The last couple of nights, I have been treated to a cattle symphony. (Okay, really more like a cattle cacophony.) It is the sound of calves crying for their mommas and mommas bawling for their calves. We have separated the older calves off to take to the feeder calf sale on Tuesday. In bovine years, these calves are teenagers, and they are eating hay and feed like crazy, but they still want to have access to momma’s milk bar, too. Teenagers!
My husband has a shirt that says “Sorry for what I said while we were working cattle”. (I may have given it to him.) Working cattle can definitely be a test of your marriage. Cows (and sheep, for that matter, which we will be sorting tomorrow for a trip to the sale barn in Rockville on Saturday) are not a bit good at doing what you want, and with only the two of us, they can be pretty good at getting past us (me). Here is a picture of our working corral. The dark red lines are the outside fence, the white line is the chute that leads to freedom (or the trailer), the blue lines are a smaller corral (if the calves would just go there, that would be nice), and the orange lines are gates. The cows see that narrow opening that leads to freedom (gate open, of course), and they say “not going there”, or the calves (who are supposed to stay in the lot) see their mommas heading that way and say “me, too!” and you have to head them off before they get out, too; or the little calves, who are supposed to go out with their mommas, say “I have friends here, I’m staying to play.” As we get older, we get simpler. We get most of the cows and young calves out, and my husband goes back occasionally and gets another cow or another young calf out. It’s less stress for us and the cattle. I think we are finally down to just having calves we want to ship in the lot, and the calves think they are in heaven getting feed every day with their hay instead of just grass. Getting them in the trailer is when the shirt really comes into play, because that has to be done quickly in the morning before going to the feeder barn, so when the calves don’t want to cooperate, it gets a little tense. My husband is usually in the corral pushing, and I’m outside trying to stay more or less out of the line of sight so they will go around the last corner but also running up to poke them in the rear when they see the trailer and want to turn around. Fun! Glad we only sell calves once or twice a year.
We actually work with our cattle very little. At one time, we had all the cows tagged, and when calves were born, they were tagged with a number corresponding to the cow’s number within a day or two of their birth (because after that, you can’t catch the little speed demons). That all changed about ten years ago when a momma cow got my husband down when he was tagging a calf and might have killed him but he managed to crawl under the tractor behind the tire. She did break several ribs for him. Now the new calves are listed with “the split-eared cow”, the “one-horned cow”, “Pinky (a lighter red cow)”, etc. or just “black”, “black white faced”, “red”, or “Hereford” if there was nothing to distinguish them better, and nothing is tagged. Our cattle management system now is just opening gates to move them from one pasture to another (we have the front pasture split into three sections), going out frequently to check for new calves, and feeding hay and supplements in the winter. It doesn’t give us good records to know which cows are producing and which need to be culled, but simple is good (and safe). Today, we opened the gate to move the cattle to one of the front pastures, so our symphony may be over.
Imponderables – Not a farm thing, but maybe a retired thing, since I have time on my hands. As I do my Bible reading. sometimes things jump out at me that make me go “hmm.” I have been writing them down as “imponderables”, although maybe I should call them “ponderables” because they are things I ponder. I’ve never shared them, and thought I might share them at the end of my farm adventure story. Today, my “imponderable” is about God. Many times I have compared the God I serve (the loving God who gave his one and only Son to die for my sins and defeat sin and death, and who clearly said (Micah 6:8) that what he requires is that we act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God) to the other gods in the Old Testament, who were capricious (you never knew what would satisfy them) and cruel, even requiring child sacrifices. It has made me marvel about what kind of God I serve, who is so loving and such a contrast to other gods. Recently it hit me that there is only one God (which I knew, but still…) and all the other (false) gods, were not just false gods, but they were just people’s idea of what a god should be like. Somehow, putting false gods in the category of “people’s imagination” rather than any kind of god, however false, put a different spin on it for me. I wonder if it went back to kings believing that they were gods (certainly the Egyptian Pharaoh was considered a God) and taking the way they treated people (“kill all the boy babies”, “you have time on your hands to worship your God? find your own straw to make bricks”) and people giving those qualities to their gods. However people came to define their gods, I’m so glad that I serve the true God and not someone’s imagination.