One of the most special parts of running a cow-calf operation, is seeing the bond between mama cow and her baby. I captured some sweet moments over the last few days and wanted to share here. These “babies” in the pictures below were born in spring-2019. This is our first year on a delayed-weaning schedule. Normally, the calves would be wintered separately on the farm. It has been interesting to observe their behavior this winter.
Through the years, we have retained many heifer calves. We currently have three mother-daughter pairs (both of breeding age) on the farm. I enjoy observing the interactions between mama cow and daughter. I will often see a mother-daughter pair laying side-by-side, basking in the sun, with their big, pregnant bellies! And one time, I watched a cow head-butt her way into the mineral barrel and proceed to block entry for any other cow. Then, I saw her daughter walk up and I wondered what would happen. To my delight and amusement, she let her daughter step right up to the mineral barrel and get a lick.
I am far from an expert on cattle behavior. But, I have spent the last almost seven years observing the behavior of our cattle on the farm and there is no denying that at least for our cattle, the mothers recognize their daughters, no matter how old the daughter is. I feel honored to capture such moments as the ones shown below. Makes me look forward to calving season #7!
Just one more lick and then you can go play with your friends…. January 27, 2020
This is the same mother-daughter pair as pictured above! May 2019 It’s been a long day, baby girl…. January 25,2020This is the same mother-daughter pair as pictured above! May 2019
We wish all of our readers (and critters) a very Safe, Happy, and Productive 2020 on the cattle farm!
A lot has happened in our lives over the last decade.
August 2010 – We got married in a beautiful field in Montana.
May 2012 – Found out we were expecting baby #1. Still living and working in Montana.
Early-August 2012 – Jer got his dream job in Northern Maine, where he grew up. We bought our farm. Starting packing up our lives in Montana and saying “see you later” to all of our family and friends in Montana. Found out baby #1 was a boy.
Late-September 2012 – It is a very odd feeling driving away from a home that you know you will never come back to again. The home where you started your married life, where you got married in the fields behind it, where you found out that you were going to become a family of three, where you made so many memories, where you LIVED. I can still remember that September morning in 2012. We had spent the last month packing up our lives and clearing out our house. The morning had finally come. THE MORNING. The truck and U-Haul trailers were packed. The car was packed. The house was cleaned-out and cleaned. We took some last photos, walked around the house that had become a home for us and then, we walked out the door and closed the chapter on that part of our lives. Jer got in the truck. I got into the car, with our dog Cooper (our sweet boy passed away almost exactly 6 years later). I was around 6 months pregnant at the time. We were moving to Maine. We were driving across the country to Maine. Oh my goodness. I still can’t believe we did it. It was emotional – driving away, honking the horn, and saying thanks for all the memories.
Onward to Northern Maine and the life waiting for us.
Onward to the next chapter in our story – OUR LIVES.
It took us 4 1/2 days to reach our final destination. The journey across the country was filled with ups and downs but we made it intact. Thank the Lord. Seriously.
February 2013 – Our handsome baby boy came screaming into the world and straight into our hearts!
June 2013 – Our very first herd – our foundation herd – of 10 beef cows took their first steps off the trailer and onto our farm.
February 2015 – Our sweet boy turned 2 years old, AND we let him know he would soon be a big brother. He didn’t really really get what that meant, of course. haha
November 2015 – Little brother came screaming into the world, letting everyone know that he was HERE. Life got even busier with two little boys and a farm of cows and calves, but oh so GOOD! So much JOY. So much to still learn – on the farm and in the home!
And life kept marching forward. More cows, more calves, then downsizing the herd, then building the herd back up and on and on and on…..
You know the whole saying, “The days go slow but the years go fast”?
This is true 100 times over. Where have the years gone? Our firstborn will turn 7 years old in a few weeks and our baby – BABY!! – is 4 years old and will join his big brother at school in September. That is a hard one for this mama.
September 2020 will be eight years since we drove away from our home in Montana. On that morning, I drove my car, following my husband far, far away from everything I knew and everyone I knew. That’s what you have to do sometimes, though, when you are following your dreams. Life is a crazy, wonderful journey, that will take us down all kinds of roads – roads that for many, will lead away from what and who you know. All these years later, and Jer and I have gone down many roads together. We stumbled a bit, we questioned a bit and we prayed a lot. We have learned the power that comes with being true partners – both with the cattle farm and with our personal lives (hard to separate the two sometimes!). It hasn’t always been an easy road and it won’t always be easy, but the good – and there is SO much good – is that much richer for it.
And as the great Theodore Roosevelt said…
“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
The year 2020 brings us hope and optimism that we will achieve another one of our dreams. Our dream to add more land to our farm and thus, be able to start building up our herd size to match the goal in our minds. Hopefully, we will have more on that to blog about later in the year!
