In the Midst of Calving Season

We have had an interest week to say the least.
Last week I mentioned that we had a calf born Tuesday night and that we had two more due soon.

Well, here's an update.

Turns out the calf born Tuesday night most likely had spina bifida and unfortunately needed to be euthanized. On Sunday morning, we went out for chores and saw that number 52 had calved all on her own and is pictured below with her heifer (girl) calf.

Monday afternoon number 7 had an extremely difficult calving where the vet needed to be called in and without the three of us there it may have had to be a c-section. The bull calf is huge and we're lucky that he's still alive. Currently mom has some nerve damage that we're hoping will improve and we're monitoring both of them extremely closely and still working along with the vet.

If I'm being completely honest, this tough calving has been harder to process for us than the fact that we had to euthanize a calf.

See, our main goal with our cows is to be as hands off as possible. We want them to have good temperaments, fairly easy to handle and then be able to calve and mother well on their own.

One of the best ways to ensure this is to make sure that the bull used is small, has small birth weight and easeful calvings. Our bull checks off all of these boxes, he's the smallest of all of our cattle, he was 70lbs when he was born and although this is the first of his calves, everyone so far has done fairly well.

This monster of a calf is throwing us for a bit of a loop. Even though this calf is the youngest by 2 weeks, he's probably our biggest calf currently, it's just wild.

Alex and I both looked at each other yesterday and said 'how the f*ck did this happen?'

A really great reminder that you can try all you want but you never truly have control over mother nature.

As of the time of writing this, we've got 11 more cows to calve this season.