Bulls with No Name.

Stupid Update: Just like every other animal that lived it's life on our farm, she (turns out she wasn't a he) was crazy hard to kill. I hope some of this animal immortality rubs off on me. She did her turn last night as our bait, but no coyotes showed up. Two of the numerous possibilities are 1) they are smarters than we or 2) there may be no pack living where we put Stupid to lure them out. My mom insists that she can hear them howling back there but from now on my hunting will take place where I have had literally seen them.

Bloated and still unnamed Update: The calf who should have died a couple days ago of the unknown ailment recovered, both unexpectedly and unexplainably. She was intensely bitter about the whole ordeal and took a couple of running head-butts at me and the vet's assistant, be she seems to have gotten over that too.
This is one of the two bulls we employ. They work for two weeks and then lounge around for the other 50. They are put with the breeding herd to do just that sometime in July. Cows gestate same as people, nine months. After they've had their way with everyone there is no point of separating them back out, it's easier to feed them with the others. Except they can't be around from February to July because they'll do their business too soon and we'll have snowy calves. My mom and my aunt and my uncle had been warning me all winter that it was a bad bad day, the bull separating day. That getting the herd into the barn and running everyone through cow jail was hell.
But I saw them both down by the barn last week and I shut them in. And then it took Rusty and I about 30 minutes to get them in the trailer. Everyone is very relieved. Or at least, so they tell me.
The bulls are now in the bull pen for the spring. There is one big one, pictured, and a slightly smaller and way less imposing one. Compared to the Holstein bulls we grew up with, these two are kittens. I was charged repeatedly by every single bull we ever had growing up. They hated me. These you could almost pet.

But they need names.

my dad called them - Slick Willie and Plodder
my first idea was - Fat Man and Little Boy
my second idea was - Franz and Ferdinand
rusty suggested - Curly and Little Moe

Participation is needed. Name my bulls. You can also do your own write ins of course.

Big Bwana.

That club of coyote hunters who came and made silly noises back in the brush took the good part of a sunny saturday to bag one lone coyote. What a sad waste.
Rusty and I plan to waste our Friday evening trying to bag our own trophy mange-dog. But we're going to avoid all the effort that the "professional" coy hunters employ.
We have available coyote bait of the toppest value. You see, Stupid's month was up on Monday and I hadn't received enough interest from concerned PETA groupies to keep my starving african child down cow fed for just pennies a day! Have you ever watched those shows where the bored crazy rich people attempt to go fishing for sharks and have to use giant chunks of bloody cow to get the sharks attention? It's just like that. Excepting a camera crew and, uh, sunlight.
Tomorrow Stupid closes his pretty little eyes and I put him back in the fields. He'll be surrounded on three sides by a willow tree and two small streams. The fourth side faces the coyote brush, which will be lined with groundhog traps. Rusty and I will be on the overlooking hill, in our nifty coyote blind:
Tangent - if you breed a coyote and a dog together, you get a coy dog. Just like a horse - mule - donkey combo. The resulting offspring is sterile. There was a problem in our community some years before I was born, involving a lowlife who bred some coy (pronounced just like the coy part of coyote, stupid English language) dogs to fight in the dog fights. And now there are rumors around that the coyotes are really packs of coy dogs. Which aren't true, because, well sterility isn't inheritable.

Tough Love.

I apologize if the above photo is somewhat insensitive.

As of 8:30pm EST tonight, this (unnamed, sorry) calf is still among the living. This is no fault of mine own, I tried my damndest to kill her.
I had a full day of staying inside and cleaning my room and responding to months old emails and thinking up clever beef ads and updating my blog with something less sickening than dying calves all planned out. I went around to feed my beefs their silage about 9am, like I always do. And I saw a calf on its side, all asprawl, stomach looking like one of those exercise balls. Shitdamn.

Cut to last Saturday night, at a bar watching a band with some friends. Comes up to me, she does, and she says, "so you don't have any problems with bloating?" Rather superiorly I reply, "We don't feed grain, just hay." "Alfalfa hay?" "yeah...?" "That'll cause bloat too."

Damn those vet students and their evil knowledge. So, here I am with a bloated calf and zero idea as how to proceed. I call my mom. She tells me to punch it with a knife, but to stand back cause all the gas (and whatever else is digesting in there) will come a-shootin' out. Later a vet will inform me that the blade of box-cutter isn't long enough to pierce the hide and rumen wall...
Now I have a cut, bleeding, bloated calf. So I call our vet. He offers to come out. But I insist on advice. He tells me to find a good 6 foot length of garden hose. Feed it down to the stomach and the gas should come right out. The calf chews the first hose I try in half, so I find a sturdier, double-ply barn hose. I've fed the entire 8' length into god-knows-where and all I have to show for it is a small trickle of bile. So I call the vet again. He's on farm calls.
Six hours later he calls me back. Asks me how I'm doing. I tell him the hose failed. All afternoon. I must've sent four different hoses into that calf over 9 times. No go. "It must not be bloat," says he, splaining that "cause if it was it should be dead by now." WTF mate? Thanks for calling, you know, 5 hours ago to tell me I didn't have much time. It's not like there is anyone in the county who doesn't know I'm new to all this.
He suggests feeding it some diesel fuel, just in case it is bloat and the calf is just a survivor. I stick a piece of tubing back down her throat and give her a cup of diesel water. For my efforts she bites my finger. No blame there.
Diesel does the trick. Fifteen minutes later she's deflating visibly. But her temp has dropped seven degrees. Cows hardly ever recover from sinking below 100. She's at 93.

