Cow Nanny

Well, I just finished my first full day at Hennie and Kerri’s dairy farm, and I’m bushed. I suppose I’ll just write down a few things, ‘cause I feel like I should.

I got here yesterday evening in time to learn how to feed the calves their dinner. Hennie usually lets the calves stay with their mothers for a day or so after they’re born, but if they stay with them longer than that they get attached and it’s harder to wean the calves later when they’re sent to another farm. The upshot of this is that I’m the one who helps out (if any help is needed) with calves being born, and then I cart them over to the calf shed once they’ve had a bit of time to get used to the outside world. I feed them all once in the morning and once at night while the other cows are being milked. The older ones I feed with a neat little invention called a “calf-eteria,” which has a bunch of nipples attached to a large container that holds milk. This only works if the calves have a sucking reflex, however, and some of the ones that are only a few hours or a day or so old don’t have it yet, so I tube feed those guys until they’re strong enough to deal with the regular feeder.

They’re pretty darn cute, and the ones that were born today (two born over night, two born this afternoon) already think I’m their mom and follow me around, butting my legs and sucking on my fingers. It’s pretty adorable, when they’re not splashing fermented milk all over me. I helped with the births of the two born this afternoon because they were in weird positions en utero. I’ve never helped anything be born before, and I was partially amazed, partially grossed out, and partially feeling totally clueless and incompetent. As with all new jobs, I spend the first day learning how much I need to learn. But both calves made it through alright (one bull and one heifer), though the bull had a narrow squeak because his mom laid down right at the end and he couldn’t get any air. We had to hang him upside-down by his heels for a bit, and then he came right.

Let’s see, other things I helped with today…
I helped with afternoon milking a bit, and found out that I don’t remember as much as I thought I did. They do things differently here than at Cedar Summit, and they have different equipment, so there’s that to consider as well. For instance, they have milkers that automatically come off the cow when the milk flow stops, which I’ve never used before! If a milker came off at Cedar Summit, it just meant that the cow had kicked it off and you had to go down the line putting them all on again.
I helped move a bunch of cows to new paddocks, so they were pretty happy about having new grass.
I helped bring in a herd that was made up of yearlings and spring calves and we had to sort them out so only the yearlings were taken by truck to another paddock (Hennie and Kerri rent land in different places in the area). While we were sorting I realized the importance of always looking at the number of the cow you’re working with. If the Boss asks you ten minutes later which numbers you put into a pen, you should be able to rattle them off, and this means trouble for me as I have NO head for numbers whatsoever. Hennie asked me the number of the first cow that calved today, and I hadn’t even looked. Gotta remember to do that. Anyone have any tricks for memorizing numbers?

Oh, and I got my right foot stepped on by a mother cow at some point, and it hurts when I flex it. “So don’t flex it!” I can hear mom saying from across the Pacific. :-)

No idea what I’m going to be doing tomorrow, aside from nannying the calves, but I’m looking forward to learning more, and feeling a bit nervous about it as well. I hate doing a poor job of something, and I always feel like I’m messing things up until I get a few days of experience under my belt. Hopefully Hennie and Hayden (the main hired guy) will bear with me for a bit.

As for domestic life, the food is good (I eat with the family, and it’s delish), the bed is warm (even though my room is pretty cold), the showers are hot, I look positively picturesque in my blue milking jumpsuit and big boots (before they get covered in gunk), and the family is really nice. Hennie and Kerri have a daughter, Lucy, who’s in 9th grade and is pretty funny, and I hear rumors of a son who’s off at college and comes home on the weekends, but I haven’t met him yet.

I’ll be working here tomorrow and Saturday, and then Saturday night Kerri’s dropping me off back at Murray and Ann’s for the rest of the weekend, so I’m excited to see them again, and stay in their deliciously clean house. Somehow, living on a farm, you start to feel after a while that you’ll never really be clean again. Of all the good things in my life that I take for granted, good, clean, hot showers are never one of them.