On the farm

Jon Adamy from Michigan Farm Bureau worked with Samana Sheikh at WLNS to do some 'On the Farm' segments about dairy farming. You can watch the videos here.

It's been a whirlwind of a month! My brother, sister, and their families came, my cousin, his wife, and their three kids visited, we camped and canoed, we had people over for pool parties and wiffle ball, we did our third cutting of alfalfa, and Kris' sister, her husband and kids are coming today! 

(We also had two family reunions. My brother Gage and I won the Anderson cornhole tournament, and Kris and I won the Wardin cornhole tournament! These are my greatest athletic achievements.)

On the farm, it's busy all the time. Calves everywhere, things breaking and getting them fixed, getting bulls from other farms, milking, chopping alfalfa, and making sure everything is getting covered, from machine maintenance to calf care and everything in between.

We were fortunate that our team member Dave and his wife Lisa sold us my grandparents' house back, so now our other team members could move closer. 

I'm also working full time now, from home most days but also going into the office, and it's been going great. I'm a marketing communications specialist (which means writer) at an ag lending co-op. It's wonderful being able to combine my love of writing with my love of agriculture!

I hope your August is going well, too. The cicadas and crickets are loud at night, there's a chill in the night air, and I'll be wearing a winter coat before I know it. But until then ... it's swimming every day until school starts!

And last but not least ... my Uncle Stuart took this video, my cousin Marilyn Cotton had it digitized, and my cousin Pat Fitzpatrick put it on YouTube. It is precious to me. It shows my great-great grandma in my house, my great-grandparents having fun, my grandparents young, my aunts and uncles, and my dad as a baby! 

But...what might be interesting to you is the vintage farming footage! How did they not lose all their limbs and fingers? Go to 8:45 and check out my great-grandpa and grandpa farming. My great-grandpa is the one with the horses and my grandpa is the guy laughing. My Uncle Dave is the little boy on the wagon.  

Watch it here.

MSU extension and vet visit

Kris is on the MSU Extension Advisory Board and after their meeting yesterday everyone came for a farm tour.  Farmers love seeing other farms.  It's just the way it is!  It was nice seeing everyone and talking - and nice doing a tour with Kris.  Questions from farmers are so different than questions from preschoolers ... for example, "What is your philosophy on cow size?"

We had another visit from Lindsey Sanchez, our vet.  (You may remember the surgery post.)  Josh noticed something was wrong with a cow.  We use a stethoscope on cows to listen to their insides - like their rumen.  Kris let me listen to it - it was my first time - and it sounded like far off thunder.  

We thought she might have a displaced abomasum, but Lindsey listened and palpated and diagnosed her with a mummified calf.  The cow gave birth 80 days ago to a live calf, and that calf apparently had a twin that didn't make it.  Her body was trying to absorb it, but she hasn't been able to do it yet.

Lindsey wasn't sure why this put her 'off feed' (that's the term for her not eating enough and not feeling well), but she suggested feeding her a special mix that we have for cows and giving her some medicine.

Again, Lindsey had to do all this with three boys, team members, and me watching.  I should have asked her her philosophy on people watching you at work, taking your picture, and asking a hundred questions the entire time!

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We love our vets - today's surgery

Every once in awhile a calf gets a hernia.  This nice two-month old heifer had a pretty prominent one in her belly button, which is called an umbilical hernia. (Tonight our dads were talking about how they've fixed small hernias in the past - they have taped or wrapped the calf around the entire body in hopes that the hole will close.)  In this case, since it was big, we called on our veterinarians.

You can see her hernia pushing out near the center of her body.

Full disclosure - I LOVE watching the vets do surgeries.  I had even more interest in this one because a few years ago, I also had umbilical hernia surgery!  

Our longtime vet Russ Seifferlein was assisting our newer vet Lindsey Sanchez.  Earlier in the day she had been to float (file) a horse's teeth and helped a family say goodbye to their cat.  Seriously, vets have such interesting days!

This was Lindsey's first ever hernia surgery.  I'm sure she was super glad that she had four people watching and one taking pictures.  (Just kidding - she did a great job.) 

First, they sedated the heifer.  Then, they shaved and cleaned the surgical area with alcohol for a long time.

Note their cute headlamps.

They covered the rest of her body and gave her anesthesia.  If you didn't see her hernia before, you can see it now!

Lindsey made the incision with Russ looking on.  She cut around the circle of the hole, making sure to cut only skin and not the intestinal wall.

