The surrogate calf

In nature not everything goes to plan, not always. Alzina our house cow calved the day after she was due. Sadly, the calf was still born.

Now I had a sad, confused cow who couldn’t understand why her calf was not responding to her gentle mooing and an udder full of milk. Luckily, she is an awesome cow and trusts me. She calmly ate her feed while I milked her, twice a day, looked at me searchingly every time I came to check on her, wondering if I would bring her calf to life.

Finding a bobby calf (week old calf) is not easy in Gisborne, as there are not many dairy farms (most bobby calves come from dairy farms as they area burden to the farmers who only want the milk from the mothers) and calving generally happens around spring time. So I wasn’t starting lucky. A few phone calls confirmed my gut feeling that it might be really tricky to find a surrogate calf for Alzina.

But as luck would have it, a friend who runs beef cows had one calf unexpectedly and wasn’t so keen to keep the calf as the mother was quite young. It was 2 weeks old and fairly wild but that was pretty much my only option unless I wanted to wait longer.

The first day the calf was wild and feral, behaving like a bull in a rodeo, jumping around and running in circles in the cow shed. He was very jumpy and skittish. In that state, there was no way he was even thinking about how hungry he might be. We had kept the still born calf’s skin and attached it to the surrogate calf, hoping to fool Alzina into thinking it might be her calf. I’m not sure we quite succeeded but it helped.

Next day, same thing. I tried to bring him close to the teats, flicked a bit of milk at his nose and placed the teat to his mouth (Alzina was ever so patient, not kicking a fuss and only turning round to see what was going on every now and again). No. Way.

Josh bottle fed him, and after some initial reluctance, the calf gulped it down.

Day 3. I am milking in the shed, the calf is free to roam next to us and he seems calmer, he is taking the time to sniff around and nibble bits and pieces. I put him by Alzina’s teats again and this time, after a few seconds, he grabbed one and suckled. From that moment the deal was sealed. Alzina was a bit shifty, but she was making her lovely soft mooing sounds again and I encouraged her, stood by her and patted her while the calf fed. She relaxed. In that moment, it all unfolded and they adopted each other. Wonderful.

It only took three days, I expected to be at it for a week. I am always so amazed at how well things can click together when you let the flow guide you. And I am so happy that my precious house cow is a happy mum once again.

Flying goats

Our newest resident animals: four Anglo Nubian kid goats, three does and a buck, to complete our little herd of milking goats. All going well, we will start milking next year, which I look forward to. In the meantime we are loving rearing little kids, they are very playful and endearing. The kids love hanging out with them and watching them jump around.

I chose Anglo Nubians because I was told their milk is great for cheese making and also because they look so cute. And maybe one will actually take off and fly one day.

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When they get older and bigger they will join our three does we hand raised last year. They are in a separate area for now as the older ones could bully and hurt them.

Goat palace

One of the little projects to get done: a goats only shelter. Goats dislike cold and wet weather. One of our goats, Muffin, is always very reluctant to even walk on wet grass. She walks like she’s wearing high heels and bleats her indignation. I was once told that you could tell when the rain was coming when goats seek shelter.

As the girls are getting bigger, the half round corrugated iron shelter they had as kids (only a few months ago!) is now too small to house them all. In the last bout of rain, one of them had its rear sticking out the whole time it was raining.

I decided to use the empty space underneath the milking shed roof to create their new space. To make it easy I just used pallets for walls and put a couple of boards accross  to stop nosey cows from stepping in, made some elevated sleeping/ resting areas and put a sheet of corrugated iron on top to stop most of the rain.

They were reluctant to get in at first but now sleep there regularly. I think it’s a bit too close to the cows to their taste, but still better than being out in the rain!

Goat husbandry

Since hand raising our own three goats I have been delving into goat husbandry a bit more. Our herd of wild goats has been living on this property a decade or two, maybe even more who knows. Considering they get no care from us whatsoever, they are thriving. It is very rare for one to die, no even of internal parasite overload. In fact the only two things they suffer from is overgrown toenails (you can tell because they will be limping) and getting their heads stuck in the deer fence. You would think that the three offspring we took from that herd would be carrying the same strong genes, and in some ways maybe they do. But I have had to be very vigilant with their health, especially with signs of internal parasites (scouring and anaemia are the ones I look out for). It has been interesting to compare with how the wild kid goats have been faring, especially considering two of our three are twins. in the wild herd, one of the 14 or so kids born last year got sick (and died within the first 3 months). Our goats have had several episodes of scours that I have treated with herbal remedies (so far I haven’t had to use chemical drenches and am hoping to build up their immunity that way), and one instance where one of them had early signs of barber’s pole (bottle jaw and anaemia/ low energy).

