Let's see. I guess the beginning of this story is why there are heifers over the hill in the first place. There's this property tax thing called Current Use and it means that if you have 25 acres or more that is being actively used for agricultural purposes, either as a managed woodlot with a forestry plan and regular cutting, or hayed or grazed or plowed by a farmer, than you pay taxes on a set agricultural value, not on the development value. If land has been in Current Use and then it gets taken out, then the owners have to pay back some of the saved taxes, which can be a lot of money. The idea is to reduce the tax pressure on farmers. A nice side benefit, from our perspective, is that people ask us to hay their land so they can keep it enrolled in current use. Marc and Ella are two of these people. They bought an old farm just over the hill from us, in Tunbridge, a few years back and asked us to hay their fields. Last summer, they asked if we had any animals to graze the un-mowable pastures. Earl brought over a group of heifers and they did pretty well for the summer.
This year, Marc and Ella are having a lot of work done on their house so they can retire and live there full time. The barn where Earl plugs in the fence charger doesn't have its own power anymore and the contractors, needing the outlet for their tools, unplugged the extension cord, and consequently unplugged the fence. Sometimes they forgot to plug it back in. Or they plugged it back in, but it's a GFI outlet and it tripped and then the fence was off again. Eventually, the cows figured it out, then they escaped. Then one of the neighbors, or one of the contractors, or Marc and Ella who have come to check on the progress, would call us and tell us they're out. Then we'd put them back in. Then they'd get out again, having developed a teenager's disrespect for the fence.
This year, Marc and Ella are having a lot of work done on their house so they can retire and live there full time. The barn where Earl plugs in the fence charger doesn't have its own power anymore and the contractors, needing the outlet for their tools, unplugged the extension cord, and consequently unplugged the fence. Sometimes they forgot to plug it back in. Or they plugged it back in, but it's a GFI outlet and it tripped and then the fence was off again. Eventually, the cows figured it out, then they escaped. Then one of the neighbors, or one of the contractors, or Marc and Ella who have come to check on the progress, would call us and tell us they're out. Then we'd put them back in. Then they'd get out again, having developed a teenager's disrespect for the fence.
I think we've been over there about thirty times in the last month, maybe more.
We've tried things. We put them in the non-electric pastures. Of the three pastures (the heifers graze bigger pastures for longer than the milking cows) only one relies on the electric fence. The other two are surrounded by barbed wire that was put up by the previous owners of the farm. The barbed wire does a better job, but one of these cows is Tasha's daughter, Tana, who, like her mother, is smart, crafty, and a bit of a ring leader. Tana has it in her head that this is a summer without fences and she's getting out of the barbed wire, too. We walk the perimeter of these pastures, looking for gaps or trees on the fence. We stay and watch the cows graze and make sure they respond appropriately to the fence. While we are there, everything is in order.
So yesterday, an otherwise slow-starting Saturday morning, was punctuated by a phone call from someone who had cows on his lawn. This time the call was from Gilly Hill, off the back side of Marc and Ella's property. Earl took the Ranger (our nifty little four-wheel-drive, bench seat, three-foot-bed ATV-like workhorse) over there. He tracked them up and around and over the hill, trying, unsuccessfully, to see how they got out (always the first step). Then he drove over to Gilly Hill and found them. He wasn't 100% confident about the Ranger on the trails through the woods, so he decided to take them back over the road. He had taken a cell phone along and called to ask me if I could come over and direct the cows through the intersection at the corner of Kibling Hill and Potash. I loaded up the kids and drove over. We got in position and called Earl for instruction. He said he was at the Pease Farm, about 100 yds. up the road, and that I should probably come over there, because there were three heifers in the manure pit and it was going to take some doing to get them out.
We were there quick enough and piled out of the car. For a while, all we could do was stare. The manure pit was maybe four feet deep and three of the cows (including Tana), thought they had outsmarted Earl and found an escape route They had run in about fifteen feet each, up to their shoulders, and then couldn't move any more. They were like little pathetic islands. Cows are fatalistic animals and when things are going poorly for them and their options seem exhausted, they give up hope and act sort of dead. So when Cliff Pease backed his tractor up to one of the cows (with the manure up to the top of the four-foot wheels) and Earl hopped off the fender, onto her back, straddling her as he put a halter over her head, I'm pretty sure she was thinking, "Oh. This is what happens when you're dead. Someone climbs on your back and then puts a halter on you. Oh. And then pulls you by a chain through the deep manure, which I think I'm glad to be dead for." After the cow got back on dry land, she just lay there for a while until it crossed her mind, in the dimmest of ways, that she might not actually be dead, at which point she stood up and followed Earl, who tied her to the Ranger and then went, with Cliff and the tractor, to get the next cow.
