Cattle

Today the Vikings play football and I am nervous and excited to watch the game. They have disappointed so many times that it is hard to get truly excited buy I do have high hopes this year. Skol!

So here are some pictures of cute, fuzzy calves for distraction.  We have changed where all the animals are housed, these are from last week when we were feeding all the adult cattle and tiny calves in the barn.  If you follow on instagram (@etfarm) I posted a picture of the little calves in their special pen.

There was an unused stall in the barn so we put a 2x4 across the doorway about halfway up so the big cows couldn't get through.  Then we put in extra bedding and a bowl of calf starter feed.  It took just a couple days for the calves to figure out it was for them.  Once they figured it out, they went in there all of the time.

Feeding cattle in the barn worked pretty well.  Eric rigged up an elevator to run silage from the feed room out to the main area and into a feed bunk.  We shoveled from that bunk into the other bunks but it was so much easier than shoveling individual wheel barrows full and hauling them outside to feed the cattle.  Also, we could lock the cattle away from the bunks and barn door so we could get all the feed out before letting the cows in.  I liked that because they will all push up to the feed bunk as soon as there is any feed there and not move for me to keep bringing enough silage to fill the bunk.

We did run into one little problem, the cows liked to drink out of one of the pig's water tanks.  In the picture below, there is a water tank at the far end of the wooden feed bunk, cows could just reach over and take a little sip.  Only problem is that a little sip for a couple cows drained a tank that usually takes 17 piglets almost 5 days to drink down.  It just meant we had to keep an eye on the water to make sure there was enough for the piglets to drink, and refill it almost every day. Eric fixed that by wiring an old gate over the top.

It was kind of fun to have the barn full of cows, like when it was a dairy barn long ago. Cows are apparently much larger now than they were when the barn was built.  They should be able to stand with their head in the feed bunk and have their feet up out of the manure gutter.  Almost none of our cattle are short enough for that! Our Charolais cattle are a big breed for beef animals but I know Holsteins have gotten bigger over the years too.