Cows!

Where have I been? Well, Riley got better, then I got sick and was sick from Thursday night through Monday. Achey, exhausted, fever, just all around yuck. For now, we appear to all be healthy, but we'll see how long that lasts since it seems that everyone and their brother is sick, just getting over being sick or just getting sick right now. Its going to be a long winter at the rate we're going.

Exciting news though: Riley's getting a TOOTH!! First one!! I first felt it on Saturday and I can feel it a little more everyday, but I still can't see it. But he also is not a big fan of letting me peek into his mouth, so even if it was visible, I wouldn't necessarily be able to catch a glimpse of it. My big boy!!

I got a question on my last post, of what kind of cattle we raise and realized it really justified its own post entirely, as its not exactly a one-word answer. In a nutshell, we raise replacement heifers for a local dairy farm. So we get them when they're about 5 or 6 months old and have them until they're ready to freshen (calve) at 2 yrs old. Then they go to the dairy farm to calve and be milked and come back to us every winter for about 60 days as dry cows. The reason they come back every winter is because this particular dairy is a seasonal, grazing dairy. Ready for your dairy lesson? Typically a dairy heifer will be bred so that she has her first calf somewhere around age 2. Once she has her calf, she goes into the milking herd, is milked, watched to see when she comes back into heat and then bred again. She'll continue to be milked until she is about 60 days out from freshening (calving). At this point, for a number of reasons including allowing for better growth for the calf she is carrying, and the fact that her milk production will decrease anyway, she will be "dried off" and allowed to basically just relax until her calf is born. On a typical dairy farm, this is happening throughout the year and each cow is pretty much on her own schedule-freshening and being bred back whenever. Calves are born year round and there are more cows being milked than not all year long. They can do this because they are housed in barns and fed a mixture of hay,usually corn silage, and likely some other grains, so the seasons don't really affect them. Now, the particular farm that we raise heifers for is a grazing dairy. So there are no barns (other than the one the milking equipment is housed in) and the cows are on grass as their main feed. Well, obviously there's not a lot of grass in the winter (or you know, no grass at all) so what they do is synchronize all the cows so that they all come into heat and are bred within about a one month window, therefore all getting dried off at the same time (December) and freshening generally within a one to two month window (March/April). When the cows are all dry, the owners of this particular dairy go on vacation to exotic places like Belize and Thailand (seriously, I'm not kidding) and the cows come to our farm for their own vacation, from the week before Christmas until about mid-February, and enjoy hay, corn silage (which they only get at our house and they LOVE it!) and just generally hang out, chew their cud...you know, do cow stuff. Usually they hang out on the feed pads out in the open but this year they'll get to hang out in our brand new barns. And just going by MY personal preferences...I'm thinking they'll be a lot happier in the new barns instead of out in the cold! :) So in a nutshell...that's our cattle. Right now we have about 96 heifers out on pasture, they're on pasture from spring until fall. When the grass is pretty much done and it starts getting muddy, (oh and when the barns are done of course), they'll come to our home farm and spend the winter in the new barns with the dry cows. Then in February they'll all go to the dairy, have their calves and be happy little dairy cows. Moo.