Mastitis is the most common disease that can plague a cow. It is a bacterial infection of the udder. The udder becomes infected when bacteria enters the teat canal. After a cow is milked, warm milk remains in the teat while the cow walks back to pasture, the ground potentially littered with manure and other contaminants. The low-hanging teats touch the manure and bacteria are drawn up into the udder. The result is an unhealthy cow, lower-quality milk and a potential spread of mastitis throughout the herd. There are a few ways to diagnose mastitis. The first is through a strip cup, a small stainless steel mug with a stainless screened lid. The teats are milked by hand before the milking equipment is attached into the strip cup, with a small amount of milk from each teat hitting the screen. Any milk contaminated with bacteria will show up as small clumps on the screen.
The infections can also be transmitted from cow to cow through the milking equipment, with the potential for widespread disease through the milking herd. Milk that is highly infected, although not considered dangerous to humans, is of poor quality. The milk can be clotty or stringy and cannot produce good cheese.
I took samples of the two cows that I had at the time and sent them off to a lab to be tested individually. The milk sample that is taken monthly from every dairy is a sample of the milk that is mixed together before being sent to a processing plant or before bottling. It is the responsibility of the dairy to check the health of each individual cow. In the case of a dairy such as mine, only two cows were in the sample and therefore the health of one cow can skew the results dramatically. One very sick cow in a one-hundred-cow herd would alter the collective sample, but not as dramatically.
The milk sample came back from the lab with the results that one cow was heavily infected and that she was infected with Staphylococcus aureus. I had no idea what that meant until the state inspector explained it to me. Staphylococcus aureus is a bacterium that is extremely difficult to control. In humans it is known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. As it happens, the procedure for treating humans and cows is different. Humans get a bit more attention; cows are immediately slaughtered, considered impossible and unwise to treat. I made a few calls to dairymen and my veterinarian, who confirmed that it wasn’t worth it. The price of the antibiotics and the possibility that they might not be effective was too high relative to the chance of my other cow catching the infection as well.
I removed the cow, Bella, to a separate paddock. I now had a problem that I did not anticipate and had to deal with quickly. I didn’t have the equipment to transport her either to a slaughterhouse or to a livestock auction. I didn’t even have the equipment to kill her and bury her on the property. She still had value as meat and I didn’t want to lose that. The only good part of this story is that the udders of a cow are very separate from the body of the cow and that each of the four quarters of the udder are separate from each other. Even though the udder was infected with the Staphylococcus aureus, the meat on her was considered healthy to eat. I couldn’t waste that meat; to do so would have been even sadder, more wasteful and more disrespectful of the animal.
An adult dairy cow such as Bella weighs in the neighborhood of a thousand pounds. The block and tackle that I use to hoist animals to skin, gut, hang and butcher can hold five hundred, maybe six hundred pounds comfortably, but I didn’t have the confidence to raise a full-grown cow with this simple rope block and tackle. I knew I’d have to call in a mobile butcher.
We scheduled the day for him to come and slaughter Bella. It was in three weeks, so I had to look at her every day knowing that she was to be slaughtered, but could do nothing about it. I kept her apart from the other cows, which only seemed to make it worse. Not sure if it made it worse for me or worse for her or both, but it just had a bad feeling to it.
By this point in the history of the farm and my evolution as a farmer, I had slaughtered a few animals myself and had no problem with it. It could be sad, certainly, but it was never an emotional moment, rather one of necessity. This was different. I had spent every morning and every afternoon with this cow, chatting with her while milking, through the heat of the summer and the rain of the winter. She was a good producer of milk and had a lovely disposition. Even now, two years later, I have fond memories of this cow. When the day arrived, I saw the butcher’s large panel truck pull into the driveway and begin its drive past the paddocks and toward the house. Two young men hopped out of the cab with long rubber aprons on. Each had a rifle in hand, ready to go to work. To them it was business, another call at another farm on a busy schedule, hoping to make the early boat off the island and back home at the end of their day.
