Loss On The Farm

There are a lot of dangers on the farm. Accidents happen. We lost one of our senior cows to one such accident last week.

One of our lead cows, Rosalie #80 was just coming into her first heat after delivering her new calf in March. Rosalie has had a great track record of great looking calves.  Brock was her first bull, the next year was another bull named Robby, then heifer Petals, last year was heifer Posie and this year heifer was Primrose. We have the herd sire in the cattle right now to breed the cows that come into heat so our next round of calves will be delivered starting in January next year.

We didn’t find Rosalie until dinner time when she was not in with the herd, very unlike her since she is usually one of the first ones to seek an easy meal. We went looking and found her back by the spring with a compound fracture of her back leg. Large animals such as cows cannot survive a broken leg because they have so much weight that needs to be carried by their appendages. We had to put her down to relieve her suffering.

For those of you who are wondering, we did not and would not harvest meat from a downed animal. In this case, we did not know how long she had been down, it could have been as long as twenty four hours and the amount of natural adrenaline coursing through her system would damage the meat value. Bruising from the fall and subsequent struggle to stand would also damage the tissue. The animal is a loss, but what we had to consider was the calf, Primrose that was born on 3/15.

We located Primrose with the herd that had moved away from Rosalie and was grazing several fields away although Primrose was bellowing from time to time for her mother to come and serve her milk. We moved the whole herd into the barn and sorted Primrose out of the group, loaded her into the stock trailer and moved her to the show barn to hang out with a heifer that we weaned last month.

In no time at all Primrose was eating calf manna, a concentrated form of milk in pellet form along with hay and molasses grass seed pellets. In the beginning it was only a pellet or two at a time. She bellowed for only a day while she waited for her mother to show up but is now getting along nicely with heifer #47 and eating everything in the manger.

The small pen we had in the barn for these two had been opened up each day into a larger and larger pen and the pair now have access to the outdoor barnyard area as well as the ability to come into the barn whenever they chose.

It was a sad day to lose Rosalie yet we are so happy to see that her baby Primrose is doing so well.

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