Muffin with a slight fluid build up under her jaw, commonly called bottle jaw.

They have access to the same pasture, breathe the same air and drink the same water. My gut feeling is that not having been suckled on their mum has made them more susceptible to disease. And maybe they haven’t learnt to medicate themselves with what’s around them.

So, my conclusions is that, while they will be carrying some of the wild goats’ genes and hopefully some good ones, there is more to it as far as parasite resistance goes.

To keep them healthy without having to inject chemical drenches, I am keeping a close eye on them: checking their eye lids for signs of anaemia, their poos (and bums) and feeling their coat on a regular basis. I feed them a varied diet of tree cuttings and weeds. If the eye lids are les than pale pink, it’s a sign of anaemia (you can check using a Famacha score chart). Anything softer that round little marbles is a sign that something is wrong with their guts (aside from Barber’s pole, where stools remain normal). With using natural herbal remedies, the key is early prevention before the system is overloaded. I have now got my protocol pretty sorted: the main herb I use is fumitory (pounded with a bit of water to extract the extremely bitter juice), along with a digestive drench made by a New Zealand herbalist brand called Malcom Harker (it’s what I use for us as well). I also make sure the goats get a regular dose of Pat Coleby’s mineral mix ( a mix of dolomite, copper, sulfur, seaweed meal, salt and diatomaceous earth), sometimes very day if the scouring is really bad. I also try to feed them weeds that are known anthelmintics (such as wormwood, honeysuckle and black walnut), hypericum (high in copper) and lots of tree prunings. All of these supplementary feeds are presented to them but I don’t force them to eat any of it, they get to select what they want to eat. I’ll watch them eat and take note of what they choose, sometimes I will go out of my way to get a weed I think they might need… I am hoping to have most of these growing in areas where they can browse them if need be. My idea is to have them planted along the fence that separates our animal free area and the paddocks, with the plants planted on our side so they can only reach the tips. It’ll be a mix of weeds and shrubs, native and non native species.

fumitory

Nettles, wormwood and honeysuckle

 

I am still researching and tweaking their diet and mineral input, hoping to give them more resilience. It’ll probably be a lifelong learning curve. I have found that the key to treating animals without chemical drenches is to give the treatment time to work. Whereas you can see the results of a chemical drench the next day, with a herbal drench it’ll take a good two weeks, perhaps more, before the animal is back on track. As long as I can see improvement, I keep the treatment going, until I am satisfied that it seems out of trouble.

 

Rooster tractor

Every spring without fail our Mama chicken goes clucky. We call her Mama chicken because she is the only one of our hens (we have 11 in total) who will not only go clucky but also faithfully sit on her eggs until they hatch no matter what happens (this last bit is important).

If you want eggs from your chickens, you don’t want a clucky hen. A clucky hen will stop laying and sit on the eggs in the laying box, which means the other hens have to either squeeze in or find somewhere else to lay. Depending on her personality, she will also give you the evil eye whenever you try to collect the eggs, make an evil clucky sound and even peck you. Another thing is that it is really hard to get a clucky hen to go un-clucky. There are whole forum posts on the subject, from kicking them out of the laying box and making sure they can’t get back in, to putting an ice pack under them… I’m not sure what works and don’t usually bother trying anything, although I do think I will isolate the problematic ones in my new chicken run next year.

I say problematic ones because in our flock it’s not just Mama chicken who gets clucky. We have others, but they always go loopy after a while, either because we move them into a special cage or because they are loopy. So anyway, Mama chicken is the only hen I rely on to hatch chicks. She hatched 9 this year, we lost two, which leaves us with 7. Out of them, two are hens I am keeping. This leaves me with 5 roosters. Since we already have a rooster, any other male has to go. Somewhere. Mostly in the freezer.(Roosters will fight to death sometimes, one good reason to only have one rooster. The other reason being that more than one rooster and the hens are constantly harassed). Unless their name is Luna and a very insistent and sensitive 4 year old girl doesn’t want it to go in the freezer. So Luna is a very lucky rooster who has found a new home (and even luckier the new home doesn’t involve a deep freeze). The others will go, but in the meantime I am putting them to good use around my garden. 

The rooster tractor, lucky Luna in the foreground (black and white)

I built a lightweight pen using water piping, tent poles and chicken mesh (all repurposed). It was easy to build and more importantly I can move it around by myself. I use tent pegs to secure it to the ground. They have been great at nibbling at the kikuyu grass, although they won’t scratch the ground. That would probably happen if I left them in one spot for longer, but I decided I am happy with them eating the grass down. I also have two children who think it’s not very nice to have chickens living in such a small space and have been campaigning for them to have access to fresh green grass. Then won. I am also hoping that with less exercise they will fatten a bit more.

