Dealing With Annie's Mastitis

Annie, our Nubian goat, has struggled with mastitis for a while.  Milking her has always been a pain - for us and for her.  She kicks like a saddle bronc every time we milk.  She doesn't let her kids nurse for very long.  We normally shy away from antibiotics.  We normally try natural remedies.  Up to this point, we've been unsuccessful in the methods we've experimented with.  We resorted to trying an antibiotic treatment to attempt to finally clear up Annie's mastitis.

Tricia purchased some Today syringes which are to be inserted into the teats in order to inject the meds to fight off the infection.  You can purchase this at your feed store or Tractor Supply Company. Tonight we started the "Today" process.  We'll see how it goes tomorrow.  Ha Ha!

We went out the the barn at night right before supper and used alcohol to wipe down Annie's teats in order to keep things extra clean.

I have cleats on the milking stanchion and we put ropes around Annie's feet and secured them to the cleats.  This will keep her from kicking as we insert the syringe about a quarter inch into each of her two teats and inject the medicine.  We put some dairy ration and alfalfa pellets in her trough to somewhat distract her.

Tricia inserted the syringe into her teat and injected it all in.  It went surprisingly smooth!

She held the teat closed and used her thumb and index finger to push the meds upward into her bag.

Nothing dripped out.  We did the same thing on the other side.  The directions say to use every 12  hours, but only two doses.  Others, including some veterinarians, say to use it until it clears up.  Tricia did the California Mastitis Test after the second dose and she still showed some slight mastitis.  We may give it one more dose and then test again.  If it doesn't clear up, we may have to culture and see exactly which bacteria we're fighting and get the appropriate meds to knock this stuff out.

Kind of discouraging, but we'll keep trying.  Perhaps we'll find the "Annie-biotic" that will work.  I know Annie (and Tricia) will be happy.

Rendering Tallow

When you bring an animal to the slaughterhouse, the entire animal is yours.  You can ask for anything you want off of him and they will bag it up and send it home with you.  We always ask for the bones and the fat in addition to the meat.  The bones are roasted and boiled to make a nice beef broth.  That can be used as a base for soups.  You can use it in place of water when cooking rice to make your rice taste richer.

The fat is another thing we ask for as we make beef tallow from it.  In THIS POST FROM 2015 we take you through the steps of rendering beef tallow.  You can click on that link for the whole process, but today we'll show you the end result. 

The bull we brought to slaughter this year wasn't skinny, he was just real lean.  All muscle.  Not much fat.  A certain amount of fat is needed when making ground meat and half of him was used for ground meat.  In the end, we just had one small bag of fat for making tallow.  Tricia cooked it down on the stove until most of it liquefied and then poured it into a pyrex baking dish.  It was transparent at that point.  Then it was put into the refrigerator and it turned into a creamy white color with a tinge of yellow. 

We cut it up into chunks and put into a gallon-sized zip loc bag and then put in the freezer.  As needed, we'll pull out a square of fresh rendered beef tallow.

So what do you use beef tallow for?  Well, use it in place of cooking oil.  Tricia keeps a little ramekin of beef tallow by the stove that she uses.  Lately, we've been using it to make homemade soap.  We've made three batches so far and it has put a dent in our inventory of tallow.  Since Astro the bull was very lean and we were only able to render one pan of tallow, we'll have to contact a friend who brings calves to slaughter and see if he'll give us a big bag of fat.  Until then, we'll ration this tallow and/or slow down on the soap-making.

Picking Up the Meat

Several weeks ago we brought one of our bulls to the slaughterhouse in a neighboring town.  They butchered the bull and then dry-aged him for two weeks before cutting him up.  We don't have a scale, so we don't know his "on the hoof" weight, but we have a pretty good idea based on the receipt.  The receipt below shows a 284 pound hanging weight.  The difference between live weight and hanging weight is the blood, hide, hoofs, internal organs, lungs and heart.  A good rule of thumb is that the hanging weight is 40% of the live weight.  So this tells us that the live weight must have been in the neighborhood of 710 pounds.

You'll see there is a $0.45 per pound charge, plus a $50 butcher feel, plus a $12 fee to process the debris.  $189.80 plus taxes of $16.50, results in a total charge of $206.51.  That's a lot of money, but then again, it's a lot of meat.