It's amazing how tough skin really is.  I mean, they are known for leather and all.

After she'd cut all she needed to, she made sure the intestines were pushed back in the body and moved to sew her all back together.  (This part actually made my belly button hurt a little.)

She needed to sew up the hole, and then she needed to sew the skin. Russ also referred to the 'belt and suspenders' method, where she sewed it in two places (together and to the side) to make sure the repair didn't fail.  

Looks just like any surgery in a hospital, minus the straw.  But it's clean straw!

Like for most events on the farm, our son got an up close view.

Kindergarten in the morning, vet school in the p.m.

Then, she was finished!  First hernia surgery successful!  She proudly displayed the repaired calf.

We'll keep her in this pen by herself for a week or so to make sure that no other calves accidentally injure her.  She'll be herself in no time, but with a stronger abdominal wall!

Thank you, Russ and Lindsey, for the educational day and great work.  As always, we hope never to see you on our farm again! 

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Summertime

We cut the alfalfa, and since then it's been overcast and cold.  This is not the weather you need to dry your hay.  The sun just came out this afternoon ... and it was a mad rush!  All at once, the farmers in the area got out and started chopping.  There was farm rush hour on our road!

Why can't you chop wet alfalfa?  Because it would get all gummed up in the machinery and not be the best quality feed for the cattle.  You try to harvest it at the right combination of moisture and yield.  This cutting, the weather is not fully cooperating.  When it dried today finally ... it was really dry!  Tomorrow will be another full day of chopping.

In other farm news, we have 44 calves out on pasture now, as we're filling up the barn with all the newborns.

And with the end of summer and vacations, scheduling is crazy for Kris and everyone.  We are so fortunate to have our great team members.

***

Today a crew came out to shoot a video about fresh food availability in Michigan, and they wanted a farming perspective.

It's always interesting talking to people about their jobs - they liked asking about our farm, and I liked asking about video production!  

They took some video of the boys, and I'm sure there won't be audio.  If there were, it would have captured this conversation - Cole and Ty want the same calf to show in 4-H.  After much negotiation, Cole traded Ty two of his toys for her.  They really have the bartering system down pat.

The people were delightful and had lots of questions about the farm.  (One I got twice was - what happens to cows when they don't give any more milk?  Answer - we sell them for meat, so they get eaten typically as hamburger.)

When they were leaving, Karen said, "I want to live on a farm!"  Matt said that his son would be torn - he loved tractors, but he hates the smell.  If only they'd been here later, when the air was full of the sweet, delicious smell of fresh-cut alfalfa.  It makes up for the manure!

My boys, on the other hand, are incredibly used to being on the farm.  So today we took a different tour - at TechSmith, where I used to work!  My friend Jim showed them around the office and they were duly impressed.

I asked if they wanted to work in an office, and Cole said yes, but in a skyscraper.  Ty said he wanted to work outside.  I said you don't have to choose just one - you can pick both.

As soon as Kris started chopping at home, they begged to go with him.

More chopping, more farming, more public relations tomorrow!  Let's hope for dry weather and good smells.

If you want to know more, you can like my farm page on Facebook, follow @carlashelley on twitter, or get the posts sent to your email by filling out the form on the right. If you have any questions, please email carla.wardin@gmail.com!

30 years later ...

My sister and brother are home to visit!  They live 12 and 16 hours away, respectively, and once a year we all get together for a week.

We've toured the farm, camped, gone canoeing, swam, and recreated this picture from 30 years ago!

We don't have even one brown and white calf so far this year, so we had to do with a Holstein.  My brother joked that we should use a cow so it looked like she had grown up too, but we went with a day-old calf instead.  

Speaking of calves, I wrote this article for U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance.  You can see it on their site here:  Calf Care from Day One.

On our farm, taking care of our animals is the highest priority and it starts the moment a calf is born.

Our calves are born in the pasture during a three-month period in the summer and fall. During this time, we’re watching the cows to see who’s close to calving. If she needs help, we can pull the calf, but normally she has it unassisted.

After the calf is born, her mother licks her off to clean and stimulate her. When she’s ready, we take her to the calf barn, which we have specially designed for calf care. Each calf has her own individual pen.  We clean off her belly button, bed her down with straw, and feed her colostrum.

The barn itself has curtains, which we open and close depending on the weather. It is also fully ventilated with fans. We built it in a direction so that the natural breeze flows right through the barn, making sure it’s always nice and cool for the calves, the way they like it.

