Late Night Ramblings

Here I am, up at 1:54 in the morning, listening to some rock music, working on e-mails. Why you ask would I be working on e-mails at 1 in the morning? Well, the answer is easy...we didn't get home from the farm until Midnight tonight.

It was a good day at the farm, but a long day. We have been working on a cow, Number 20, who has a mystery illness. She gave birth to twins 3 nights ago, and since then she has not been eating as much feed as we hoped that she would. We had the vet look at her yesterday but he couldn't find anything directly wrong with her, so we assume that it is a couple of different things. As a result we "treated" her twice today. She received a "soup" of yeast, vitamins, minerals, and probiotics to help out her rumen-she drank this. And she got a couple liters of IV fluids. She isn't on antibiotics, because she is not sick from an infection but appears to have a digestive upset. Tonight, it was a night and day difference-she was eating everything in sight, so we hope we are over this hurdle.

We delivered 2 new bulls calves today, so we had to tend to the mothers and the boys. All are bedded in and well fed tonight. We also bedded in all of the heifers, dry cows, and milking cows. We had to fill hay feeders in the dry cow lot and the heifer lots. And then at the end of the night we had to head back to the dry cow lot, to look for cows calving-we have 3 that look to be giving birth before sunrise....which brings me to now-this is why I am up....I will be leaving shortly to drive out the farm and check on them. Making sure that in the case that they do calve tonight someone is there to help them and the new calves. I am hoping for no calves until morning-but Mother Nature always wins this argument. So, of to the farm I go, hopefully 3 news calves and 3 happy mothers will greet me =)