When I began this farm venture I had no idea how to do any kind of medical work. When I was growing up, my mother worked in a pediatrician’s office and I would spend my weekends hanging out in the lab playing with the auto-clave and the syringes—sans needles, of course. I never wanted to be a doctor, always felt too nervous around medical work. When I had blood drawn for tests I would invariably pass out, unable to deal with the sight of blood, or my blood, at least.
As I began to have livestock here at the farm, I needed a veterinarian. I am most fortunate to have access to a great one here on Vashon Island. Like many semirural communities across the country, this island has a lot of horse enthusiasts. Horses are finicky animals and need veterinary care often. Having a large-animal doctor nearby is a boon for me. Treating dairy cows and the odd sheep or pig is a welcome change for the vet and, as he is a mobile vet, farm calls are all he does. I had never seen or heard of a mobile vet before and was quite intrigued the first time Mark pulled up my driveway in his full-sized pickup truck. Fitted into the back of the bed is a large fiberglass box that spans the width of the bed. Inside the box, accessed by lids that open on either side, is a compact veterinarian’s office. A small refrigerated compartment holds a variety of medicines, and small shelves and drawers hold the requisite syringes and ointments and salves. A tank of clean water with a pump guarantees an ability to keep the whole operation hygienic and tidy.
The relationship I have with Mark evolved in a way that I never expected. I thought it would be like going to my doctor. You make an appointment, you have the office call, he treats you, you pay him and you go on your way. Working with a mobile vet is a different procedure. I do make an appointment, he drives out to check on the animals, but then he gives me ideas about what is wrong with the animal in question and the pricing of different options. After years of coming out to the farm, he will now give me some medicine and syringes and tell me when to give them, where to give them and expects me to step up and administer the doses. Often now he will simply leave the medicine for me at his home without ever even coming out to the farm after I call him with an animal problem. I know now what specific medicine I need for a variety of problems and how it is to be administered. It has been a slow learning curve, not one that I had expected in the least, but very rewarding.
The most frequently used skill I have had to acquire is giving a cow an injection. I had watched Mark take the syringe and stab the cow in the ass quickly and precisely several times before he left me a small bottle of medicine and a baggie of syringes to administer the next few days’ worth of medication, but I really had no idea what I was doing.
The next morning I went out to the barn, brought the cow in question into the milking parlor and fed her a bit of grain, locking her in the stanchion to hold her in place. Although she had been milked just an hour before, she happily took to the uncharacteristic routine: more grain is always a pleasure to the cows. And there I stood. The cow was chomping away at the grain in the bucket in front of her, unaware of my apprehension. When she ran low on grain she lifted her head and turned my way, silently requesting additional feed. I refilled the grain buckets a couple of times before I opened the Ziploc and reached into the small plastic baggie of the type generally reserved for a lunch sandwich, and pulled out a syringe. I picked up the small bottle of medicine with the flat rubber top where I expected a screw-on lid. I removed the plastic sleeve that guarded the sharp needle of the syringe and pushed the point into the rubber top, piercing it, the needle going into the clear glass bottle. The needle was rather sharp, but I expected it to pop in a bit easier. How was I going to get the needle into the cow? I pulled back the plunger of the syringe, drawing the liquid into the chamber, and withdrew the needle from the bottle, slowly and deliberately. Then I held the syringe vertical and pushed the plunger just a bit, until a bit of medicine squirted out the tip of the needle. I have no idea why I did this, except that I had seen Julie London on Emergency! do it in the emergency room on every episode. I also tapped the syringe quickly with my finger, just like Julie. This made me feel like I knew what I was doing. And then I stood there again and stopped, with the loaded syringe held straight up, the cow looking over at me for more grain.
I had no idea how much pressure it would take to get the syringe into the cow’s hide. It had been tough just getting the needle into the small medicine bottle. Mark had mentioned to me that one way to administer an injection was to take the needle off and push just that in first, then, if no blood came squirting out, attach the syringe cylinder and administer the medicine. The needle seemed way too small for me to hold on to and to jam into the cow, so I took my chances and hoped that I wouldn’t hit a vein. If I hit the vein, I would dose way too fast and my cow would be dead in minutes, all on my first attempt.
The longer I stood there in the milking parlor, the more grain the cow ate, and I would have to stop and grab another scoopful of the oats, then walk back to the other end of the cow, pick up my syringe and try to get the nerve up again. I finally tried a much larger scoop of grain in hopes of buying myself a longer bit of time.
At last I mustered up the confidence to proceed. I grasped the syringe in my fisted hand and jabbed it as hard as I could into the thick hide on the side of her hip. It went in well—not gracefully, but well. I had watched Mark enough to know that the cow would move around a bit, quickly and with strength. I stood back right away as she felt the needle hit, letting go of the syringe in the process, and it stayed put, embedded in her hide. When she calmed down a bit, I pushed the medication into her and quickly pulled the needle out. With my newly acquired confidence, I rubbed the area where I had poked my cow, not really knowing what function this performed, but thinking it seemed like the right thing to do. By this time she was bored with her excessive second breakfast of the day and was ready to return to the other cows in the paddock, thinking little, I presume, of the entire experience.
