Have you ever had one of those days you know the day that makes you question why you do what you do?! OR maybe you have had one of those days where a hot shower and a good cry is all that sounds good. Well today I had one of those days.
We recently had a cow come fresh & give us two beautiful heifer calves. This cow is a cow that my farmer raised from a baby. She is a gorgeous big black Holstein. Yes, I know I say that all my girls are gorgeous. But she really is. She was doing just fine after she gave birth. Showed no signs of anything wrong. Well we are now on day three of her not being able to stand on her own. She went down with what we believe to be a pinched nerve. Our daily routine includes taking care of her even more so then when she was healthy and able to get around on her own. She requires us to hip lift her, give her lots of vitamins, carry food/water to her and of course give her lots of love!
Tonight I was standing next to her after giving her food and water. I knelt down to give her loves and she placed her head on my lap. Yesterday, she looked amazing. No signs of any weakness(other then not being able to stand). Tonight, she looked at me with sunken red eyes and completely broke my heart. I felt like she was giving up. I stayed there a little longer with tears running down my cheek. I let her know that we were not done trying. I was NOT giving up on her.
I then headed over to the other commodity bin. My new(new to me) calf barn is being built on the other side of the wall from her. I then began to take care of our calves. Two of the calves are getting some special attention and have been the last three days. You see, these two girls are the twin daughters to my down cow.
As I walked out of my calf barn I noticed that my down cow was trying to get up on her front legs. I quickly dropped my buckets and ran over. She still couldn’t get her back legs to work quite right. I smiled to myself, even though she couldn’t quite get it. She was TRYING. I gave her some more loves and she used my leg reach an itch between her ears. She licked me and I went on my way.
It is hard to see the good in the midst of all the bad. It is hard to pick yourself up when you feel defeated. It’s just plain hard to raise these animals and then lose them.
Tomorrow is a new day. A new life can be brought into this world on the farm and it is very possible a life can be lost. It is the circle of life in which we have hardly any control of. We will get up, we will hip lift our down cow, we will baby her as much as we can, we will make sure she is comfortable, we will push her to try harder, we will take care of her girls, we will love them and we will continue this little thing called life. We may shed some tears, we may get discouraged, we may feel defeated but we will not give in.
We are farmers and this is what we do. We choose this life & we will do our best in everything we do.
Krista Stauffer
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these days are always hard.
We've had a few problems with cows going down with no reason. We are looking at it being liver fluke and by giving a fast acting oral drench they are getting up fast. 🙂
🙂 Just an idea
Cant get the face book link to work at the moment. but am getting there!
Big hugs from Ontario! I couldn't help but give our girls (and wee babes!) some extra, extra lovin' after reading this…
Hugs! I've had these days too, although usually with pigs and c-sections and piglets dying for no reason and too many reasons all at once. At least things seem to be looking up! Just know you're defiantly not the only one who has shed tears in the barn 🙂
Such a touching post Krista. I appreciate so much the care and love you and other farmers give the animals you have on your farm. Growing grain crops, I don’t have the opportunity to care for my crops like you would an animal, but I still take the best care of the crops and land that I can.
Thank you!
Thank you for sharing such a beautiful story. Have to admit it made me tear up a bit, just because I have been there. My husband and I raise steers from the bottle up and my nitch in the operation is to get the babies from bottle to feed. Well this winter has been a tough one and unfortunately I have lost 3 calves. All 3 of which I sat with, loved, and cried for when they couldn’t fight any more. It seems silly to some that I give so much to these little guys, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only one 🙂
Nice to know I am not alone as well. This was a throwback story from 2013 but it still seems like it was recent.
Keep us posted on this cow. What is her name? We had beef cattle (mostly polled Hereford’s) for years and we suffered when one went down or died. My kids saved a blind calf born after a difficult birth and his mother died. Kids bottle raised Simon and then they decided to put him in the feed lot and send him to market when it was time. That was really hard on me but the kids were raised in the beef business. I got close to the cows because I knew they would always be there. No so with the younger ones. We had a 100 head cow herd at one time. I miss them.
Hi Candy! This was an older blog post that I re-shared. We lost this cow. Sadly, there was a much bigger issue due to calving than we had initially thought. We had to put her down. It broke our hearts.