Many thanks to all of our readers. We appreciate each and every one of you!
May the year 2020 be the year that you finally catch that dream you have been chasing! 🙂
Fences are a great invention. We like fences. Fences are good. They tend to keep our animals where they need to be. Emphasis on the word “tend”. As I shared in a previous post, moose and fences don’t really get along here on our farm. When a moose takes on an electric fence, the fence usually ends up flat on the ground!
We train our animals to respect the electric fence. To respect the presence of a fence, period. Sometimes, the electricity shorts out during a storm and the fence may not be hot anymore. We still want our animals to respect the fence and for the most part, they do. But, sometimes an opportunity presents itself and an animal tests a fence or disrespects the fence, and boom, you have a habitual fence offender. As we have discussed in previous posts, we employ a hay bale grazing system during the winter months to feed out our hay. The success of this feeding method hinges on our animals respecting the electric fences.
Let me share two stories with you, where the phrase, “What are you DOING?!Get out of THERE! “ makes an Oscar winning appearance…..
Story #1
Winter 2018/2019
During a routine morning check, I discover a cow (D9) in with the hay bales. Seems innocent, right? No, she was in with the hay bales BEHIND the electric wire. “What are you DOING?!Get out of THERE! “ No good. Not gonna fly here on the farm. It really is disheartening when one of your cows decides to start disrespecting the electric fences. Our entire operation depends upon our cattle respecting fences.
D9 went on to become a definite problem cow that winter. Luckily, the rest of the herd stayed far away from the trouble and did not dare join in. We gave her one more chance. Well, she blew through the second chance like a kid challenged to eat all their Halloween candy in one sitting. She met the challenge. Eventually, we added on additional wires to our fencing system to further protect the hay bales “behind the wires.” That contraption finally stopped her in her tracks. But, her ticket was already bought.
Once a cow becomes a habitual fence breaker, she has bought a ticket for a trip down the road. We have no room on our farm for any cow that can’t respect our fences. Not only will she slowly start to train younger members of the herd to disrespect the fence, she will COST US MONEY in the form of hay being eaten before schedule. She will throw the whole feeding regime off-kilter. Like I said before, we gave her a second chance, hoping it was just a fluke but she proved herself to have no respect for the fence until we built a wall of wire to stop her, pretty much.
D9 did go on to have a healthy calf that spring, which was great, but the trouble she caused throughout the winter was not forgotten. We sold her and her calf that summer.
Story #2
Winter 2015/2016
This fence breaker was a bit of surprise. She was part of our original herd of 10 cows. This was her 3rd winter with us, and she had never shown any disrespect for the fences. She was a big girl, bigger than what our vision was for our herd but you can’t be too picky when you are first starting out. She gave us many fine calves and never caused us any trouble. We kept her on, as others got sold-off.
Then, one day during the winter, we discovered her in the hay bales, behind the wire. “What are you DOING?!Get out of THERE!” Sigh…. And, that was that. It was like a switch flipped in her and fence breaking/jumping/ducking under the wire became her mission. She was a hard one to let go of because she had been part of our foundation herd. But, in times like that, emotions have to be put aside and what is best for our farm – our business – has to come first.
Take Home Point
Seriously consider culling any cattle from your herd that do not respect your fencing system. Don’t waste time and money on troublemakers!
Calving season is by far the most anticipated season on the farm. We have had 6 calving seasons so far. The wonder at watching new life come into the world never ceases to amaze us. I have been blessed to witness many births over the years. Most of the time, I am alone but a few times, I have had the boys with me. What an experience and education for them! And, this past calving season, all four of us a witnessed a birth, together. That was pretty special.
Over the course of the calving season, I conduct herd checks frequently throughout the day. Anytime Jer gets a call from me during the day (he is at work), it almost certainly has something to do with the cattle! Whether I have discovered a new calf or have discovered a cow in labor, Jer has heard the phrase “The calf is coming,” many times over the years. Within an hour, I am flooding his phone with texts and pictures and videos of the new baby calf. Those are the joyful moments, filled with relief that we have a healthy calf and healthy mama. Then, there are the moments filled with dread. Moments that every cattle farmer goes through. When you KNOW something just isn’t right with a new calf. Sigh. You question everything and go over the what if’s a thousand times in your mind…..