I'm now fit to work at Guantonamo Bay.
She's sleeping with a heating pad and a blanket of straw. I'll be surprised if she makes it to morning.

Cow Bio - Stupid.

I had a very hard time telling apart all my cows when I first got here. The yellow, brown, red, and blue ones I can for the most part differentiate. Naming them all won't happen. 200 is too many names.
But the ones who are awesome enough to merit naming begin to develop personalities. So far the named beefs are: Red, Stupid, Snowball, Fat Joe, Chuck, Charles, Jack, Beardsly, Eric, and uh, Chocolate. All but Red are calves, and you already met Red. I don't hate her anymore. And all calves will be eaten. Cows with names just taste better.

The pictured calf is Stupid.
Stupid slipped on the slippery manure-wet concrete about a month ago. Down he (she? i dunno) went. Ever since then, he has been lounging in the old dry cow lot. He looks quite uncomfortable, what with one front leg stuck underneath. I am convinced that he's fully able to get on his feet, were he to actually try. But he gets personally fed and watered twice a day, so why try? He still doesn't like me and refuses to act like he enjoys me petting his head.
Little does stupid know, his rent-free life is about to be abruptly interrupted. One month is closing fast. It does us no go to feed a cow that won't walk.

Unless, of course, someone wants to sponsor the continuing life of this useless beef?

No News.

A full moon on a snowy field makes man-made lights look pathetic and ugly.

War Wagon.

Who remembers three-wheelers?
This is my almost exclusive mode of transportation between farms. The War Wagon. It's a 1980-something HondaSX ATC250. Five speed with a foot shifter and thumb throttle. It had brakes once. Along with a front fender, a seat, and matching tires. But Honda's be hard to dispatch.
We had a matching pair of these on the farm growing up. They were made to race mud courses, but we used them to bring the cows in from the pastures to milk every morning and evening. I have sprained an ankle and severely bruised my tailbone (superman story) on them. Once I clotheslined myself with an electric fence wire. I've flipped this one three times so far since I've been home. That these are the only injuries I've sustained on these things is quite amazing.
My dad's friend Jesse has the other one. The only difference with that one is that its rear wheels are set out from the machine to keep it from tipping as easy. It still works and I'm planning on asking for it back as soon as I fully destroy this one.
Two of the farms are connected off-road with paths. My aunt and uncle's place is just up the road a 1/4 mile. The bike reaches speeds close to 40mph and is actually legal to drive (albeit only for farm to farm for farm purposes.) Cars don't like me much.
The hood ornament is a deer skull found out in the woods while cutting brush. I also have a smaller animal skull (cat? fox?) which I have yet to wire on. Rusty has some vague plans involving sidecars, machetes, and other groundhog killing amenities.
If you come out to visit, I might even let you drive it.

Like a Dog.

So last night I went to bed.
Two hours later I was awakened from some sort of nightmare which included feeling like I had three sets of shoulders all trying to fit into my chest.
When I was fully awake, I realized I still felt like that.
Then I threw up repeatedly.Now I'm better. Thanks.
But in the meantime I ended up watching some utter crap movies while trying to find a comfortable position on the couch.
City of Angels and Amistad.
CoA was redeemed briefly by Maggie dying.
Amistad was horseshit. I despise movies that claim to be "based on true events." Excepting maybe only Braveheart. They all take the truth of the matter, reduce it down to events that could only fit truthfully into one or two sentences, and then they're tarred and feathered with bits of hollywood foo-fah. John Quincy Adams did not ever deliver such an insipid speech in defense of a god-like escaped slave. STFU Spielburg.

Would wood?

This tree baffles me.
Did it grow that way? Did it somehow become liquid after growing normal-like?
Ask your tree loving friends and get back to me.

Corn mash is used to make what?

There are two basic foodstuffs for my cows. Hay is just dried grasses bundled into big fat unmanageable bales. Silage is far more interesting. I assume silage could be made from other things, but we make it out of corn. It’s far less complicated than growing corn to pick the ears off and rub the kernels off to make grain. To make corn into silage you simply drive a chopper through the field and cut down the entire plant and chop up the entire plant and than you have silage. This is blown out the back of the chopper into forage wagons (4 wheels, I’ll learn you yet). This is a silo. This is traditionally where silage is stored. Giant farm phallus. Drive the forage wagon up to the blower and shoot the wet chaff 100ft in the air. Let it compact. Hope it doesn’t explode. Then, in the winter, you simply lower the unloader off the ceiling and blow the stuff back down to an auger:
Viola. Fed cows. The unloader we have at the top of our silo is original. It’s the most scary piece of engineering we have on the farm. It shouldn’t work.

The second way to feed silage is the sea slug. Rather than go to all that wasteful effort to build a giant concrete tube we lay a plastic silo sized bag on the ground and fill it out horizontally.
Most people use a loader tractor to feed out of the bag. We build a fence all the way around the beached gastropod and feed out of it head, letting the cows only eat that which they can reach. Both the silo and sea slug are a little over half devoured. That's a good pace.