a complete guide to summer farm camp

I never went to camp. I can't say I wanted to. But from what my cousins tell me, when you've lived in the city your whole life, coming to the country is tantamount to living in a tent in the wild for a weekend.

I mean, we do have coyotes, so they're not really that far off. 

Are you my mother?

Saturday mornings are my favorite. Monday through Friday mornings involve getting ready for work. Sunday morning involves getting ready for church. But Saturday morning means getting to putter around the house with the windows open, listening to heifers wolf down grass and waving at the occasional neighbor who drives past. 

farm party

Chris is a practical kind of guy. He sees a barn, and he puts things in it, like, you know, tractors and sprayers and lawn mowers. I see a barn .  .  . and then I see a barn party. 

surviving a coyote attack . . . minus the attack

I've long contended that exercising is dangerous for your health. There's turned ankles, pulled hamstrings, torn ligaments, coyote attacks. 

Obviously.

That's why I decided to forgo a walk last night. 

Or should I say, THEY'RE why I decided to forgo a walk last night. 

Coyotes. 

In the middle of the evening. 

On MY road. 

That I pay taxes to use. 

kit kat

I'm not a cat person. 

To be fair, I'm not really a pet person. 

But I do have to admit that this little kitten, which Chris brought home last week, is slightly cute. 

Kind of. 

As long as it doesn't show me its little pointed fangs. 

Then it's just scary. 

I've already had a chat with him. It went something like, "You're cute now, but we're not going to like each other in the near future. You're going to turn into an attitude with legs, and I don't like claw marks on my arms. But don't feel bad. I raised chickens as a little girl, and I only thought they were cute as baby chicks. Once they started morphing into teenagers with mottled feathers, they lost me too. So at least you're not alone." 

He didn't seem to notice, namely because he was too busy attacking his own tail like I hadn't just fed him an entire saucer of milk. 

This little guy came home too, and while he may not stay with us long (one of the guys at the dairy is partial to him so we'll take him back), he's a little goober too.

We named him Ponce de Leon because, well, (a) we just got back from St. Augustine, Florida, where everything is Ponce de Leon all the time, and (b) he loves to explore. 

Ok, I take that back. He loves to explore the shade. If there's sun, consider him done for. 

The guys at the dairy say his name is actually King Henry I who was, according to Wikipedia, "short," "stocky," and "barrel-chested." Well, they had him up until that last one. 

It's a regular menagerie around here. 

Heifers. 

Kittens. 

A dog. 

A skunk somewhere out in the pasture who lets us know about once a week that he's alive and well. 

All we're missing is a donkey and a peacock. (Chris: hint hint.)

Which is why we're signing off--dogs, cats, cows, and all--and settling in for a supper of cheeseburger salad. 

Sincerely, 

Chris, Adriane and the rest of the zoo creatures, living out where the wild things are 

10 minutes with a dairy farmer

On our way to visit family in Illinois this weekend, I devised a great plan. "You're driving! I'm just sitting here! We should write a blog post!" I exclaimed to Chris. "Umm, gosh. We're going through St. Louis. Look at all this, you know, traffic and stuff," he said. Undeterred, I pushed forward. The following resulted. 

Well, not the calf, but the interview. 

AH:      People probably wonder what a day in the life of a dairy farmer looks like. So, what's a day in the life of a dairy farmer look like?

CH:      I start by working on heat detection in the AI pens.

AH:      I have no idea what that means. You wanna check the heat? Why not just look at the thermostat?

CH:      Umm…….

AH:      But seriously.

CH:      Let's start at the beginning. AI stands for artificial insemination.

AH:      Not artificial intelligence?

CH:      *ignoring AH* We as dairy farmers don’t have any magical way of knowing when a cow's in heat and is ready to breed so we look for certain signs. I could go into detail about those signs, but we’ll save that for another day.

            When we find the cows that are in heat, we prepare semen. It’s frozen in tiny little straws. We thaw it out, and we use that semen to breed the cows. 

AH:      *in my best three-year-old voice* But whyyyyy?

