Thank goodness January is over. It’s always a tough month on a dairy. But this one, well, I am just glad it is gone. We always have challenges with keeping water pipes from freezing, tractors starting, driveways clear, etc. And usually it can be a bit tough raising young calves. But this year we have had three of our girls get pneumonia.
It all started the day after Christmas. We’d been struggling to get Ruby and Greta pregnant. So after many failed attempts using artificial insemination, we decided to punt and bring in a bull. We’re not sure whether the bull brought a bug in with him or just the stress caused by his presence was the trigger. But whatever was the cause, Ruby went from frolicking in the snow, to deathly ill by January 3. We stopped putting her milk in the tank and began aggressively treating her with some very expensive drugs. She continued to get worse and by the following week was beginning to succumb to hypothermia – her body temperature was more than 4 degrees below normal. And all the while, our weather just kept getting colder. We stopped milking her – she had all but dried herself up anyway. We started using a blanket on her and keeping her in the calving pen at night when the temps were dropping to minus 12ºF. Our vet had us treat her with an oral calcium gel to try to get her blood calcium level up.
Meanwhile, the bull was beginning to become a real pest. He was constantly herding Elsa away from the rest of the girls. She was coming into heat. For three days he kept getting more and more aggressive. Ingrid was the only one with the size and will to set him straight once in awhile. The last day he was here, he wouldn’t let me take Elsa in to milk in the morning. I had to use a pitch fork -yes, the sharp end – to convince him otherwise. He then began banging into the outside of the milk parlor. A bit of comic relief came when he hit the building so hard that all the snow slid off the roof onto him … he looked chagrined.
That evening, I decided to lock him in one of the calving pens while I milked. That didn’t last long. He turned the steel gate into a pile of worthless scrap. I had go back to the pitch fork plan again. I kept Ruby in one of the calving pens during much of this time, so she was spared most of his nonsense. So before milking the next morning, a friend came over and helped me load that son-of-a-gun in the trailer for his ride home. When we turned him back in with the three bulls he had been kept with, a little bit of justice came his way … it looked as though he was not going to get any rest for some time to come.
The excitement of those three days took its toll on both Ingrid and Greta. They too developed high fevers and began coughing. We wasted no time and got the vet down that day. They both responded very well to treatment and are now fine. Elsa, bless her heart, never missed a beat. She’s one tough old girl. Needless to say, our milk production – thus cheese production – crashed this month. An advantage to having so few cows is the personal attention that we can afford to give each one. A disadvantage is the large impact problems with even one cow has on our operation.
Anyway, Ruby is still hanging in there. I’m not sure for how long, though. We’ve got her body temperature staying closer to normal the last few days, but she is still not eating enough to maintain her weight. And her cough is just terrible. So after four weeks of struggling to keep her alive, and after spending many hundreds of dollars, we are reduced to just trying to keep her as comfortable as possible and hoping for some milder weather.
Ending on a positive note, we brought Iggy and Elsie down to join their mothers this week. Although they have shared a lot of time rubbing noses across fences, this is the first time for months that they have all been together. Iggy will be having her first calf in April and we are looking forward to her contribution to the milk tank. Elsie will be bred this coming Monday. She turned 14 months old today.
February is only two months from spring!! -PS