We have officially surpassed our first month of calving! We wanted to do a more indepth update for this week’s blog post. Our first calf was born on August 21st and as of Sept. 24th we are 56% completed with calving. Our first few weeks of calving were all babies born from artificial insemination (AI) and now we have started calving cows that were bred from our herd bulls. Check out our youtube we did on AI to get a more detailed description of how we do this.
Here are the stats so far:
79 cows have calved out of our 142 animals.
73 calves are up and running around
29 of those are heifers
44 are bulls
As with any livestock we cannot have a 100% rate of living, but we shoot to have the best we can. We have had a couple of hiccups in the calving season so far.
2 cows had their babies too early and they did not make it
1 heifer had a hard birth overnight and we found the calf dead in the morning
1 cow laid on her baby and injured it.
2 cows had twins; 1 cow we had to assist and both were born dead and 1 cow had them both on her own born alive
1 cow had a perfectly fine birth and the calf was 2 days old and when we moved the cows the babies jaw got stepped on and could not suckle
With all that being said we are currently at a 92% success rate
This weekend we have been working on grafting one of the twins onto the cow with the calf that had the broken jaw (830). This means we put a cow who lost her calf with a baby that needs a mom (we do not leave twins on a cow because they rarely can care for them both successfully) and they become a family. This is time consuming work and takes a lot of patience but is really worth it in the long run.
As always, if there are any questions we are happy to have a discussion about our practices and why we do them.
Oh and the cows are really enjoying their third grazing of sorghum and a much needed rain!
Love,
Olivia, Tabby, Gina, & Kendra
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