Farmer dates : )

We arrived in the barn this morning and made the decision that the heifer that was having trouble dealing with the stanchion had to leave.  Tethering legs can break them of the habit of sticking their legs in front of them or laying  so far ahead that they can't get up, but nothing will break them when they decide to stick their leg out to the side.  If it were summer she may have been able to go out in the pasture and figure out the fine art of laying down and getting up but its winter and we have no where else for her to go.  We came to the conclusion long ago that cows don't read the manual! We have a stanchion barn with wide stalls and kraeberg mattresses bedded with straw or corn fodder.  More current state of the art buildings to house cattle have free stalls with sand bedding.  For every situation there is an animal to screw up the plan.  When we put our cows out on pasture we had some leave the herd because they struggled and didn't figure that out!!!  The disappointment is she was to provide income in our business.  Had we sold her as a heifer she would have been worth about $1200.  We will be lucky if we get $500 selling her today but the other option was eventually having to put her down and pay $50 for someone to pick her up.

Once the truck picked up the cow we headed out on a "farmer date".  Basically this translates into a trip to town with a farm list of things to do and we take the opportunity to go out for dinner.  We dropped off the samples for milk cultures and another drug sample for the fresh cow.  We ate dinner and went to Farm Fleet.  Bruce is farmer to the core and perfectly content not leaving here for weeks at a time. It is nice to get out and do something different, even if its just a lunch.  We arrived home in time for him to feed cows, eat supper and milk again.  Farmer dates are nice but they really do just extend the evening.  Feeding that didn't get done during the daytime just gets postponed until after milking. On the bright side, the drug sample passed this time so everyones milk is going in the tank.  Time for more calves to start the process over again : )