The administering of an intravenous calcium solution into the vein of a dying cow to save the cow from milk fever is one procedure I have never done. It takes much more skill than an intramuscular (IM) or subcutaneous (sub Q) shot. I get very nervous when my cows are down, when they can’t get up and they need help quickly and proficiently. I look at injecting an IV calcium solution as my final exam in the caring of cows, and I hope to perform it one day.
One of my favorite bits of cow lore is the concept of hardware disease. The term is both perfect for what it describes and highly cryptic. The basic idea is that as cows graze grass, they eat very close to the ground. With their powerful lips, they might try to ingest any item that is on the ground. If that item is a rock or a stick, not a big deal; but metal, such as a nail, is a much bigger deal. They would have to pass a nail through their system with the risk of puncturing one of their stomach chambers or their intestinal tract.
When I first began fencing my pastures, a friend came to help who had experience fencing, from growing up working on his family’s farm. Part of stringing fences is to pound large staples into the posts to hold up the woven wire. I tend to be rather casual about most chores and downright sloppy at times. He insisted on keeping track of each and every staple to make sure that they were all accounted for. In the process of hammering, staples tend to fly off from the post if they are hit slightly off. The result is a heavy one-inch staple flying into the grass. I wanted to move on and grab another one; my friend would make me grovel around on the grass until the errant staple was found. He knew cows would eventually find them and possibly ingest them. He had been raised right.
Beyond making sure you don’t add metal to the cow fields, there is a strange additional precaution you can take. In all the livestock supply catalogues and often on the counter of feed stores are torpedo-shaped magnets. About two inches long, a half-inch around, with tapered ends, they are fed to cows and remain in their stomachs to catch errant metal objects.
Even though I have never fed one of my cows one of these magnets, I recently slaughtered an
older dairy cow that I had bought from another farm. When I put the numerous large stomachs into the metal bucket of the tractor to haul them to the compost pile, I heard a clunk of a sound, and found that a bullet-shaped magnet had stuck to the side of the steel bucket. Attached to that magnet was a mishmash of small wires, brads and nails. I am still a bit confused how it all works, but I can confidently state that it is indeed a sound system for keeping those errant ferrous bits from lodging in the intestines of a cow. I do wonder why the ferrous bundle wouldn’t pass as a whole, making the cow’s experience that much worse, but I trust that this has worked for so many years that it has become a part of the bovine procedure.
Just when I thought I knew everything about cows, I learned one more crucial fact: they are tremendously sensitive to electricity.
Inside the milk room is a cooler that chills the milk from the temperature of the cow at ninety-eight degrees to the legal maximum of forty degrees. It is a large, powerful cooler that consumes a great deal of electricity. A few months ago I noticed that the cooler was blowing its internal circuit breakers and acting strangely. It appeared as though there was an electrical short.
The first morning of this unusual cooler activity, I led the first cow onto the walkway surrounding the dairy building. My dear cow Francesca immediately reacted as she placed her first two hooves onto the concrete, her trailing two hooves still on the wet winter soil.
The reaction was swift and dramatic. As her front two hooves hit the concrete she convulsed, her body writhing. She didn’t make a sound, but quickly moved across the walkway to get off, as if her hooves were on fire. As I watched her in horror, I thought that she was having some sort of heart attack. I have no idea if dairy cows even have such afflictions, but that was the conclusion I jumped to. I took her in to be milked, thinking her behavior was odd, but she seemed to bounce back and I wanted to assume that it was behind her, never to show up again.
Then I brought the next cow through, passing by the milk room on the way to the milking parlor. Boo, an admittedly sensitive cow, headed onto the concrete slab to make her way to the milking parlor and had the same reaction.
My first thought was that there was an electrical problem in the concrete. I got on my hands and knees and felt all over the slab. I could feel nothing. I bent my head down low and tried licking the concrete, thinking my dry hand was not conductive enough. Although I was the only one at the farm at this hour, I still had the fear in the back of my mind that someone would pull up and see me crawling around with my palms flat to the floor, my tongue on the concrete, trying to feel something, anything.
It tasted like concrete. I couldn’t reconcile the idea of electricity in concrete. Concrete is like dirt; it is of the earth. Copper conducts electricity. Aluminum, steel, tin, those kinds of things.
Still worried about my cows, I called a friend who does electrical work for me on the island. I was nervous about leaving the following message on his cell phone: “Jason, I think I have electricity coming through my concrete, can you come and check it out?”
To his credit, he agreed right away to come out to the farm. He pulled out his voltage meters and checked everything. As it happened, he did find a small amount of electrical charge—up to one volt in the metal gutters and metal roof—but was unable to find anything in the concrete.
