Calving Chaos

I can't keep tags made fast enough
for the new babies

WOW! It has been a hectic month on the farm!  After my grandfather passed in 2014 we started trying to move our calving season to Jan/Feb and we almost have it narrowed down!  We had some Christmas and Super Bowl Sunday babies and hopefully we can finish up mid February! If you are new to the blog, we raise Simmental/Chi/Maine cross show cattle with the cull progeny going to my feeder operation to be fed out and then onto the food supply. 

Everyone chipped in when life hit the fan!

       This story is about the farm, Volunteer Simmental (VS) and it's calves! There has never been any
type of study done to say that simmental's are fertile myrtles BUT THESE DANG COWS ARE FERTILE!  Cows typically birth a single calf at a time unless they are VS cows then they like to have twins and sometimes triplets. That being said we have had THREE sets born in the month of January.  Now normally farmers dislike twins but we do a lot of advanced reproductive work that (normally) has more success when a cow is fertile. And I may be a young naive farmer but            calves = money. Now I still realize the impact twins take on...everything; resources, dam, and the farmer; however I learned many valuable lessons fooling with bottle calves like hard work and determination.   I currently have on calf on the bottle right now and it sure is draining my energy and amount of unexcused absences at school.  I emailed one of my professors that I was going to miss class because "my cows are a priority" and I wanted to cry when I received her very understanding response back!  I am slowly getting all my new calving chaos chores down pat right before we leave for the 2019 Dixie National Livestock Show. 

The bottle babies- we brought one half of a twin set in to be warmed up

Family makes it all go round!  The used-to-be youngest sibling helping me put out mineral 

Dad checking crops 

Twin set 3 was brought to the barn due to the delayed birth of the second calf