Yevette, next to her mother Yasmine. Yasmine was sick with pneumonia when we dried her off last month. We treated her with antibiotics and she was better until last week when the rainy weather made her pneumonia flair up again. The stress from being sick again, forced her to calve early, 33 days early. It is amazing that we have a live calf, even if she's only 25 pounds!!!
Yevette, after her bath courtesy of her mother Yasmine
My husband Jonathan with holding up Yevette next to our other calf "System" who is 3 days older than her and over twice her size.
Yevette, is knee high at 2 days old!
So darn cute!...she's so adorable, everyone stops to pet her when they walk by.
Yevette on the back of the 4-wheeler in the pasture, just before we brought her to the calf barn.We take our care of our girls very seriously. Our care is concern with animal welfare, and their well being. Having a live calf of this size is a miracle of it's own, but also a testament to the care a dairy farm can offer an animal in need. Had this calf been born in the wild, she would have died and her mother would be dying. Thanks to modern agriculture and vetrinarian practices we can work to cure her mother Yasmine as well as take good care of our new premie. Yevette was vaccinated upon arrival as well as given a shot of steriods to help her underdeveloped lungs develop faster. Within hours of birth she was holding her head up and making noise. She wanted to get up and run but her premature legs just couldn't hold her yet. By today she could stand by herslef, but only with help from a human. She is amazingly able to drink 4 pints of milk each day, even though our average 100# calves will drink almost 2 gallons of milk each day. We call her our little miracle, and hope for her long life here are Orange Patch Dairy...she'll be so spoiled in the coming years!
Just visiting your site after reading The Journal online. We are from NU but moved away 9 yrs ago. I used to work at AMPI in the lab so reading about you treating the cows and "drying them up" brought back memories of testing milk in the lab for antibiotics, somatic cells etc.
ReplyDeleteI am happy for you that you know a life of farming is a blessing, not all people are that wise but there must not be a day spent anywhere that could be closer to god than on a farm surrounded by creation and gods beloved animals. Kathy
Thank you for your kind comments and reading our letter. We do consider it a blessing to work with these animals. A wise neighbor once said "that if God trusted us with these animals' care, we owe them to give them our best". Truer words were never spoken. Thanks for stopping by and I hope you come back again!
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