After he made a few phone calls, he gave me insight into something called “stray voltage.” Evidently, a large section of the standard electrical code is devoted to electrical work on dairy barns. As it happens, cows are deeply sensitive to electrical current. We did manage to solve the crisis in the milk room, but the problem worked itself out in a different way as well. In addition to being very sensitive to electrical current, cows are unable to forget anything. Cows are large, stubborn beasts; difficult to move, challenging to motivate to try any new path. The only part of their personality that makes moving them and milking them easy is their love of repetition and their excellent memory. They remember where the milking parlor is, what time they can go in and what their favorite route is.
Once Francesca and Boo realized that walking over the milk room slab on their way to the milking parlor was painful, they would never return there. They quickly found a safer, albeit longer, route to the milking parlor. No amount of pushing, shoving or coddling could get them to return to their old, painful path. The fact that the electrical problem has been solved was inconsequential to them; they had learned a new route and would stick to it, thank you very much.
Perhaps I enjoy cows because, like them, I’m a stubborn creature of habit. I began milking a single cow every morning five years ago, and I’ve never wanted to stop. Four cows at $1,500 each was a serious investment for this small farm, and one that I knew I had to figure out how to earn back. I didn’t want to give up my glorious mornings with the cows, so I had to turn them into a viable business. My city life, with its security and compromises, was over. I was a farmer, and if I was going to stay one for long, I had to become a profitable one. I would become a dairy farmer.
Seven
Dairying
Keeping a cow is a lot of work. They eat a lot, they create a lot of manure and they’re rather expensive to buy. Although nice enough and attractive, they won’t thank you for feeding them and milking them twice daily. The rewards, therefore, center around the milk, in addition to the joys of working with cows.
Fresh cow milk is amazing. Full of fat, flavorful and sweet. When I was a child, my mother would often buy powdered milk during the tougher economic times of the early 1970s. I’m not sure that it was that much cheaper, but we bought it nonetheless. The irony that I now produce exceptional milk is not lost on me. The trick to making acceptable powdered milk was to remember to mix up a new batch at night in anticipation of finishing off the older batch the next day. A jug of freshly made reconstituted milk was warm and unsavory. The chill was what made it palatable.
The odd thing is that I love fresh warm milk today. Not fresh milk in the sense of a few days old, but really fresh milk: out of the udder by a few minutes. It is certainly not chilled, but closer to ninety degrees, and rich and creamy. Warm milk is more dessertlike; chilled, more milklike.
Milk warmed even hotter, more like one hundred and fifty, two hundred degrees, mixes well with honey for the ideal beverage to solve all the problems of the world. I can think of nothing more soothing and ideal. Biblical references to the land of milk and honey ring true.
Milk has a thickness, a body, because it is filled with fat. Without the fat, milk is tasty, but the fat makes it rich.
Modern production milk is not only pasteurized but also homogenized. Pasteurization is the heating of the milk to kill any pathogenic bacteria present in the raw milk. Milk that is not pasteurized is termed raw. Homogenization mixes the fat and the milk together so that the fat will not rise to the top of the milk. Essentially all of the milk in this country has been pasteurized since before the Second World War. Homogenization is a relatively new part of milk technology, showing up around the middle of the last century. I have never really understood why we need it. I like the cream rising up to the top.
Milk is homogenized by forcing it mechanically through minuscule holes to break up the fat globules in order to make them less likely to coalesce and form a fat layer. Luckily, my dairy does not have such an apparatus. The cream rises up and collects on the top of the milk.
Milk is highly enjoyable, but butter is different; it is transcendent. It’s more than just an enjoyable food, it enlivens the tongue, fills the palate and makes food cooked with it special. When I was growing up in the 1960s, our table was graced—maybe not graced, but occupied—with plastic tubs of vegetable-based margarines. On the odd holidays of each year, a stick of butter would show up on the table, its rectangular shape out of sorts with the customary swirl of pale yellow fat in the tub made to vaguely resemble a country crock. My recollection is that both the sticks of butter and the margarines were vaguely fatty and pale, devoid of color and flavor.
Fresh raw butter has no pale characteristics. As Jersey cows do not completely process carotene from their grass diet, but rather pass it through in their milk, the cream and resulting butter are bright yellow in color; they appear to be dyed. The result is a fullness on the tongue, without the fattiness.
I was intrigued by raw milk, but I yearned to make raw butter. The cows have held up their end; an actual crock of raw butter now always commands my table.
Butter, simply described, is the collection of the fat globules of milk into a solid. Churning butter is fairly straightforward and has remained unchanged for generations. The fat is suspended in the milk and rises to the top. The cream congregates on the surface little by little. After a few hours some cream will be visible, by twenty-four hours there will be a goodly amount and in two days there will be a full thick layer of cream.
The longer the wait, the less milk and the more cream that you can easily skim off. Keeping a backlog of milk is difficult, however, as it takes up a great deal of space, and twenty-four hours works well enough to capture the cream necessary to proceed.
A large ladle lowered into the surface of the milk will pick up the cream that runs into it without disturbing the milk below. Moving the ladle around the surface will complete the process, getting as much cream as possible without dragging too much milk along as well.
Growing a Farmer Page 12