Circle M Farm

Had a lovely uneventful day. Dehorned and castrated our two baby steers, all without incident. Seems we are getting better at some things around here.

Star, the little Angus calf, enjoying his breakfast.

Today’s blissfully competent hour with the steers was much-needed encouragement in a season of overwhelming under-achievement. While we are slowly coming to accept our failure to complete a quite large to-do list of things we planned to accomplish before the winter set in, we nevertheless endure daily frustration working around those un-done tasks.

The older steers should be in a closer pasture with shelter for them to escape the wind. But the snow came early and deep, pretty as it is, and we didn’t get the electric fencing up and running first. Our attempt to drag a portable shelter into their current pasture should have been aided by the slippery accumulation, but the hut acted like a plow, and built so much snow up in front of it that the siding broke off the frame. So the steers remain in a pasture we’ve got to walk a ways out to, and have only each other as a windbreak. We’ll feed them extra to keep their weight up. Ditto with the horses who need an addition on their shelter to accommodate the new filly. And then there are the sheep and goats, still in three separate pens, each requiring it’s own expensive heated water trough, because we started breeding them so late that we’re not sure they are all covered yet.

We are ever thankful that just when we feel completely inept, we run into a delightful neighbor farmer who has a tale to match ours. Yesterday afternoon we enjoyed a hearty potluck and some nourishing conversation with the families in our daughter’s 4-H group. Mostly owners of small dairy farms, these families are an endless source of excellent advice and humorous anecdotes pertinent to our fumbling around on this little homestead.

“The snow could have waited until the the last week in December to come, instead of the last in November, and I still would have a list of 30 things I didn’t get done before it started,” said one, before giving us detailed instructions on how to build a quick windbreak out of corn fodder bales and hog panel. Apparently, we’re not the first to be caught at Christmas with our cows in a remote pasture. Another talked about kicking around piles of snow in his tractor yard to find tools he’d forgotten to put away and now needed to use. I’d done that just this morning in our horse corral, frantically looking for a feed trough that was buried out of sight.

We never miss the chance in a conversation like this to tell the story of Bessie, our pregnant heifer, who became a jumping steeplechase cow after we took the two steers she lived with off to the butcher. Three expensive gates and multiple ruined fences later, we took Bessie to join her buddies at the meat market. Everyone at dinner had a good laugh at that, and one farmer concluded, “Yeah, that’s farming. You learn pretty soon to never leave an animal alone. In fact, you don’t just buy two, you always buy three because one is gonna’ die.” Funny. And sobering. Husbanding animals can be a risky and expensive business, especially for dairy farmers, because cows are expensive livestock to purchase and to raise. But every one of us kvetching at the dinner clearly loved what we do on our farms, in spite of the risks and the mistakes and the setbacks and the endless undone to-do lists.

The little steers, still being bottle-fed in their cozy huts in our backyard, are a reminder that we’ll get better as we go. Last year at this time, we decided to let our Brown Swiss calves keep their horns because they got too big while we fretted about how best to restrain them during the dehorning process. Today, we simply tied the head to an old piece of wood fence panel with a rope and went about the quick, yet nasty business of burning the outer edge of the horn buds with a round-tipped iron. We’re now experts at this with the goats, but we put those tiny babies in a specially-designed box to restrain them while we do the job. The calves, so much larger and stronger, had frightened us off. But it turns out that since calves are calmer and slower, the task was actually easier. And calves aren’t very vocal, so we didn’t feel as bad as we do when the goat kids plaintively complain.

As for the castration, Shannon simply pulled the calves down to lay on their sides in the hay, while I manipulated the elastrator pliers to secure tiny green rubber bands around their as-yet-small sacks. The babies didn’t really react at all, and in a month or so the sacks will fall away like dried up scabs. No problem. We’ve at least stayed on top of these few important things and can get on with making do somehow about the rest.