To ensure the calves are fed the correct amount, we mark the calves the first two times they're fed colostrum. It's really important that calves get colostrum right away, because it contains so many antibodies and we want them healthy from the get-go.

After a week, the calves start eating solids – grain – and drink water all day in addition to their milk. For eight weeks, they stay in their individual pens to make sure that they’re thriving. That way, we can monitor their health and make sure they’re getting all the food they need – and not worry about some bossier calf eating more than her share.

After eight weeks when the calves have received their individualized care and we’re sure they are thriving, we take out the panels in between them and put them in groups of eight. Calves like this, because they are social herd animals.

Like all our heifers, we plan on her being on our farm the rest of her long, healthy life. Starting as a baby, becoming a mother, giving lots of milk, and having a daughter that give lots of milk, we love taking care of them! For our male calves, since we own a dairy farm (and only females produce milk), we sell them to a farmer to raise them as steers. However, we do have about 20 bulls we buy from other farms who are responsible for all our little calves!

There’s all of this…but there are also calves born in the middle of the night, giving vaccinations, teaching them to drink from a bottle and a pail, hernias, stomach problems and constantly checking their manure. Really as a farmer, raising calves has many of the same glamorous details as raising babies. It’s all-encompassing, tiring and totally worth it.


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Happy Independence Day!

Happy Independence Day!  From our herd to yours.

A couple of weeks ago Allison from Michigan Milk Producers Association came out to take pictures of cattle in the pasture for an article, and she also suggested that my boys pose for the picture above. Believe it or not, they're used to having their picture taken ...

We have 79 heifer calves going into the holiday, including another set of heifer twins!  One side of the barn is completely filled, and now we've started on the other one.

The oldest have ear tags now, which have their number and birth dates.  Isn't she pretty?

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Calf explosion

                                     

As the calves keep on coming, the harvest is happening too.

Juuust in between the rain storms, Kris and the guys managed to cut, chop, and pile up the second cutting of alfalfa.  Then the guys (and the little guys) put tires on the pile.

The first calves were born on June 8, and since then we now have 60 heifers.  We've had about the same amount of bulls, but we sell them twice a week to a farmer who raises them as steers.

So all day long, every day, there are pastures to check.  Cows to check on.  Calves to take care of, take into the barn, feed colostrum, and feed water.  The calves get fed milk twice a day, eat grain at a week old, and drink free choice water all day long.

We have a girl working for us who is going to vet school in the fall.  She has a lot of experience on farms, but Kris said he showed her a trick my dad taught him ...

Sometimes you are in a place where you have to help a cow calve by pulling her calf.  Usually you use calf pulling chains.  You put the chains around the calf's front feet and pull it out.

If he was in a pasture far from the chains (admittedly we own four of them, but it happens if you're not in the truck) my dad would take off his belt, loop it around the calves' hooves, and use that to pull a calf.

My dad taught Kris, Kris taught the employees, and everyone uses it as a backup.  Kris and Josh both did it last week.  (Nice, solid belt material!)

When people talk about a belt-and-suspenders solution, I always think of this belt use.  No one around here wears suspenders, but I'm sure - if necessary - they could be fashioned into a calf-puller too.

If you want to know more, you can like my farm page on Facebook, follow @carlashelley on twitter, or get the posts sent to your email by filling out the form on the right. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me! 

Fathers

Happy Father's Day to the 20 bulls who are responsible for all our calves - and the guy who's taking care of them and us.

Kris worked all day with the calves - wow, there are so many, sometimes I lose count.  We've had nine or more a day for the last three days in a row.  MANY.  Here we are on the last check of the night when we picked up a bull and a heifer.

Here's the bull, just starting to stand:

And of course, Happy Father's Day to our dairy farmer dads!  My dad was helping Kris just this morning, plus in this older picture -

There's also a good chance that Ty might look a little like his Grandpa Wardin.

We've had great examples.  Thanks!

If you want to know more, you can like my farm page on Facebook, follow @carlashelley on twitter, or get the posts sent to your email by filling out the form on the right. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me! 

Preg check - ultrasounds today!

Big excitement today - preg check!  

Our vet comes and gives an internal ultrasound to every cow to determine 1) if she's pregnant 2) exactly how pregnant she is 3) if she has any problems.

Nick was our vet today.  I first met Nick when he was new to the practice, dealing with a uterine torsion.  (Go to that link for some great pictures.)  Now he's married, has a baby girl, and is well-seasoned!  