The saddest story to date

I have been thinking about writing this post, putting it off, re-writing it in my head, thinking about it some more… This is the hardest story to tell and on that has made me question my faith in where our civilisation is headed.

One of my house cows, Choupette, had a very sad ending to her beautiful life, one that I have been feeling very guilty about, angry at my naivety.

I had decided a while back that I would sell her as I wanted to keep Zen. In the long term, we only want to have one milking cow, as we are gradually reclaiming grazing land to plant more natives. She didn’t sell while she was in calf, so I waited, thinking of selling her with calf at foot (which means selling her with her newborn calf). There was a local guy who had been interested for a while, and seemed very keen. So when Lune was born he came and checked them out, I went and checked his property, it seemed good enough I thought at the time, and he seemed genuinely motivated to give her a good life. He rears bobby calves (calves that are taken from their dairy milk mums a few hours after they are born) to weaning age then sells them on to farmers to fatten up. Choupette would be his project nurse cow, the first he ever owned.

Choupette had a lot of milk on calving. My first mistake was to let her go before the calf was able to drink most of the milk. This meant she would have to be milked until the calf could take over. The buyer was confident he would milk her if he couldn’t get her to take another calf on straight away.

Of course things didn’t go as planned. She was so distressed she wouldn’t let any other calf but her own get near her, and the new owner wasn’t in favour either. So for 6 days, I went to her new home once a day to milk her. Even though she was stressed out and unhappy, she still behaved the same with me, let me tie her up and milk her. I figured she would calm down after a week, and that once she didn’t need to be milked she could just be left to roam to get used to being there. She really didn’t like the new guy though, and was very defensive, even charging him (his account of the events). I was surprised as in the five years we had owned her, milked her and handled her, she had never behaved that way. I should have picked up on it now that I look back. The last day I milked her, she was looking very nervous and literally bolted out of the holding pen after  I had milked her. I watched her for a bit, she seemed lost. The owner was away, I figured I would come back in a couple of days, milk her and check on her.

That last visit never happened. The night before my due visit, the owner message me to say she had attacked her calves and was so distressed she had been put in some yards. It didn’t sound good, he talked about selling her through his stock agent and sending her on a truck, so I offered to take her back, at a price less than what he had paid for (On account of the fact that I had been traveling back and forth for a week mainly). It was late at night, no reply, so after a restless night I tried to get back in touch in the morning. It took me all morning to manage to talk to the guy, by which time she had already been put on a truck headed to another region of New Zealand. When I asked where she was sent to he was vague, assuring me that she would be cared for and that his stock agent knew what he was doing. She’d slipped away from my reach and I was desperate to get her back now. I was willing to pay what I had sold her for, even though I had spent so much time helping him out, for her sake and good health. I was very upset, not wanting my cow to end up in some horrible dairy farm, separated from her calf. She had had such a good life to date, was such a lovely house cow, my hope had really been that she would live on many happy house cow years in the hands of some compassionate owners. In Hindsight, I should have just given him his money back and made sure she made it safely back to our place.

I finally tracked her down after 3 days, and my heart sank. She had been sent to a meat processing factory. I have been mourning her and her calf ever since, feeling anger, sadness, guilt, despair… It would never, ever, occur to me to do this to a perfectly fine animal. I was naive enough to think that the person I sold her to would have the same good intentions, the same compassion and empathy for an animal in his care, that he would see that the problem was not her but the environment in which she was put in. I should have seen it and acted on it, seen that he wasn’t taking any of my advice on board. My heart has been wounded deeply, my soul is feeling the void and the hurt, nothing will ever bring her back and I miss her so deeply. I feel like I failed her. As Miro sometimes says, I wish magic was real.

Surprise calf

Just as I thought we were done for the year… Zen had a calf, a cute brown bull calf. The boys got to name him this time, and chose Dune, after a character in the series of books they are reading at the moment, “Wings of Fire”. Apparently it’s a sand dragon…

I wasn’t expecting her to calf so soon, since she is only 13 months old, which would mean she got in calf around 6 months old… eeeekkk, teenage pregnancy!

Ideally cows should be put into calf around 12-18 months, to allow them to put their energy into growing first… I’ve noticed she has just enough milk for Dune, probably due to that too. I was too slow separating the bull from the girls, a lesson learn for me. My aim now is to make sure she doesn’t get in calf for another year or more, and wean Dune before 10 months, hoping that will allow her to put energy into her body rather than into growing a calf or producing milk. I won’t be milking her this year, although I did milk her in the early days just to make sure she wouldn’t get mastitis, and she was great, let me put a halter on her and milk her while she ate her feed. Her teats are not as great as Alzina’s, but they will get better with each calving.

