Part one
Oxbow Farms
typical drylot operation where cattle are housed 24 hrs. / day outside in the elements. this is not OxbowFarms but was typical of their operation.
I totally
skipped a job and went on to the next in line so I intend to return to this job
at Oxbow Farms as I had quite a few entertaining and interesting experiences
while working there. Including air dancing with a bull, learning how not to
operate a bobcat loader in a shitty way, and watching the heifers drink it up
at the silo bar and grill.
To begin with I need
to explain how this farm worked as it was quite the operation though is used
mostly for grain production today. While going to college at ATI (Agricultural
Technical Institute). You were encouraged or required to find work within your
specific course of study for class work for one quarter. For this you would receive a grade of pass or
fail and was worth 6 credit hrs., and was called practicum. Although most of us
came from family farms you could not do your practicum there, but instead it
could be a neighbor or whoever was employed in a farming business in your
course of study. I chose Oxbow Farms as they were a large purebred Simmental cattle
farm with 250 cows on 6 acres of dry lot, with 1000 acres of supporting grain
fields supplying their nutritional requirements.
With just 6 acres
of land to house 250 head of cattle it required that all feed be provided to
the cattle and you couldn’t spare anything in terms of nutrition. Cows that aren’t
fed properly have problems with fertility and since it was a purebred operation
you needed cows that were pregnant. All cows were artificially inseminated (AI),
and the bull was allowed in to clean up those cows the AI guy couldn’t get inseminated
after a couple of tries. Part of my job was to watch for heat detection and to
help cows deliver calves and in the course of three months I worked there, I
delivered over 60 calves and three sets of twins.
This was usually
accomplished mostly by the mother with limited engagement of my services except
to watch and make sure there were no complications. Cows are very adept at new
mothering, and for the most part take to the job well. But there were times when it became apparent
help was needed, and we would apply chains and help pull the larger calves as
well in some cases resort to calling in a veterinarian. At those times I assisted the vet in helping
with a split pelvis operation and also a caesarian operation to remove calves
that were either too large to fit through the birth canal or it was too long a
time that the mother was in labor. Both of these operations I had wrote about
previously in my blog and actually sketched some drawings to accompany the
story and can be found by searching through my blogs by the key words split
pelvis and caesarian. I will try and provide a link to these stories for you to
view.
The whole idea
and purpose to the farm was to increase the numbers of purebred Simmental cattle
in existence in the United States as a primary beef breed that also had milking
capabilities as they were originally from the Simmen valley in Switzerland, and
were used primarily for dairy cattle because of their rich butterfat content in
their milk to make the fine cheeses that are noted from this area. Also they
produced heavy calves and beefy ones that were capable of providing the fine
meat one needs with the right amount fat to make a tasty steak, kind of a dual
purpose breed. They felt that this was the answer to the beef man’s dream where
he could have a good milking cow that would provide a healthy calf with higher
weight and profile at weaning time. It had caught on with limited success, and merely as breeding stock to create a crossbred
calf that out performed even its purebred origins, and still does. If you look
at any county fair, and look at the grand champion steer or heifer, you usually
find a crossbred steer or heifer, as crossbred calves are picking up the dominant
characteristics of both breeds if successfully bred. Owning and trying to
compete with other purebred breeders is a big gamble that rarely pays off. And eventually
this farm failed as the price of the cattle produced exceeded their input costs
and eventually ate up the owner, Boyd Hemminger’s bank account and left him
little but a farm that was foreclosed upon not to long after I had quit their
operation.
To say the least
it was a very labor intensive operation requiring cattle to be fed in rotating shifts,
and as employees we worked in twelve hour shifts with each person spending time
shuttling cattle from dry lot to feeding barn. All feed was supplied from three
30 by 80 silos and distributed by an overhead automatic feeder into a feed bunker
where cattle would eat 24 hours a day on a rotating basis. We would bring in
one bunch of cows and then punch a bunch of buttons and the feed would automatically
be distributed in the feed trough. Then when the allotted amount of feed was
given we would shut the process down and walk around and check cows rear ends
and their general health and see how they were eating and if they showed signs
of pregnancy. Certain cows with known birthing dates according to the time they
were artificially inseminated would be displayed on a board, we kept alerting
us to look for them according to their ear tag number, all this would be based
on gestation time of the cow in question. It would give us an approximate date
they were due to birth. If a cow was not calved by a certain date or determined
by a pregnancy test by thumping usually by a vet which indicated she was not pregnant or
aborted as no fetus could be felt when thumped which was usually pressing in sharply
right after their rib cage and actually feeling a lump. This lump usually
indicated a calf if she didn’t have that lump and she wasn’t in heat then she
had other problems and she was usually culled. A polite term for butchered.
Waterers had to
be checked constantly as well fences, as they were all electric fences and also
we would have to check for cows in heat. We did this by use of a dummy steer as
it is called. We would take a Holstein steer and outfit him with a chin ball
marker as it was called, that would leave a paint mark on a cow’s back. If he
was to jump a cow when she was in heat this device which looked like a crude
leather device that was strapped around the steer’s head, and would have a
paint canister on the bottom of the leather harness or under the chin. His pressing
of his chin against her rear would leave a paint mark on the cow’s rear end, if
and when she was in heat and as he was about to jump the cow. It wasn’t a conclusive sign for heat in cattle
but it helped us to observe or watch when you had so many cows to check daily. Outside of probably being a little hot the steers,
they didn’t seem to mind it too bad. Since we had no bull in the pen and relied
on artificial insemination to impregnate a cow we would need all the help we
could get in heat detection to determine the proper time to artificially
inseminate a cow. This is usually after she is in standing heat, or the time
when she will stand and let a bull jump her. This is what the dummy steers were
for.
Now a steer by
himself won’t jump a cow as he has no testicles to provide the hormone testosterone,
so we needed to supplement his testosterone by injections we would give the
steers when we saw other heifers doing his work. This one day I had noticed a
steer wasn’t performing up to my expectations so I brought him in and gave him
a shot, unknown to me the other employee who worked the other shift had already
done the same thing, now double dosing the poor guy. Later when we talked and
found out what we had done, we went to the manager and explained, and then he
took a worried look in his eye when we told him what steer it was and what we
had done, as he had done the same thing also. This poor steer now had been
triple dosed with testosterone and it showed easily the next day we had paint
marks over everything, as that poor guy had been jumping and trying to screw everything
in sight in the dry lot he was in . The waterer had paint marks on it, all the
cows apparently must have been in heat as he must have looked like a jack rabbit
jumping from one to the other around the pen. Fence posts had marks on them, I swore
I saw a groundhog with suspicious marks on him, and when I went to check on him
in the morning he could barely hold himself up on his legs that were splayed
out to support his weak and tired body. I
guess too much testosterone can make us males a little crazy and in some
strange way I understood his plight.
But in a sad
way I came to realize he was the definition of a bum steer at that point. He did
recover and finally had his strength return and after that we shared information
on a bulletin board of any medication we injected so as to not have that
problem again. Hopefully you begin to see that farming is not a simple task as
it used to be years ago. Technology is more than creeping on to the farm, it is at the farmer’s finger tips now. Where we
would manually write down records, all that information as well as feed
formulas are computed on hand held computers, or on laptops in the barn, and
some farmers still do things in a traditional way but for the most part
agriculture is technology driven monster out of control. Course it will have to
be if we expect to feed 7 billion people, almost 2 billion more than we have
now by the year 2050 by recent estimations. That is with fewer farmers going into
farming and corporate farming taking up the difference and squeezing out the
small farmers. Tomorrow I shall continue on with Oxbow Farms.
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