Elsie's BoBo

 

This is our girl, Elsie.  Elsie is a Jersey heifer and she should be a cow.  What I'm meaning by that is that she should have calved by now as she's been exposed during heat cycles to several different bulls.  It just never "took."  We had the vet look at her and it turns out she had some cysts on her ovaries.  He took care of them and supposedly, she's good to go.  We put her and Nick (our Jersey bull) together for date night while she was in standing heat, and we observed them romancing.  We marked down the date and so far, it looks like she skipped a cycle.  That means perhaps she's pregnant.

She'd better be!  She's a fat cow.  I tell her every day, "Elsie, you'd better be pregnant.  If you're not, you'd better get pregnant fast.  You are a milk cow.  Cows don't make milk unless they get pregnant.  If you don't get pregnant, we're not going to keep you around to just eat grass.  You'll go to be processed and put in our freezer."  Of course she has no clue of what I'm telling her, but it's true.

In looking her over yesterday, I noticed something.  It is a circular wound on her side, about the size of a silver dollar.  It is a nasty looking wound, yellow and festering and flies were around it.  We quickly moved into action.  We got some iodine in a sprayer from the shelf in the feed room in the barn and sprayed the area real good.  It must burn, because Elsie didn't like that one bit.  Today, it looked a little bit better.  We sprayed more iodine on it.  Tomorrow Tricia will inspect it and put either some honey (natural antibiotic) or some Neosporin.

We will continue to watch it.  Elsie is real rambunctious.  Two mornings ago, it got in the lower 50's in the morning.  It was cool and crisp and Elsie was acting frisky, running and kicking up her heels like small calves do.  She probably ran into something and that's how she got the injury.  We try to keep our eyes open for hazards like that and as soon as we see them, we try to get them corrected.

Hopefully the iodine treatments, followed by honey and Neosporin will do the trick and heal up Elsie's bobo.  We'll post an update as things change. 

Rosie's Young Bull Calf

Rosie's little bull calf is three days old now.  He was born on 9/11.  It will be easy to remember his birthday.  We've separated Rosie and her calf in the "bull pen" away from the rest of the herd.  Chuck, the bull, was head-butting him and we figured it best to get Rosie and the calf away from him.  In fact, we've made an appointment to have the bull processed in October.  Our inventory of beef in the freezer is down to only a few soup rounds.  We'll work with the bull to try to get him into the trailer between now and then.  That is going to be quite a task.  He is not friendly and can get aggressive.  I think I'm more hard-headed than he is, though.  I'll find a way to get him in the trailer.  Beef.  It's what's for supper!

Back to the calf.  The little guy is very healthy.  He drank Rosie's colostrum and is nursing on all four quarters throughout the day.  In the evenings, I bring them into the barn and feed Rosie some dairy ration and alfalfa.  While she's eating, I milk her out.  There is still some colostrum in her milk.  It is a dark yellow color.  Pretty soon that will be gone and it will just be pure milk.  We will do what we always do - we leave the cow and the calf together all day and then separate them in the early evening.  The next morning all the milk will be ours.  Then we will put the cow and the calf together and he'll get all the day time milk.  We share with each other.

So, while I milk Rosie out, I also check out her torn teat.  We have posted about her stepping on her front teat and tearing it.  It is healing and she let's us milk her, but the cut is still open.  In fact, it bled on me a little bit today.  Each day we put iodine on her teat to help keep infection out, but truthfully, I think the calf keeps things clean as much as he's nursing.  Yesterday afternoon, we couldn't find the calf.  We started to get a little concerned, but Rosie had him hidden in the grass.  He was hiding.  I picked him up and threw him over my shoulders, carrying him behind by neck holding two legs with my left hand and two with my right.  He's already getting heavy.  Thankfully, he didn't pee on me.

I got him back to the barn and Rosie moo'd at her baby.  In learning about cows, we read that cows will tend to step on their teats if their hooves get to long.  Her hooves aren't that long, but I figured I would give her a pedicure.  Too keep her from kicking me, I used a device that I blogged about in our Kow Kant Kick Post.  I positioned that over her back and got some tin snips and was able to trim her back hooves today.  I'll try to do a better job tomorrow.

Rosie's milk hasn't fully come in yet, but after milking her out in the evening for the last two days, the calf is getting most of the milk .  The little bit of milk/colostrum mix that we did get was fed to the chickens.  Do they ever love to drink fresh milk! Pretty soon, we'll be drinking fresh milk again, too!

Diagnosing Daisy's Lame Foot

Daisy is the matriarch of Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  She's the oldest Jersey cow on our farm and will turn 8 years old in June.  When we purchased her, she came alongside her mom, Buttercup. Daisy makes delicious milk with thick cream. She is a bossy, headstrong cow, but she's like a member of the family.

We know our animals and watch them closely to assess their behavior.  The other day we noticed that she was limping a little bit and could tell that she was favoring her back leg on her left side.  We had to take a look and see what the problem was and determine how to treat it.  This sometimes proves to be tricky on a large animal.  If a cow kicks you, it can be a painful and dangerous situation.  We have a nifty device called "Kow Kan't Kick" that we use for this purpose.

You can see it in the photo below.  You slip it over her backbone and it has two arms that go right in her 'armpits.'  Then you crank it tight with the crank on top.  This disables her ability to kick.

Kow Kan't Kick

We pulled the rope tight to ensure she didn't have slack.  She is known for making trouble.  Of course she immediately got all nervous when I put the Kow Kan't Kick apparatus on her and you can see above that she lifted her tail and immediately pooped and peed to let us know she was not appreciative of this loss of freedom.

Cut me some slack

Tricia held her steady because with the device on, they lose their balance.  While Tricia held Daisy upright, I got behind her and lifted her hoof.  Yep, just as I suspected, Daisy has a touch of foot rot. We have had wet, muddy conditions for several weeks and that contributes to the problem that is caused by an organism called Fusiformis necrophorus.  I learned that from reading Keeping a Family Cow by Joann S. Grohman.  It is a great book that teaches you everything you need to know about tending to your family cow.

Foot rot is a pretty easy condition to treat for sheep and goats and I've treated many of them. Fortunately, we caught Daisy's problem early.  It wasn't pus-filled and didn't stink.  It was just tender and sore.  Well, we are going to do what we can to remedy the situation.  First, while I had her leg up, I cleaned out the area between her hooves with a knife, checking to see that there wasn't a nail, wire, rock or stick causing the tenderness.  Nope.  Funny thing is, it didn't stink.  Goats feet stink horribly when they have this ailment.  It was clear to see where the problem was. You can see below on the back of her foot, the skin area is decomposing a little bit, pulling away from the hooves.

Daisy's foot rot

The best way we've found to treat it is to liberally spray down the area with Iodine. This antiseptic will clean up the area and disinfect it.  We've seen it work its magic overnight on Annie the goat.  I held Daisy's foot up and sprayed the hoof area real good.

Iodine

We will check on her again tomorrow and treat her again until we can't notice a limp.  Cows need to be able to walk about and eat hay and grass and not be limited by an ailing foot  We've got to get things fixed soon.  Dry weather would help as well, although I see we're expecting rain again next week.  

Hopefully Daisy will be walking better on her leg tomorrow after the treatment.