I went to the paddock where I had left Bella to graze, put a rope harness over her head and led her through the gate and toward the large gravel parking area in front of the house. I chatted to her briefly, thanking her for her life and apologizing for her early demise. I handed the rope lead of the halter to the main butcher, mumbled that I had to head off for errands, told him I would speak with his boss back at the butcher shop later and thanked him. I hopped in my truck and drove out the driveway toward town. I wanted to make sure that I was well enough away before they made their shot, before she fell to the gravel beneath her. I didn’t want to look like a complete fool; a sad romantic trying to be a farmer and failing in the eyes of the two seasoned, tattoo-adorned butchers with their rifles and chew and logging boots. I walked crisply but quickly and drove in the same manner. I tried to look like I was a busy man, with many errands to take care of in town, instead of an emotional mess too fragile to watch my favorite cow slaughtered in front of my eyes.
There was a chance that I could have saved Bella with a lot of antibiotics and a lot of luck, but not likely. Slaughtering her was the most logical alternative, and yet it was a decision I didn’t want to have to make. My impression of a small dairy was of wholesome goodness: gentle creatures casually walking into the milking parlor to effortlessly produce gallons of pure, white, clean milk. Premature death wasn’t part of the equation. I learned quickly that dairy cows come and go, sometimes not in the best circumstances.
An important component of producing milk on a dairy is breeding the cows. The cows come into lactation in anticipation of their having an offspring to feed. If they do not get pregnant, then they do not produce milk; they are dry. A dry cow is still a lovely cow, good for that pastoral look. Such cows do, however, eat hay or pasture every day and, without any milk being produced, they are a financial drain on the farm. Every day that they are not in milk, they are a loss on the balance sheet. The easiest time to breed a cow—for her to be “bred back”—is two to three months after she has calved. At that time she is at the peak of her milk production for the lactation cycle and she is most fertile. In a commercial dairy this is when she would be bred. The tricky thing is to determine if she is in heat.
When I had just started the dairy, I had just the one cow: Dinah. She had just calved at the farm I’d bought her from and she and I were just getting used to each other. I had no idea how to breed her, when or how it was all going to work. She was producing lots of milk, so it was really the last thing I was worried about. People had warned me that it would be difficult to tell when she came into heat, as she was all alone. I really didn’t understand what they meant.
One February morning a few months after I had gotten her, I learned more about cows than I needed to, very quickly. The morning milking had been finished, Dinah had been fed and I was headed up the pasture to attend to the sheep, to get them watered and fed. It was foggy and cold, a mist in the air. There are some mornings when I love this job, it all makes sense, I feel good about what I do and I am confident that I will continue. This was not such a morning. Wet, cold, trudging up the hill to the sheep, I was looking forward to quickly finishing and heading back to the kitchen to have a hot breakfast and move on to other tasks for the day, preferably inside.
I was lost in my own thoughts, walking across the field, when I realized, all too late, that Dinah w
as immediately behind me. She rose up on her two back legs and proceeded, or at least attempted, to mount me from behind. Her body knocked me to the wet ground, one of her front hooves smacking me from behind, cracking my ribs in the process.
She immediately moved on, walking off in search of some more grass to graze, thinking little of her action. I stayed on the ground for a moment, unable to move, rethinking this farming thing completely in the couple of minutes I lay in the grass. At that moment, the farm had had no glamour: a single cow grazing weedy pastures, a few sheep and a couple of pigs. I had no choice but to get myself up and head down the hill to the house, wondering what I’d been thinking. Why had I given up my comfortable city job?
Dinah had most definitely cracked my ribs. For three weeks I had to roll out of bed in the morning; it was too painful to lift my body up. Carrying anything of weight was very difficult. If I could have found a way to get rid of the one cow at the time, I would have. It was too humiliating to quit and I had no idea how to do it. Buying a cow had taken a lot of time and effort. I didn’t have a horse trailer or a truck that could pull a trailer. Even if I could have moved her, I had spent too much money on Dinah to drop her off at the auction and get a minuscule recoup of my investment. Dinah and I would have to learn to love each other.