Over the last six calving seasons, we have lost three newborn calves. One was a stillborn. The other two had some sort of weakness syndrome/condition and despite our best attempts, never did stand. Those losses were all hard. The stillborn stands out the most in my mind, though. I was 5 months pregnant with our second son, and Jer was gone in the field for a few days, away from cell service. What I thought would be another blessed opportunity to witness new life come into the world, changed in the blink of an eye. It was a hard one…straight to the gut for my then-pregnant self. A complication during delivery and what started as a live calf ended with a stillborn. Those moments will live in my memory forever. The dead calf and the grieving mama. She cried for that baby and was fiercely and aggressively protective over it, rightfully so….. This happened during our 2nd calving season and those memories follow me through each calving season.
Losses like that stick with you, but that’s life on a cattle farm.
Birth and death.
A stillborn calf one afternoon and new, healthy baby calf the next morning.
And life keeps marching on.
Faith and renewal in our purpose here on the farm…
We look forward to our 2020 calving season, when we can start saying “The calf is coming!” again!
Calving is always a favorite topic to blog about.
Please be sure to browse through our past calving-related posts!
We run a cattle farm in Northern Maine. Our neck of the woods is frequented by many wild critters – big and small. Of all our wildlife visitors, one stands out as arguably the most majestic and massive. The MOOSE. I love and respect wildlife, don’t get me wrong. BUT….for any farmer that uses fences and would like to see those fences upright and not laying on the ground, stretched out across your field, the moose can sure put a wrinkle in your plans.
See, the uniqueness, so-to-speak, of moose is that they will plow through the electric fence. They can jump them and we have witnessed such events, but more times than not, they plow right through them. Deer will jump our electric fences and bears won’t even touch them.
Every year in May and June, like clock-work, we start getting visits from our neighborhood moose. And as sure as the sun rises in the morning and sets in evening, we will find fence and gate damage galore. Now, this damage can be on a small scale, like a downed fence in an area that the cattle are not in. The fence damage will take some time, tools and supplies to repair but the repair work can wait a day or two. Not a huge rush but definitely one to make sure is fixed before rotating cattle into.
The other scenario, is when that moose breaks a fence and/gate in the pasture in which our cattle are grazing. THAT is almost certainly a guaranteed ticket for our cattle to take a trip, whether across the potato fields or to our neighbors front yard or just take a stroll up and down the road. The whole grass is greener on the other side scenario!
So, I find myself early one morning (before 7am), getting a call from my neighbor. We usually text, so calling was unusual, especially this early in the morning. I cautiously answer the phone and hear “Sara, your cows are in my driveway.” Oh, puke…..Goodness gracious, say it isn’t so!!!! The herd was SUPPOSE to be in our back pasture, nowhere near our neighbors driveway. Of course, as it always seems to happen when trouble strikes, Jer was gone, out in the great wild, blissfully unaware…(love you, Jer). I lucked out that day, for many reasons but first, my wonderful mama was visiting from Montana. She was able to watch the kids while I ran out the front door, threw a hay bale (and a sled to pull it in) into the back of the pickup and raced down the driveway. I wouldn’t see my mom and the kids again for another 4 hours.
As I was driving, I knew, I just KNEW, that this was all because of a moose. I drove up the hill to our neighbors, and sure enough, there they were……the whole herd, just strolling around the yard, having a ball. I pull into our neighbors driveway, jump out of the truck and throw the hay bale onto the sled and start calling “hey mama’s. They look at me curiously but not really motivated. And why would they be motivated. Our neighbors yards were plush full of nice, green grass.
I was overwhelmed. I ain’t gonna lie. I was one person, on foot, trying to lure a herd of 30+ cattle (yes, I know this is not a ton of animals but it sure feels like a lot when they are lose!) across the road and across several pastures, to the pasture they escaped from. What a nightmare. Just as my mother was an angel that day, our neighbors were as well. Our neighbors are good people – plain and simple. Over the years, they have become part of our Friend Family and for that, we are so fortunate. Working with them, I was finally able to -HOURS LATER – get every animal back into the right pasture. And sure enough, I discovered a damaged fence and gate, that was most certainly the latest work of our resident moose. The herd decided to go through that open “door”, figuring it must be fate, and enjoy a nice, leisurely early-morning stroll through the fields and down the road.
Moose breaks a gate, and the cows think it is fate!
On a side note, we spent years trying all the different tricks to make our fences more visible to wildlife, especially at nighttime. It made no difference. At a certain point, we accepted defeat and instead, focused on how we could improve our fences to help decrease the degree of damage. Jer came up with a brilliant idea to start replacing damaged and broken wood fence posts with conduit pipe instead. Brilliant! Our fences lines now have a mix of wood posts and gray conduit pipe posts. Conduit pipe has more give to it than a wooden post and as a moose stretches out that wire, a conduit pipe will not snap or break as quickly as a wooden post. Also, conduit pipe will not rot! We will continue to replace, as needed, our wood fence posts with conduit pipe.
See the conduit pipe fence posts in the background!