After the bull was butchered, they packaged it and asked us to wait a couple days for it to get frozen solid.  Tricia arrived and there were about six wire baskets of meat ready for her.

The meat was all in a big walk in freezer along with everyone else's meat.  It was labeled and organized.

The ground meat, steaks, briskets, ribs, roasts, liver, tongue, fat, bones, and debris were individually wrapped and also put in big heavy-duty plastic bags.  They filled the trunk of the car.

The meat was moved inside by loading into a big ice chest.  Tricia weighed the individual cuts to determine how much of each we got.

Then it was all loaded into the deep freeze.  We're still in hurricane season, so we always worry a little bit about losing power, but if the worst case scenario happens and we lost power, we'd figure out a way to save it.

In separating out the different cuts and weighing everything, we got 249 pounds total for $206.31.  That's about $0.83 per pound.

This will keep our family stocked with meat for the foreseeable future.  We do have two additional bulls growing out in the pasture as well once this is gone.  While we'd rather have heifers, bulls provide much needed meat.  We enjoy the tenderness and flavor of our grass-fed bulls that have never been off the property and are free of antibiotics and medicines.

Hidden Nests

Since taking Astro to the slaughter house, we've moved Aussie into the bull pen that Astro once inhabited.  Now there's only Clarabull out with Rosie, Luna, and Clarabelle.  Each evening when we do late afternoon chores, the cows all come in for their feed.  Except for Clarabull.  He doesn't get fed anything at night, but we bring him in the corral and separate him so that he won't drink all of "our" milk overnight from his momma, Clarabelle.

I always have to climb over the fence and walk up to him.  He's eating on the tall grass and is in no rush to be locked up in the corral.  I get behind him and push on his rump and coax him slowly toward the barn.  As I was walking I noticed a hidden nest that our hens laid in the tall grass in one of the paddocks.  No telling how long they've been there.  I don't trust them, so I'm not going to pick them up.  They may all be rotten, and I'm just going to leave them alone.  Perhaps a hen is setting on them and just stepped away to get to the hen scratch that Tricia just threw out in the barnyard.

Most of the hens are predictable and they lay their eggs in the hen house nesting boxes.  Those that don't, lay their eggs in the hay near the round bale.  There are always a few hens that are unpredictable.  They'll go off, lay a nest, set on the eggs for 21 days and show up with some babies behind her. 

We've been experiencing a serious problem with a hen or hens.  We have a hen or hens that have picked up a very bad habit of eating eggs.  Each afternoon there are broken eggs in the nesting boxes that have been eaten by chickens.  So wasteful!  Then, the yolk gets all over the unbroken eggs in the nesting boxes and make cleaning the eggs a major chore.  The uneaten egg yolk/white drips down into the hay in the nesting boxes and with 95 degree heat, begins to smell really bad.

We've read all about this 'cannibalism.'  We keep the bin of oyster shells full, so we know it isn't a calcium deficiency.   We are feeding them plenty, so they shouldn't be so hungry that they feel the need to eat the unborn chickens.  To top it off, this is the time of year where egg production drops substantially.  We want those eggs to make it back to the house, NOT getting eaten by chickens.  It is a bad habit that we need to stop right now!

Perhaps the hidden nest in the tall grass in the photo above that Tricia and I found is hidden by a hen that doesn't want her eggs eaten by other hens.  Therefore, she's laying them in the tall grass where the cannibals can't find them.  Smart girl!

An Update on Our Mulching Project (When the Chips Are Down)

In THIS POST FROM JULY, we posted about getting wood chips to start experimenting with the Back to Eden gardening method.  Here's a little update.  The wood chips keep on coming.  So far we've received 16 truck loads of mulch.  It is stacked high and deep in the side yard.  We probably won't win any "Yard of the Month" awards with all these piles on the property!  We're almost out of room, and I've been moving it as fast as I can with a pitchfork and a Gorilla Cart wagon.  Just as soon as I have a pile moved, two more piles arrive to take its place!

Below is a 45 foot garden bed in our side yard that I plant purple hull peas in during summer months and potatoes in the spring.  The purple hull peas just completed producing and I figured it was time to apply an 8 inch layer of wood chips to the bed.  I used a wagon to haul them from one of my many piles, dumped it out and used a pitch fork and a rake to spread the wood chips evenly.