What I didn’t understand was that Dinah had acted like all cows do in heat. I had always thought that the male mounts the female. Period. During my brief experience with a farm as a kid (two weeks at horse camp a couple of summers), I remember seeing the male horses mounting the females in the pasture near the arena where we would ride. The horses on top were obviously males, the ones on the bottom obviously not males. I thought I understood the nature of the world.
Cows in heat will either mount or be mounted. Therein lies the confusion. The one that is in heat will show “standing heat.” That is to say, she will allow the other female not only to attempt to mount her, but additionally will stand there deferentially while she does. The cow in heat will also attempt to mount, unsuccessfully, other cows who are not in heat. In the case of Dinah, alone in the field, she attempted to mount me. She was in heat, I was not. I ended up, however, in a great deal of pain.
With a small herd of cows, luckily, I am now out of the heat equation. They mount each other as they each go through their cycles. Watching closely and with a bit of experience, I can tell who is coming into heat. I look for a “slick,” a long drip of thick mucus trailing out of the end of the cow. The slick is the best indicator of a cow in heat. There are times when this slick is tremendously long and full. After a cow has walked around the field for a while, her tail switching away at flies, the slick will be tossed onto her back to dry in the sun.
This is the time when a cow should be bred. In a perfect world, a bull would be available and she would be most receptive. In a more difficult and modern time, artificial insemination is a suitable alternative. The benefits of a bull are that cows have a much better understanding of when they are receptive to breeding than I could ever gain through observation. A bull, if he is functioning properly, will do the deed without question at the right time, and do it right. The downside of bulls is that they are bulls: full of vigor and dangerously strong. They are needed for a few minutes a year, and yet eat heartily every day and can potentially cause serious problems. The chance of gaining a top-quality bull is slight; most available bulls of are of lesser quality.
The upside of artificial insemination (AI) is that the best bull in the nation can be bred with your cow for relatively low cost. The AI providers are national companies that have access to the finest bull semen nationwide. Although this is for the most part a positive thing, there is also something disturbing about most all of the dairy cows in America being the progeny of a handful of bulls. They are collectively getting more and more inbred every year. The sperm facilitators also are creating calves that are bred for production and high fat, and not necessarily for the qualities that are important to a small homestead farm like long life, temperament and ease of handling.
When I see a cow come into heat I make a note of it on the milk room calendar. It is very difficult to schedule the AI breeder to come out in time for the actual heat cycle. It is possible, but a great deal of planning is needed. The other alternative is to manipulate the heat cycle. Cows will come into heat every twenty-two days. After ten to twelve days they can be given a hormone, Estrumate, that will bring them into heat in a very specific time frame, generally seventy two hours after an injection. This gives me a very tight window to schedule a breeder.
I sometimes fear that AI from such a limited pool is manipulative of nature. Should we be using artificial insemination and hormone shots to breed cows to the same bulls that are used to breed most of the other cows around the nation? The diversity of dairy cows will diminish as more and more are bred from the same genetic pool. Presently I am working on using a bull from a neighbor’s farm, but the logistics are tricky. Transporting a docile dairy cow isn’t easy, but it’s nothing compared to moving a thousand-pound bull with a mean streak.
After the cows have been bred and the nine-month gestation period has elapsed, it is time to get ready for the cow to calve. The calendar in the milk room here is a special one. The cow breeders give them away with advertisements for their bull semen on each page. Each day has two notations printed on the date: one is the date twenty-two days forward when the cow should come into heat again after the present day, and the second notation is the target date nine months hence when a cow bred on the present day will calve. The photo at the top of the calendar for each month also depicts bizarre cow fantasy scenes: a perfect cow, groomed excessively, standing on a verdant piece of grass with an impeccable barn in the background and a caption at the base of the photo like: Miss Sharpshooter April Sun, Grand Champion 2007.