Like most good doctors, Nick likes answering questions about what he's doing.  (I once had a doctor who told me I asked too many questions.  I never saw him again, of course!)

So there was a lot to learn today!

Nick reaches into the cow with the probe in his hand.  It's connected to goggles that he can look into, and on the screen of his goggles is the ultrasound.  

He let me look through them - it looks a whole lot like a baby ultrasound.  I could see the beautiful spine and the little heartbeat fluttering away. 

But 'reaching into the cow' isn't an easy job.  He has to push into them up to his shoulder.  He answered that yes, lots of vets eventually tear their rotator cuffs or hurt their elbows.  He has personally overextended his elbow before.  

Sometimes the uterus isn't where he can feel it, so he coaxes it up with his hand in order to get a better feel for the calf.

Sometimes he uses his hand and not the probe to feel the calf and estimate the size.

But this isn't a one man job, of course.  Josh was in there, helping position, treat, and tag the cows.

Here's a view from the pit.

And this is a really physical job.  Right here, the cow has moved into Nick so that he's pinned and can't move.  He wasn't in pain or hurt or anything ... just clearly not going to be able to move until she leaves the parlor.  There's another vet in the clinic who's far along in her pregnancy, and this is why she isn't doing preg checks right now!

All of our cows have ear tags so that we can keep track of them.  Over time, they sometimes fall off. We give them a new one at preg check, if necessary.  

 

We bought some cows from a friend named Susan, and her name still goes on their tags!  (They're doing great, Susan!)

Some have names, some have numbers, and all of them wear earrings.  

We separate the cows into three groups.  We did one preg check Tuesday, one today, and we'll do one in two weeks.  We don't have enough time in between milkings to do all of them, and a vet wouldn't want to do hundreds at one time, anyway.  (See rotator cuffs.)

Josh and Adam were helping put them in the parlor, one by one.  

They'd put one in one side of the parlor, and yell the number.  Nick would check her while they put one in the other side, yell her days pregnant, go again, and so on until they were all done.  Of course, this wasn't like an assembly line ... there was lots of talking and laughing the whole way through! 

Still going ...

Nick came upon a cow that he thought had a DA, which means displaced abomasum, which is the technical term for a twisted stomach.  He listened to her with a stethoscope and ruled that out, so he wanted to check her for ketosis.  We have strips that the cows can urinate on to see if they test positive for ketosis.  

So, Nick sort of rubbed on the back of her until she peed, and Josh held the stick in her stream of urine.  It was negative, and she was fine.  Hooray!  (I've never seen a vet stimulate a cow to urinate either.  Nick said it almost always works.)

Kris was in the front, writing down all the numbers and names and taking a record of the pregnancy dates, cows that were open (not pregnant), and ones with any problems - like an ovarian cyst or an infection. 

Max mostly swung around on pipes and chatted. 

It was all a success!  The calves are growing, the cows are doing well, and we're on our way to another year of milk.  Which makes farmers ... and milk lovers ... very happy.

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Wintery week

Tonight Kris and I were supposed to go a neighborhood party together.  He came home from the barn and showered, but he got a call ... a cow had a calf!  This was a surprise calf ... the vet had checked her in May and said that she was "open".  (Meaning she wasn't pregnant.)  

This just happened in the news this week.  A girl didn't know she was pregnant until an hour before she gave birth, and had a 10 lb, 2 oz baby.  Having been pregnant twice, I don't know how this could happen, but it seems to happen all the time.

June 2007

For me, it was hard to miss it.  

To be fair, the cow didn't look pregnant either.  

After the two of them were taken care of, he came back, reshowered, and went to the party.

It was a cold, cold week.  -11 wind chill one morning.  Wind gusts of 20 mph, a little snow.  On Thursday Kris wore five layers on top, two on the bottom.  I posted this picture on Facebook, and everyone kept commenting on his smile.     

Winter isn't just working in the cold ... it's indoor work!  Taxes and health care and meetings, all of which we did a lot of this week.  But yes, Kris always makes time for seeing friends and family.  It keeps him smiling.  (All work and no play makes Kris a dull boy.  Or definitely not as smiley.)    

He also manages to involve the boys in a lot of his work.  For instance, he lets our four-year-old address the employee paychecks and tax documents.

Sort of makes finding your envelope more of a challenge!

We'll see what new surprises are coming this week ... more surprise calves?  A sudden warm front?  An audit? Haha -  just kidding, government.
 
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