Rosie, our Jersey cow, isn’t pulling her weight.  Sure, that premature calving was a setback, and a gal needs time to recover her health after that sort of trauma.  Rosie’s always been a good mama cow, and she provides Cocoa with all the milk she can manage.  It’s not enough though— not for Cocoa, who’s [...]

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Jersey cow and her preemie calf. When viewed from the side, Rosie looks pretty good. At this angle, she still looks very pregnant. Or very fat. Whatever you call it, she’s still huge. I worried about bloat. I dreamed one night that by some freak chance she had another calf in there, still growing and biding its time until it could emerge like some alien space creature with big teeth and a raging, carnivore appetite.

I’ve never wanted a bottle calf. In my experience, four-legged bottle babies are pushy, demanding pests. A few years ago I got a scary-looking hickey from a bottle calf that thought my thumb made a good pacifier. I’ve been bumped, shoved, and slobbered silly by half-grown calves that think humans are just part of the herd. And then along came Cocoa.

Alone, but apparently not lonely, our young Jersey cow Rosalie spends her days in the back 40, munching on grass.  Her only responsibility is to eat enough to maintain her ever rounding figure.  She’s doing very well at that.
Rosie’s also doing very well at being alone, which isn’t always the case with herd animals.  Rosie spent most of [...]

The calves got bored with the fenceline meet-and-greet routine pretty quickly.  Or maybe they got tired of being licked.  So they went exploring.  Rosie behaved like a typical new mother, hovering close, keeping an eye on her restless offspring.  She tried to keep them close.  She tried to keep them together.

She’d head one off, get [...]

I was away for most of the day yesterday and left the calves and their mama in the barn where they couldn’t get into much trouble, and where not much trouble could find them.  The coyotes have been too active lately, and a couple of small calves would make a nice meal for the pack.
Unfortunately [...]

I knew that Rosie was about to deliver and had been checking on her at all hours for several days.  Besides that, she was huge.  Seriously, look at this picture (below), taken in the back pasture on a rainy day last week.

For comparison’s sake, here’s a shot taken a few minutes later with the other [...]

On the right, aspirin for people. On the left, aspirin for cows. Twice a day, Lottie, the Jersey cow, gets two of the big ones. The instructions say ‘by bolus’ which is a fancy way of saying ‘poke it down her throat.’ It’s a common technique, and every feed supply store sells a simple [...]

Lottie’s had a rough week. Her 4-month-old calf is a rather vigorous nurser. Add a bit of chapping from winter weather, and her tender parts got quite sore. She quit letting the calf nurse, which led to other issues. She wasn’t too amenable to hand-milking either. We tried one thing, then another, and she got [...]