On the other end, Alzina has been wonderful, she got straight back into the milking routine, complained the first few times Bouba was separated from her for the night… I’ve been making lots of butter!

One last calf

Choupette finally calved, a week before her due date as well. This time it was a heifer, born in the evening this time. She was very determined to walk and it was very cute watching her wobble around on her stick legs. She found the teat promptly and seemed very eager to get a taste. I love watching those first few hours of life.

Even though the sire is the same one and only Robbie, she looks very different to Bouba, and seems to take more from her mother in looks. Choupette’s udder seems to have inflated, and there is a lot of milk in there! I milked her morning and evening for the first week or so. Even with her calf (we named her Lune, or Moon) suckling, I still ended up with close to 10l of milk… Of course I had to make a few cheeses. I usually leave the calves with their mothers until I get less than 2l per milking (about 2 weeks), then I start putting the calf in at night and milking in the morning, making sure to leave a quarter un-milked for him. The first night or two are always dramatic, and the girls bellow loudly to let us know they are not happy about being separated from their calf. Somehow, after that they don’t fuss so much, I’m guessing because they know they get their calf back after milking (and a yummy feed too).

I love watching them together, there is so much love. I have seen bobby calves (calves under a week old, taken from their mother at a few hours old) at other places, and ours are so much more lively and happy, they run, jump around, nuzzle their mum… they can be very entertaining. Bobby calves on the other end, they always seem so bored, expressionless. It feels good to think that our animals are living a good life.

Alzina’s new calf

introducing: Bouba! He was born a few days before his due date (from my calculations), I found him curled up and wet on my morning check, he would have been born in the early hours of the morning. From a distance I could tell there was something going on with Alzina. It turned out the little teddy bear (he is brown and fluffy like a teddy bear! Aaawwwww) had somehow rolled to the other side of the electric wire and Alzina was desperate to get to him. I got him up and shuffled him back to his mum, who proceeded with the mooing and licking and fussing about. He wasn’t in a particular rush to get up and suckle, so I encouraged him a bit.

Fast forward a week, and he is running around in circles and impossible to catch! Alzina is a great mum and won’t let him out of her sight, the first few milking sessions were interesting, and she wouldn’t even eat her food until she could see her calf next to her, moved around and pooed. One morning she even turned around and walked away from me as I was getting her to the cow bale.

As we get back into our milking routine, and as her calf gets bigger/ older, she will calm down (hopefully).

Choupette is also looking pretty close to calving, so I am keeping a watchful and anxious eye on her now.

We have pretty much had no milk since drying both girls off end of August, it’s really nice getting some tasty fresh milk again.

Spring lambs and kid goats

Most of our sheep had lambs while we were in Canada. Our pet sheep Geegee and Baby waited until we got back though (well, they didn’t technically “wait” for us, but it felt that way), with Geegee literally giving birth before our eyes. A nice welcome back.

She had twin ram lambs, the first of which was born on the edge of a bank, so Josh decided to name him Cliff (he helped keep him from sliding down too fast).

It always awes me to see how animals instinctively know what to do, like mother for the first time. I wish breastfeeding for the first time had been that straight forward!

Baby and Ziggy

Geegee and Cliff

The wild goats all kidded within two weeks. 16 kid goats, 13 of which were males! For the first time we decided to take some of the girls and raise them. The goal is to have milking goats, either them or their offsprings. So as not to distress the mothers too much, we had agreed we would only take girls from twins (One of them ended up not being a twin but we took her anyway because she was being bullied by sheep and goats with the mum not intervening). They adapted really well to us and are now part of the family. They each have their own personality and are so much fun to be around. The kids have really enjoyed looking after them, Tahi built them a shelter and some great climbing circuits (they love jumping and climbing on things), Kuihi spent countless afternoons playing with them in their area under the walnuts and they have both been very involved in feeding them.

They are very smart, and at 6 weeks old, have learnt to follow me when I call them and stay behind fences. My goal is to shepherd them and eventually teach them to go out during the day and come back at night. They are like the cats of the ruminant world: independant and affectionate (as opposed to sheep who would be the dogs of the ruminant world!). The goal with interbreeding wild goats with dairy buck is to have a line of dairy goats that are more naturally resilient to disease.

We have also noticed that the wild goats are less wild than when we first moved here. Whether it’s because we interact with them more (at kidding time we check on them at least once a day, so we can keep track of newborns and intervene if there are any problems) or the cross breeding with domesticated breeds. As a result each new generation of kids gets bolder, as Wini finds out: