Nothing about church this morning. Yesterday we brought home the first of two cows we are buying. The other cow is still at the farm we are buying her from, she seems to be in season and she and the bull seem to be...getting along. So we will get her and her calf from earlier this year later in the week (hopefully she will be "with calf" at that time). We brought this mama cow home yesterday because we knew she was ready to calve at any time.
Well, we were certainly right about that! Last night at around 1 AM one of my daughters woke us up, she had been out in the barn and thought the cow was in labor. Like I did whenever my wife was in early stages of labor, I rolled over and went back to sleep while she got up to investigate. Sure enough, she was in labor and had a little calf (we think it is a bull calf, which means he is destined for the freezer) early this morning.
He(?) seems pretty healthy this morning, all dried and cleaned up. I am glad we got him yesterday, otherwise he would have been delivered in the pasture. These are
Dexter cattle, which is a smaller and quite hearty dual-purpose (good for milk and meat)
heritage breed so a pasture delivery would have been fine but still I think delivery in a warm barn on clean straw beats outside any day of the week!
So we have a cow for less than 24 hours and double our herd. The world hasn't seen a spectacular return on cattle investment like this since
Hillary Clinton turned $1000 into $100,000 in 10 months! Maybe I have a career in politics after all....
4 comments:
So we can assume you had some inside knowledge prior to buying the cow, lol?
Seriously, they both look good. Congrats on a good source of raw milk.
She was huge and clearly ready to go into labor when we picked her up. Luckily she was only about five minutes away and she loaded and unloaded quite readily so she was pretty unstressed by the whole thing. I think she was more stressed when she realized she was kind of confined and that there were not any other cattle around but she has started to warm up to us and the calf is very friendly.
:) My comment had to do with insider trading, as per your last paragraph, lol!
I wish we had room here for a cow.
Unfortunately our little one has presented with a serious cow dairy allergy, so we are sticking with goats indefinitely.
Would you share where you purchased your cow? We have raised steer for beef, currently we have no steer as we are eating our way through a freezer load of beef and pork. Next spring we plan to get two more calves to raise for the freezer, one for our freezer and one that our oldest son and daughter will share for each of their households.
My husband has a desire to raise Angus, but may be interested in this breed too.
Thank you,
Bean
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