Chores at Davis Hill.
Terry who does the milking is taking his vacation over Thanksgiving, so I am being trained to do calf chores and some milking. Milking still scares me becuase of the loud noise the milking tubes make when they auto release off the cow and then bang into the side of the milking jars, those large glass bottles in the parlor. The noise always scares me. Jo and Tom laugh at me when I jump at the bang. I am more comfortable in the heifer barn doing those chores.
Heifer chores are basically back breaking manure scraping and scooping. The heifer barn is the original cow barn that Charlie built when he first started farming. Concrete stalls/beds that have a manure gutter at the base. So you take a hoe and scrape the poop and soiled bedding off the bed and into the gutter. Then you run the pump and the gutter has paddles that move the poop away from the cows and down to the pump area.
Except for the area in the barn where there are about 12 heifers. There is a gutter, but not on the chain paddle area, so you have shovel the poop by hand into a wheel barrow, then truck it over to the other gutter area and dump it in. I can do it in three wheel barrow loads. Charlie does it in 2. A wheel barrow of manure is the same weight from a cow as from a sheep. No difference really.
The animals are in the stalls the entire time you are doing chores, so you are in close proximity to the back end of the cow. Cows kick, so you talk to them and tell them you are there and I ask them to move their feet so I can get the poop off the bed. I also sing to them, which they don’t seem to mind too much. Cows are like big sheep. Let them know what is going on and they seem to cooperate. Except for #202 a pissy brown cow that kicks, becuase she can. She hasn’t gotten me yet.
There is also feeding the calves and heifers, grain and hay. There are currently 76 mouths to feed, plus a barn cat that gets some extra milk. The calves get different grain then the older cows and there are different amounts that you give. Some get a half scoop, some get a whole and some have thier grain stolen by the cow next door, so you have put it in a special place. Some critters get 1st cut, some get good second cut and some get not so good 2nd cut. First cut hay is the fist hay cut in the season. It tends to be stemmy. 2nd cut is better quality and generally a higher protein. Better for the newer calves.
Then you have to get new bedding put out. The farm uses shredded paper for bedding. Recycling at the most basic level. They have a paper shreeder/blower that you put old newspaper in and then it is chopped into 2 inch confetti, then it is blown into each of the stalls. You have to load it with paper and then walk by each of the stalls to get the paper to blow in.
Then the new mother cows are milked and the babies are fed bottles. You have to give them specific types of milk depending on how new the baby is. The cow that just delivered has colostrum rich milk, the creamiest yellow milk that smells really wonderful. (haven’t had any,so i don’t know how it tastes, but I bet it is really rich.) So the newest baby gets colostrum then graduates to regular milk a bit at a time by mixing the two together. You have to know who gets what and how much. I need a list. Charlie just knows.
You have to clean out the pipe line, wash everything, tuck everyone in for the night and turn off the lights. Generally a couple of hours, 2 times a day.