The calendar is covered with my marks, dates when the cows have come into heat, or when I think they have come into heat; the dates when I think they were successfully bred, or might have been bred, and when I think they will have their calves.
As with all mammals, when the cow is close to giving birth she will begin to produce milk in preparation for feeding her progeny. In a dairy cow, this is readily apparent. She will “bag up,” meaning her udder, which had hung loosely for the past sixty days, will begin to fill out.
With my newfound knowledge, I love chatting with women about cows. It is my great entry into the private lives of mothers in my community. Generally we would have little common ground. Conversations thrive at the local coffee shop about mastitis, colostrum, switching from milking twice a day to once a day, ovarian cysts and other milk topics on which the thirty-something women love to compare notes with me. I have quickly learned, however, never to use the terms bred back or bagged out to describe females of the human race, though it’s of course standard fare for the bovine crowd.
If a stall is available in the barn, or a paddock is empty, I will move a pregnant cow there to keep better track of her and so that she doesn’t calve far from me. A common part of every animal husbandry book I have ever read is a series of drawings showing all the different ways a lamb or calf can get stuck in the birth canal of its mother. Then there is a long description of how to right that position, pulling this leg or pushing that leg and turning the body around and so on. The most pressing worry concerning a dairy cow, however, is not that there will be a breached birth, but rather that she will have milk fever.
Milk fever, or hypocalcaemia, is especially prevalent among Jersey cows. The basic idea is this: The mother produces milk to feed her calf. Once the calf is born it will begin to drink the milk from her. Her body needs to quickly jump-start milk production immediately after she has birthed this animal and expelled its placenta. The calcium needed to produce this volume of milk needs to be able to come from the bones in her body. If she tries to draw it only from the food she is eating, she will not be able to produce enough with sufficient speed. The result is a dramatic loss of nutrients in her body.
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The reaction comes very quickly to her. She will fall to the ground and not be able to get up again. In a few hours without help, she will be dead. The remedy is to inject calcium supplements intravenously in a controlled manner. Too much too fast will cause damage to the heart and even kill her by stopping her heartbeat. Too little and she will die from the milk fever itself.
I worry every time a cow has a calf. My third cow, Francesca, came down with milk fever. Of course, it happened on a Saturday afternoon when the regular large-animal veterinarian was off the island. I did manage to find another vet who agreed to make a farm call and administer the IV. The farm is located very close to the town of Vashon, a short drive from this vet’s office. After making the call and chatting with the doctor, who assured me that she would head out, I began the wait for her to make the three-minute drive. After thirty minutes I started to panic, sure that my beloved cow would be dead before the vet arrived. She did show up close to an hour later, and after a long and slow IV drip of calcium solution the cow popped back up.
Luckily, milk fever is preventable. The preventive steps are intriguing and counterintuitive. I would think that feeding a cow about to calve with alfalfa hay, which has the highest concentration of calcium, would be the best idea. My logic goes that if she needs calcium, make sure there is plenty in the animal’s food to cover the quick production of milk. On the contrary, if a cow is fed only alfalfa in the last few days, then she will rely on her diet to produce the calcium and not adapt her body to utilize the calcium in her bones.
Immediately before she calves—the night before or early that morning—I give her a large tube of calcium paste. A calcium gun looks like the caulking guns that that you buy at the local hardware store. I come around the head of the cow, and with one arm and my shoulder I steady her head, opening her mouth with that hand. With the other hand I stick the caulking gun in her mouth and quickly start pumping the handle, sending the white paste as deep into her throat as possible. As expected, she is not happy about this, but with luck a suitable proportion of the paste will go down her throat to be ingested. The remaining paste will invariably end up all over me as she tosses her head and spits it out, calcium flying through the air.
Growing a Farmer Page 11