A Busy Day

Well today was quite a busy day. 7 new babies on the ground, the good news was that we got all of them there alive. The bad news was that 4 of them had to be pulled. I think that some of the cows have gone quite a bit over their due date and now we are having issues because of that. We subscribe to the idea that it is better to pull a calf that maybe didn't need it, than to leave them too long and end up with a weak or, even worse, a dead calf. 3 of the 4 were out of heifers, and we also had 1 heifer that managed to calve all by herself. The 3 assists were all pretty big calves, I estimate in between 90-100 lbs. We'll weigh them in the morning and see for sure. 2 were pretty easy pulls, and I actually think that the one heifer probably would have had her calf alone...eventually. And the 3rd heifer was a fairly hard pull. But mama wasn't totally worn out and the calf was up pretty quickly so in the end it is all good. I'm not sure whether these big calves out of the heifers are because they are overdue, or maybe one of the 3 bulls that we used last year is throwing some larger calves. Who knows, and really not much we can do about it now. As long as we don't have any bigger problems than this I will be happy.

On another note, we are having some awesome weather here lately. Today it got to at least +10 C and another day or 2 like this, the snow will be all gone. The creeks and rivers have been running pretty full for the last week or so, and the major runoff is done now. A couple more days and things will be starting to dry off, that's the best thing about living on a sand dune, mud season doesn't last too long. Of course we'll be crying for moisture in a couple of months most likely though....

As well as dealing with the cattle, I was able to get 1 of my horses in and start cleaning her up and getting ready to start working her again. Looking forward to getting back at jumping in the near future. A couple more days and my riding arena should be good to go. Finally no more ice!

Calving Season 2014

Well, I'm going to try and give this another try. We'll see how it works, if I remember to blog a little. So please bear with me...again. Once again it is calving season and the calves are starting to come pretty fast. We've 40 calves on the ground so far and the number is growing. This year we will have quite a large number of Shorthorn x calves on the ground. I am excited, it has taken a lot of years to get here. Some of the calves so far are a little on the splashy side. I am glad that they are heifers, the colour won't affect their calf raising ability, but it sure would affect their sales value!

We had a little rough luck early, this cow had a premature calf on a fairly cold night in Febuary. I think it might have lived had we been there, but what can you do, I sure wasn't expecting her to calve. She sure wanted a calf though, and all we had to do was convince the calf that it wanted her!

And then there were 2! She sure surprised us with these to fellas. She did good though, 2 big bull calves 75 and 88 lbs, she had them all by herself and she took care of them all by herself too! Very impressive and she's in good condition to boot.