The Tale of the Tape

Whenever we want to weigh in, as humans, we jump on the bathroom scale.  It is a digital scale.  You put your toe on it, it flashes CALC and then zeroes out.  Then you stand on it and it flashes your weight.  Easy like Sunday Morning.

We don't happen to have a bathroom scale for our cows.  We like to keep track of the growth rate of our calves and have started weighing them monthly to chart their growth.  They are both still nursing off of their mommas.  We haven't weaned yet.  They are growing on a mixture of momma's milk and grass.  With all the rain this year, they've enjoyed a lot of grass to eat.

So we'll show you how we weigh them.  We purchased a 'Weigh tape' at our local feed store. It reminds me of a tape that a tailor uses to alter the length of you pants.  We simply wrap it around the calf's body right behind the front legs.  Don't pull extra tight - just tight enough to pull the slack out.  Mark that line on the tape with your finger.

This is a dairy cow tape and it has three lines.  The top is for Jerseys.  The middle for Guernseys, and the bottom for Holsteins.

On one side it shows their girth.  Elsie's measurement was 45.5 inches.

If you flip the tape over at the same point as 45.5 inches and look at the top line, it shows that Elsie weighs 310 pounds.

Elsie was born April 7, 2021

On May 1, she had 31 1/2" girth                  92 pounds

On June 6, she (didn't write down girth)    175 pounds 

On July 2, she had 42" girth                        240 pounds

On August 7, she had 45 1/2" girth             310 pounds

Elsie is growing at a pretty good clip, more than a pound a day weight gain.  We'll continue to watch her and chart her growth.

Clarabelle's Feeling "Under the Weather"

After the livestock shows, we were ready for things to settle down to normal around our little farm.  The rains came and never stopped falling, however.  The cows were all mired in knee-deep mud and were just miserable.  Then, all of a sudden, Clarabelle got sick.  She just began looking very lethargic and week.

Tricia called me at work one day to tell me that Clarabelle had fallen down in the milking stall and Tricia was unable to get her to stand back up.  Tricia got a saw and screwdriver and took the stall apart and was finally able to get her back on her feet. 

Sickly & Weak

Then she stopped eating her dairy ration.  She lost her appetite and the only thing we were able to get her to eat was alfalfa mulch and hay.  Clarabelle began rapidly losing weight.  You could count her bones.  Dairy animals are bony anyway, but this was alarming.  We were worried about ol' girl.

On Friday, Russ was off work, so he and Tricia loaded Clarabelle into the trailer and brought her to our veterinarian.  He's located about a mile away, so it is very convenient.  Our veterinarian put on rubber gloves and got a fecal sample.  Then he put it in a solution and waited for "things" to rise to the top.  He then looked at it under a microscope.  He diagnosed her with a high load of parasites.  Worms.

Worms are easily treated, but there are some medicines that cannot be administered to dairy animals or there is a long period during which you cannot drink the milk.  Due to Clarabelle's condition, he advised us to "dry her off" (stop milking her) and wean her calf, Astro.  During her sickness, her milk production had dropped to almost nothing anyway.  The vet gave us meds to give her that hopefully will help.

35 cc's by mouth should do the trick.  We administered it by using a syringe without the needle.  We held her head, stuck the syringe in the side of her mouth, and slowly pushed it down her throat, ensuring that none leaked out of the side of her mouth.

All we could do at this point was wait.  Tick, Tock...  I put up the temporary electric fence in the yard and she picked around at the winter grass.  Amazingly, she wouldn't touch the white dutch clover.  Pretty soon, she was ready to go back with the other cows.  Things weren't looking good.

Yesterday, I began to wonder if perhaps she had a virus and was running a fever.  I got the rectal thermometer we keep in the barn and lubricated it with Vaseline and then took her temperature.  It registered 100.5 at its highest.  A cow's normal rectal temperature is 101.5.  So no fever.  Perhaps we just need to be patient and let the meds work.

At last night's feeding, Clarabelle began eating.  Not a huge amount and not fast, but it was progress.  We fed her as much as she'd eat.  This morning, she didn't eat as voraciously, but she still ate.  This afternoon, she ate a little better.

Get Well, Clarabelle!

I think she's turned the corner.  Hopefully, she'll continue to get better and make a full recovery.  She has a lot of weight to gain back, but we'll keep working with her.  Get Well, Clarabelle!

"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.

The Tale of the Tape

We've always wanted to weigh our cows, but don't have a scale large enough to weigh an animal bordering on a thousand pounds.  Fortunately, you don't need a heavy-duty scale.  They make a Weigh Tape for Dairy Cows and Tricia purchased one for us for only $4.95.  It is not as accurate as putting your animals on a scale. It is merely an estimate.  But an estimate is good enough for us.

Weighing them gives you good data that you can use to see if your animals are average size for their age, helps you to compute feed amounts and drug dosages, and allows you to determine when they are ready for breeding, etc.

The Dairy Cow Weigh Tape

It is made of Tyvek so it is pretty much weather-proof and durable.  When it gets dirty (it will), you can clean it without damaging it.  One side of it is simply a measuring tape with inches.  It sort of reminds me of a sewing tape that my wife keeps in her sewing box - this one is just larger.

Inches on one side

If you flip it over, you can see that it is broken up into thirds - one line for Holsteins, one for Guernseys, and one for Jerseys.  We have Jerseys and as you can see, they are the smallest of the three breeds.  The numbers you see are weights.

So what you do is have your animal stand on a flat, level surface and place the tape around the cow's girth, just behind the front legs.  Run the tape all the way around and mark down the number of inches.  When you flip the tape over at whatever inch measurement, the tape will have corresponding weights based on the circumference.

Weights for each breed.

It will show you things such as the lightest Jersey breeding weight.  Without this tape, we went strictly by age, but it is important that your heifer weighs enough. Now we'll know.

Lightest Breeding Weight for Jerseys

The tape also tells you the average calving weight by breed.

So I measured Rosie and she measured 69 inches around.  When I measured Daisy, she was about the same.  The girls were a little startled as we'd never done this to them before.  
The instructions say not to pull the tape real tight.  I marked the tape with my finger at 69 inches. Flipping the tape over at 69 inches reveals that the cows each weigh roughly 905 pounds.

And that is the tale of the tape.  905 pounds.  Even though Jerseys are relatively smaller cows, 905 pounds is still pretty heavy.  That is especially evident when they step on your foot.