In early February, I'll scrape back the mulch to plant Irish Potatoes.  The soil underneath will be soft and easy to work.  I'll plant the seed potatoes in the soil, adding some compost.  As the potatoes grow, I'll cover with wood chips, and the potato plant will grow right up through the chips

The wood chips are chipped up pretty good.  The pile is hot.  The bacteria is breaking down the chips into soil.  Oh, another way we are using the wood chips is to mulch around trees in our yard.  I do not like weed-eating.  The roots around our live oak trees make is near impossible to get close with the mower, and that leaves a lot of weed eating to do.  Mulching around the trees (hopefully) will cut down on the weed eating.

I have a few more trees to mulch around and then I will begin stacking the mulch in the back of the garden again.  From there I'll move it to the garden as we get things planted.

When the chips are down, we'll see how this experiment works out!

The Old Fruit Bowl

Oftentimes, Tricia watches the Chip and Joanna Gaines "Fixer Upper" show where the couple work together to renovate an older home into something that is more modern and decorated nicely.  They talk to the buyers and find out what they like and will often incorporate something old and meaningful into the home.  Do you have things like that in your home that you've reclaimed?

I like things like that.  For instance, in the house I grew up in, my mom and dad incorporated old bricks from some landmarks from their childhood into the fireplace.  Things like that have a nostalgia factor.  It creates a great conversation piece and helps personalize your home and bring back memories.  It doesn't have to be part of the construction.  It can be a piece of furniture or a decoration or an old keepsake.

This evening I was looking at something in our home that brings back memories.  It's an old fruit bowl.  Not that it necessarily only contained fruit.  This bowl was my grandmother's.  We called her Bumby.  This bowl was in her kitchen on a countertop right next to an old International Deep Freeze.

Bumby normally had a few bananas in this bowl that were on the brown side.  Shortly before they turned completely brown, she transformed them into banana bread or banana pudding.  Let's see, what else was in this bowl?  Well, if I close my eyes and try to remember, there was also a pack of Juicy Fruit Gum in the bowl, a Baby Ruth Candy bar, a Snicker bar, various nuts, Bumby's car keys, the day's mail, the bulletin from Sunday Church Service, some butterscotch candies and a cinnamon disk candy or two.

Bumby passed away years ago, but seeing her old fruit bowl on the island in our kitchen reminds me of her and brings back good memories of spending time with her. 

Oh, What A Web We Weave

Do you remember the book, Charlotte's Web, written by E.B. White?  It was a children's story about a pig named Wilbur who was the runt of the litter.  Because Wilbur was such a runt, the farmer was going to kill him.  The farmer's daughter, Fern, however, talked her dad into saving the pig.  Fern cared for Wilbur, fed him with a bottle, put him in a baby stroller, and became very attached to Wilbur.

Soon Wilbur became too large to keep.  Mr. Zuckerman, a farmer nearby, purchased Wilbur.  Wilbur arrived at his new home and had no friends at first.  Then someone spoke to him.  It was Charlotte, a big grey spider.  Wilbur and Charlotte become close friends and all is going well until it is discovered that Wilbur will be killed and will turn into Christmas Dinner. 

Charlotte?

Charlotte hatches a plan to save Wilbur's life by writing notes in her web above Wilbur that say, "Some Pig!" and things like that.  People in the town flock to the farm to read the messages and the pig about whom they're written.  Wilbur's life is saved!

What a story!  I left off the sad part and the end.  You'll have to go read it again for yourself.  As I walked out to the barn this weekend, right above the barn gate a banana spider had spun a web.  She had caught breakfast and was wrapping it all up.

Her web looked out over a mud hole that Rosie, our Jersey cow, likes to lay in each day in order to cool herself.  Each day we have to give Rosie a bath before milking her.  We don't have pigs on our farm, but each and every day, we call Rosie a pig.  The spider above our barn gate hadn't written "Some Pig!" in her web, but her web gave her a panoramic view of Rosie in her mud hole, and I'm sure that she (like us) certainly thought it.  Hopefully the weather will cool off soon so our 'pig' will stop laying in the mud all day.