The boys and I weren't much help for this part. We tried to take some pictures, but the cell phone spends a lot of time in Earl's pocket and the lens isn't exactly optically sound anymore. So we just watched, the boys open mouthed with wonder at the coolness of getting to see something like this and me fiddling with the phone, texting in the e-mail address to send the pictures back to the computer. I'm sure my tapping away on the keyboard like a city girl (really, it was only the second time I've taken a picture with a camera phone) figured into Cliff's telling of the story back at the Pease compound. We did help put the cows into the trailer, which Cliff generously offered to transport them back to their pasture.
The cows that weren't in the manure pit ended up in a barn with the Pease's youngest heifers. Cliff was able to get the trailer most of the way to the door, but the boys and I had to be a wall to channel them in. Moving cows always consists of one person who is the Chief actually moving the cows and telling the other people where to stand and act like walls. Not the quiet kind of wall, but the kind of wall that is inhospitable to cows because it is making noise or waving around an arm or stick. At one point, Harley and Cliffy (our seven-year-old, not to be confused with Cliff, who is in his early thirties) were being a wall and the heifer they were channeling had the thought that Harley wasn't much of an obstacle and took a few steps to get past him. Earl was quicker and closed the gap before she could bolt and Harley got knocked off balance and fell down. He had been standing his ground, though, and popped right up, waving his stick and staring her down. It really is great fun, when you're three, to pretend you're a ninja warrior, wave a stick and make an eight-hundred pound animal go where you want her to.
When we got home, the phone was ringing and it was Clint, the butcher, calling to say the steers we sent him were ready. Earl's sneakers were on their last legs before the manure pit experience and beyond my willingness to clean them afterwards, so the boys and I decided to go to Farm-Way when we went to pick up the meat. Farm-Way was crazy busy with the sales tax holiday, and we took advantage of it to buy a solar-powered fencer which hopefully will get the heifers rehabilitated to electric fencing.
When I first met Earl and was learning all about the farm and the names of things, Heifer was a tricky concept for me. A calf that is born is either a heifer calf or a bull calf, and the heifers stay heifers until they've had a calf, at which point they join the milking string and are cows. Except that you can still call them heifers to distinguish them from the older, more mature cows who know what they're doing--ie. "Milking was going along just fine until that heifer, Cocoa, came in and thought she should go in stall four like she did last night, except that Bizkit was already there and she got her head underneath and got her ears all tangled in the hoses." There is such a thing as a first-calf heifer and I've even heard someone say second-calf heifer, but that's no so common. At some point a cow will settle down, get into the routine and you feel like you've been milking her forever, even if it's only a few months, and you don't have a pang of dread when she comes into the parlor. Then I think she's a cow and not a heifer anymore.
When I first came here, though, I was still translating these foreign-language words back into Amylish in my head. Tedder was Hay Fluffer. The suction intake on the liquid manure spreader was a Poop Straw. The fence charger was the Zapper. And heifer, to me, meant Teenage Cow. Teenagers, of course, alarm me. They are really quite capable, and yet, they don't know what to do with themselves and they aren't much wanting input or guidance. They are annoying and it's tempting to not put a whole lot of energy into them, but they're the whole future of the world and you have to take good care of them, even as they hold you in contempt, until they ease into the reasonableness of adulthood. And so it is with heifers. Someday, Tana and her buddies are going to be big, beautiful, stoic animals who seem to have all the mysteries of the world figured out, perfect examples of bovine grace and calm. They will pay the bills and the tractor notes with their milk.
We've tried things. We put them in the non-electric pastures. Of the three pastures (the heifers graze bigger pastures for longer than the milking cows) only one relies on the electric fence. The other two are surrounded by barbed wire that was put up by the previous owners of the farm. The barbed wire does a better job, but one of these cows is Tasha's daughter, Tana, who, like her mother, is smart, crafty, and a bit of a ring leader. Tana has it in her head that this is a summer without fences and she's getting out of the barbed wire, too. We walk the perimeter of these pastures, looking for gaps or trees on the fence. We stay and watch the cows graze and make sure they respond appropriately to the fence. While we are there, everything is in order.
So yesterday, an otherwise slow-starting Saturday morning, was punctuated by a phone call from someone who had cows on his lawn. This time the call was from Gilly Hill, off the back side of Marc and Ella's property. Earl took the Ranger (our nifty little four-wheel-drive, bench seat, three-foot-bed ATV-like workhorse) over there. He tracked them up and around and over the hill, trying, unsuccessfully, to see how they got out (always the first step). Then he drove over to Gilly Hill and found them. He wasn't 100% confident about the Ranger on the trails through the woods, so he decided to take them back over the road. He had taken a cell phone along and called to ask me if I could come over and direct the cows through the intersection at the corner of Kibling Hill and Potash. I loaded up the kids and drove over. We got in position and called Earl for instruction. He said he was at the Pease Farm, about 100 yds. up the road, and that I should probably come over there, because there were three heifers in the manure pit and it was going to take some doing to get them out.
