John’s First Blog!

            The Spring calving season started this past week.  As usual on the farm, everything happened at once.  On Monday morning I received a phone call from the Litchfield Post Office advising me that our package of 50 live replacement chicks had arrived.  On the way back to the chicken barn with the chicks, my LRGFB partner Jim Abbott called to say that our first calf of the season was getting ready to arrive.  As I left the chicken barn, I spotted Tim Pabst delivering the firewood processor that we were going to use to cut and split the 70 cords of wood that we had amassed while cleaning our fence lines.  I checked on the cow, and by that time, it was evident that the calf as trying to come out backwards and that the cow was going to need help delivering.  This would have been Jim and my first breech birth, which sent us diving for the Storey’s Guide to Raising Beef Cattle (our bible).  As we were deciphering the instructions, Tim mentioned that he had done this many times, and we deferred to his experience.  Picking up some baling twine that was literally lying around, he wrapped it around the calf’s hind legs, he and Jim pulled, and our first calf of the year arrived.  She was a little underweight at 59 lbs but otherwise healthy, and after tagging her ears, and putting iodine on the umbilical cord, we let her go have her first nurse from her mommy.

            While we don’t normally name our cows, I decided to call her Numera Una, in honor of her firstborn status, her sex, and her arrival in Cinco de Mayo.

            As I write this on May 9^th, we have had two more heifer calfs arrive safe, sound and via normal birth.