CH:       There are several reasons for this:  (1) Safety. Dairy bulls are very dangerous, and every dairy farmer knows someone who’s been injured or killed by a bull. (2) By AIing, you get access to higher quality bulls and thus higher quality genetics.  Some bulls have better genes for milking, just like some families have better genes for running, for example. Sidenote: This has nothing to do with GMOs; genetically modified livestock isn’t a thing. It doesn’t exist. We do use bulls on the farm in certain situations, but we try to minimize the amount we have to use them for our safety as well as for the overall genetic quality of the herd.

AH:      Then what do you do? Also, I’m hungry.

CH:      Have a carrot.  Well, I check with different people on different projects, make sure everyone’s got work for the day, that they’re pointed in the right direction. Then I start looking over the milk data and the calving data from the previous day and look for anything that stands out.

AH:      What’s Blackjack the dog doing while this is happening?

CH:      He’s pouncing in piles of manure, playing tug of war with cow tales, digging in my trash can, licking snot off of cows's noses, and generally wreaking havoc. And chasing cats. Basically, it’s a dog’s wildest dream come true.

AH:      What else?

CH:      The next routine thing that’s done every day is checking our hospital pen and our post-fresh pen. When a cow has a calf, she’s said to freshen. A post-fresh pen is filled with cows who have calved in the past two weeks. They get their own pen with more space and more feed and more care. The vast majority of health problems will occur within two weeks of calving, so we look at this group of cows in extreme detail every day. We look at how much milk each cow produces. We look at each cow's body temperature, their manure, how bright their eyes are and how perky their ears are. We look at how much they’re eating and their overall appearance, and we do this for each cow every day for the first couple of weeks. Prevention is key in all of this! We would rather prevent problems early on rather than let them develop.

           The hospital pen is for any cow that has gotten sick and has been treated with antibiotics. The reason these cows are kept separate is because their milk cannot be sold and cannot enter the market for human consumption. Once the cows have gotten better and they’ve not been treated for a set amount of time (ranging from several days to several weeks depending on the type of medication and how quickly it leaves their system), we test their milk for antibiotics, and if the milk tests negative, they re-join the herd. If it tests positive, they have to stay in the hospital pen until all the antibiotics are out of their system.

AH:      Sometimes you get called away from what you're doing to pull a calf. Why’s that?

CH:      When cows are having their second, third, fourth calf, 90 percent of the time, they have it on their own with no problem. When they have their first calf, they need help about a 1/3 of the time. So when we do need to help, either the cow isn’t able to push the calf out on her own and she needs assistance, or the calf is presenting incorrectly, which means the calf is coming out backwards or upside down. At that point, I help to rearrange the calf and help it out.  My job is to make sure mother and calf are both alive and well by the end of the calving process.

AH:      So you’re like a cow ER doctor.

CH:      Sure.

AH:      What’s your favorite part of your day?

CH:      Coming home and kissing my wife.

AH:      Awwwww, honey. Ok, favorite part of your day on the DAIRY.

CH:      A large part of what we do is prevention. We try to prevent problems before they happen. Rather than treating a cow when she gets sick, we’d like to prevent her from getting sick in the first place. Rather than pulling a calf, we’d rather do things earlier to prevent the calf from needing to be pulled. So for me, herd management is my favorite part of the job, and prevention is a key part of that. I like preventing problems so that the farm runs smoothly.

AH:      What’s the messiest job you’ve ever had to do on the dairy?

CH:      Crawling through a tunnel filled with mud and muck to fix a broken pipe. Being shoulder deep inside a cow trying to help a calf come out correctly while being soaked in blood, amniotic fluid, and manure. Riding a four-wheeler in freezing rain, trying to get cattle in after they just tore down a fence. Want me to keep going?

AH:      I think I'd rather not know. Final question: As a sixth generation farmer, what do you think your ancestors would think of what you’re doing today?

CH:      They’d be blown away by the efficiency that dairies today are able to achieve. They would see the technology that we’re able to use, and they’d be astounded. They would see how closely we’re able to monitor and care for our cows, and they’d be impressed. They’d see the quality of feed and the quality of cattle we have, and they’d be jealous. And I think they’d see our family, and they’d be proud.

you know it's true

Because it's a truth universally acknowledged .  . . 

that everyone needs a little adorable calf in their life. 

Cats not so much. 

But calves? 

Definitely.