We were there quick enough and piled out of the car. For a while, all we could do was stare. The manure pit was maybe four feet deep and three of the cows (including Tana), thought they had outsmarted Earl and found an escape route They had run in about fifteen feet each, up to their shoulders, and then couldn't move any more. They were like little pathetic islands. Cows are fatalistic animals and when things are going poorly for them and their options seem exhausted, they give up hope and act sort of dead. So when Cliff Pease backed his tractor up to one of the cows (with the manure up to the top of the four-foot wheels) and Earl hopped off the fender, onto her back, straddling her as he put a halter over her head, I'm pretty sure she was thinking, "Oh. This is what happens when you're dead. Someone climbs on your back and then puts a halter on you. Oh. And then pulls you by a chain through the deep manure, which I think I'm glad to be dead for." After the cow got back on dry land, she just lay there for a while until it crossed her mind, in the dimmest of ways, that she might not actually be dead, at which point she stood up and followed Earl, who tied her to the Ranger and then went, with Cliff and the tractor, to get the next cow.
The boys and I weren't much help for this part. We tried to take some pictures, but the cell phone spends a lot of time in Earl's pocket and the lens isn't exactly optically sound anymore. So we just watched, the boys open mouthed with wonder at the coolness of getting to see something like this and me fiddling with the phone, texting in the e-mail address to send the pictures back to the computer. I'm sure my tapping away on the keyboard like a city girl (really, it was only the second time I've taken a picture with a camera phone) figured into Cliff's telling of the story back at the Pease compound. We did help put the cows into the trailer, which Cliff generously offered to transport them back to their pasture.
The cows that weren't in the manure pit ended up in a barn with the Pease's youngest heifers. Cliff was able to get the trailer most of the way to the door, but the boys and I had to be a wall to channel them in. Moving cows always consists of one person who is the Chief actually moving the cows and telling the other people where to stand and act like walls. Not the quiet kind of wall, but the kind of wall that is inhospitable to cows because it is making noise or waving around an arm or stick. At one point, Harley and Cliffy (our seven-year-old, not to be confused with Cliff, who is in his early thirties) were being a wall and the heifer they were channeling had the thought that Harley wasn't much of an obstacle and took a few steps to get past him. Earl was quicker and closed the gap before she could bolt and Harley got knocked off balance and fell down. He had been standing his ground, though, and popped right up, waving his stick and staring her down. It really is great fun, when you're three, to pretend you're a ninja warrior, wave a stick and make an eight-hundred pound animal go where you want her to.
When we got home, the phone was ringing and it was Clint, the butcher, calling to say the steers we sent him were ready. Earl's sneakers were on their last legs before the manure pit experience and beyond my willingness to clean them afterwards, so the boys and I decided to go to Farm-Way when we went to pick up the meat. Farm-Way was crazy busy with the sales tax holiday, and we took advantage of it to buy a solar-powered fencer which hopefully will get the heifers rehabilitated to electric fencing.
When I first met Earl and was learning all about the farm and the names of things, Heifer was a tricky concept for me. A calf that is born is either a heifer calf or a bull calf, and the heifers stay heifers until they've had a calf, at which point they join the milking string and are cows. Except that you can still call them heifers to distinguish them from the older, more mature cows who know what they're doing--ie. "Milking was going along just fine until that heifer, Cocoa, came in and thought she should go in stall four like she did last night, except that Bizkit was already there and she got her head underneath and got her ears all tangled in the hoses." There is such a thing as a first-calf heifer and I've even heard someone say second-calf heifer, but that's no so common. At some point a cow will settle down, get into the routine and you feel like you've been milking her forever, even if it's only a few months, and you don't have a pang of dread when she comes into the parlor. Then I think she's a cow and not a heifer anymore.
When I first came here, though, I was still translating these foreign-language words back into Amylish in my head. Tedder was Hay Fluffer. The suction intake on the liquid manure spreader was a Poop Straw. The fence charger was the Zapper. And heifer, to me, meant Teenage Cow. Teenagers, of course, alarm me. They are really quite capable, and yet, they don't know what to do with themselves and they aren't much wanting input or guidance. They are annoying and it's tempting to not put a whole lot of energy into them, but they're the whole future of the world and you have to take good care of them, even as they hold you in contempt, until they ease into the reasonableness of adulthood. And so it is with heifers. Someday, Tana and her buddies are going to be big, beautiful, stoic animals who seem to have all the mysteries of the world figured out, perfect examples of bovine grace and calm. They will pay the bills and the tractor notes with their milk.
This is probably good practice for the thirteen years we will be the parents of at least one teenager and for the one year when we will be the parents of four of them. Note to selves: Remain calm. Keep an eye on the future. Stand your ground. Act like a wall, the kind that makes noise.
And if they get in deep shit, climb on their backs and pull them out.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment