for our little pasture.  The pasture is also shared by all of our laying hens and Annie, our Nubian dairy goat who will be having kids in less than a month now.

Singing to Amy (How We Got Amy To Let Down Her Milk)

If you follow our blog, you'll know that Amy just had her first calf.  He's a little bull calf that we named "Chuck."  Chuck is a healthy little fellow and is doing just fine. Right now we leave Momma and baby together all day.  Soon we'll separate them in the evening and begin milking Amy in the morning. Right now, Chuck can't empty out all of Amy's milk, so I'm milking Amy out in the evening so Amy doesn't get mastitis.

30 minutes after 'Chuck' was born

Here is Chuck one day after being born.  Once he dried off, he's more of a brown color than a reddish-brown.  He has lots of personality.

Chuck at one day old

We have two stalls in the barn.  Each evening at about 5 pm, we bring the cows in the barn for feeding and we separate the calves from the Momma cows.  Clarabelle, Rosie's heifer, goes in the big stall for the evening:

And Luna, Daisy's heifer, goes into the little stall that we have the goat milking stanchion in.  If you look closely, you can still see the green ink on one of Luna's ears from when we tattooed her ears.  It will rub off soon.  You can also see one of the scabs on her head from where we recently de-horned her.  We've got to do the same with Chuck this weekend.

"Green-eared Luna!"

Speaking of Chuck, here he is.  We don't have another stall for him in the barn. We'll have to remedy that for when we start separating him, but that is on my project list.  Anyway, that was a long, rambling introduction to the reason for the post - milking Amy, and how we get her to drop her milk.

Poor Chuck - stranded outside (Rosie's glowing eyes in the background)

The first thing we do in the evening is to bring Amy into the barn, leaving Chuck outside.  This makes her a little nervous, but she's okay with it for the most part. Chuck will come up to the barn gate and look in and then he'll dash off, tail high in the air - funny to watch him run.

When Amy's in the barn, we clean her up and get ready to milk.  Initially, we hobbled one of her legs and she milked perfectly fine, but then began to kick. Fortunately, we have a device called Kow Kan't Kick.  We posted about it in this previous post.  You can click on that hyperlink to read details about the nifty contraption.  

Kow Kan't Kick in place

With the device in place, her udder cleaned up, and lubricant put on her teats, we're ready to start milking.  The Kow Kan't Kick tool makes it next to impossible for her to lift her leg.  Properly installed you don't have to worry about her kicking at all.

Ready to Go!

But there's one more problem.  As I start milking, the process of separating her from her baby along with the stress of clamping the device on her back, causes her to be filled with anxiety.  Cows like things to be serene, slow, and steady.  All the excitement has caused Amy to hold back her milk.  I discover that there's very little milk coming out.  Cows can be very cunning and hold back their milk for their babies.  You can do several things to get her to drop her milk.  First, you can clean her udder with warm water.  This will relax her.  Then, you can imitate the calf and bump her bag.  This bumping action is what the calf instinctively does with its head to cause the milk to drop.

Finally though, I found the thing that worked.  Alone in the barn, I began singing to Amy.  I picked the first song that came to mind, a country song by Tim McGraw called, "Just To See You Smile." As I belted out the chorus:

Just to see you smile

I'd do anything that you wanted me to

When all is said and done

I'd never count the cost

It's worth all that's lost

Just to see you smile

And then, an amazing thing started to happen - Amy's milk started dropping!  The more I sang, the more the milk dropped, filling her udder.

Amy let down her milk!

As I sang to a cow in the barn at 7pm at night, I couldn't help but laugh out loud at what someone would think if they came walking by.  You can't argue with success, though.  Singing to Amy made her milk drop, but I'm not sure if it made her smile...