Photo above by Mary Lou Shaw. Milking a family cow in a stanchion. A reader has asked for a blog post about training heifers and cows to milk. We will cover the spectrum from training large groups of heifers with the cow herd to training a single heifer or cow...
Reprinted with permission from Farming Magazine. “You’ve just got to talk to them,” my uncle would always say about working with livestock. He could tame wild calves by talking to them soothingly as they calmed down and started to like him. Experienced stockmen like...
Feeding the calves was my first duty, which I loved, when I came to this farm 38 years ago (as a college student looking for a farm job—but that’s another story!). We fed whole milk, from bottle or bucket, to calves in individual hutches or pens, transitioning to...
Are you ready for winter to end? I do appreciate bright and pretty snow, sparkling in the sunshine, but the gray and wet days are getting tiring and the vast fluctuations in temperature do get challenging. It’s easy to look forward to green grass and warm air. While...