Eight Acres

This is an article that I submitted to Grass Roots magazine a few years ago.   With my recent post on Instagram/Facebook showing Molly with her calf, and my tale of finding her with the calf and going to get Pete and both of us coming back, but Molly had already hid the calve and we did not see it again for two days.... I few people have asked about cows hiding their calves and this article covers that and other weird things that cows and calves do!   Also we haven't milked yet - trying something new to see if we can get away with not milking all the time, which has been successful so far, will write more when we have fully tested this method. Molly with her new calf  If you haven’t spent time observing a cow with a new calf, you might be surprised to learn how cows go about their mothering. I have heard of people who are used to sheep who get quite a shock with the apparently blasé attitude of a new mother cow. Unlike ewes, who keep their newborn lambs wi...

Its mid-autumn and our nine angus-cross heifers are currently calving.  This may seem an odd time of the year to have calves, and certainly in the temperate areas you would expect to see baby calves and lambs in spring, but in the sub-tropics we can do things a bit differently as we don't have a cold winter. Read the rest over at my house cow ebook blog. Buy my ebook "Our Experience with House Cows" on  Etsy ,  Lulu  and  Amazon , or email on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com to arrange delivery.  More information on my  house cow ebook blog . Reviews of "Our Experience with House Cows" Kim from the Little Black Cow Blog Fiona from Live at Arbordale Farm Marie from Go Milk the Cow Renata from Sunnyside Farm Fun Gavin from Little Green Cheese  (and The Greening of Gavin)

Our first house cow Bella came to us from a dairy farm and had already had two calves. She came with her second calf, Molly, who is also a full Jersey cow. We raised Molly to be our second house cow. With Bella now having an uncertain future after having difficulty with her last calf, we decided to raise some future house cows.  I think they two most important inputs are human interaction (to ensure the cow is tame enough to be milked) and good nutrition (to raise a healthy robust cow). While Bella is extremely tame, from what I know of her early life I don't think she had good nutrition and she now has health problems that prevent us using her as a house cow. Molly is extremely robust AND tame. Can we produce another good house cow? Read the rest over at my house cow ebook blog . Buy my ebook "Our Experience with House Cows" on  Etsy ,  Lulu  and  Amazon , or email on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com to arrange delivery.  More ...

We’ve now had Bella for about 18 months and have learnt so much about owning a house cow!  As I mentioned in my kitchen update , having access to raw milk has allowed me to experiment with lots of the recipes in Nourishing Traditions .  Bella has a very gentle nature, but she is her own cow, and will tell us very clearly (usually by kicking) if she is not happy with something we are doing. Bella with her foster calf Romeo I wrote a post about choosing a house cow, often you don’t have much choice, we were offered Bella and had to decide if we would take her, but this might help you to know what to look for and how to find yourself a house cow.  We also learnt early on how to milk Bella, how to manage mastitis, how to arrange for the vet to AI her so she could get back in calf and finally weaning Molly to prepare for the next calf.  We then went through the birth of Bella's calf, which died, and had to get a foster calf, which she eventually accepted.  ...

Paralysis ticks (xodes holocyclus ) are native to Australia and are found on the east coast from southern Victoria all the way up to northern QLD, and in the north of Tasmania .  The ticks’ natural hosts are native animals, such as bandicoots, wallabies and koalas, which have developed immunity to the neurotoxin produced by the tick.  Domestic animals, including dogs, cats, sheep, calves and foals, which have not developed immunity to the toxin, are affected by symptoms starting the paralysis of the back legs and progressing to paralysis of the respiratory muscles and finally the heart, resulting in death. poor wee Benny is still recovering from tick paralysis The Australian Paralysis Tick has a 3 host life cycle.  The eggs hatch into larvae, which attach to a host for a few days.  The larvae feed from the host, and then drop off to transform into nymphs, which then attach to another host.  After a few days the nymphs drop off and transform into adult ...

In part one of this long story , I explained how we brought home the first weak braford calf and struggled with whether or not to give him milk, we thought he was just weak, and if we could get him to eat more he would get better.  At the same time we were keeping an eye on another calf that we had noticed was skinny and often separated from the herd.  We were worried that she also didn't have a mother, but she seemed to still be doing ok.  Then one day we couldn't find her anywhere, and the next day she was lying in the grass with the rest of the herd but couldn't get up, so we brought her home to Nanango too (this time in the dog box on the ute, not the back of the 4WD). She was worse than the first calf and couldn't stand at all, so we called the vet the next day (having brought her home on a Sunday, and not wanting to pay weekend call-out fees, and not realising that it was urgent).  The vet rolled her over and found ...

This is a LONG story, so I’ll break it into two parts.  In the first part, we found the first calf and I wasn’t sure whether to give him milk or not, so I’ll explain what I found out in that regard.  In the second part, I’ll explain how the second calf turned out to have paralysis ticks, which explained why the first calf couldn’t stand up and what we learned since then about paralysis ticks. Since we got the 25 (or so) Braford cows with calves for Cheslyn Rise, we’ve been trying to spend time with them to get them tamer, and at least once a week we take them hay and get them to walk up to the yards with us.  About three weeks after they arrived we noticed over a couple of days that one calf seemed to be very slow walking down to the yards.  On the second day we got him into the yards and through the race and shut him in the crush so we could have a look at him.  He had a lot of burrs in his coat and was very skinny.  We thought he probably didn...

When we found Bella’s dead calf we didn’t have much time to figure out what to do next.  We managed to milk Bella by carrying her calf to the milking bales, and then we started calling friends to find out if someone had a spare calf that we could try to foster.  That afternoon we picked up little Romeo, and he spent the night in a separate yard, and Bella stayed close to her dead calf. We have never fostered a calf before, so we weren’t sure how it was going to work.  We were very lucky that we could find a very tame little bull calf, who was only a week old and had been bottled raised since birth, as his mother had died.  He was the ideal foster calf, very tame, so he wasn’t scared of us, and very strong and used to sucking from a bottle, so not scared to find his milk in strange places!  Romeo the changling Various people and forums suggested different ways to get a cow to take a foster calf.  Everything from dosing the calf in the afterbirt...

About three months before Bella was due to calf we decided it was time to wean Molly.  Actually Molly kind of decided herself, as she came on heat and was too busy moo-ing and pacing up and down to worry about having a drink, so we moved Bella into another paddock and I don't think Molly even noticed. The ideal time to wean depends on what you're doing.  Large scale dairy farms typically separate calves from cows after a couple of days (after they have had their dose of colostrum) and feed the calves on excess milk from the vat.  As this is extra labour, farmers aim to wean calves as early as possible, at around three months.  By this time the calves' rumen will have developed enough so that they are getting adequate nutrition from grass and a grain ration.  In beef cattle, the calves are left with their mothers for between six and nine months, they will be weaned early if there isn't enough feed in the paddock to support a lactating cow, and often the cal...

Just to keep all my non-facebook liking blog-followers updated on happenings at the farm.... I had given up on this foster calf idea ever working and was planning to have to milk twice a day for ages and to make lots and lots of cheese.... but then on Wednesday morning, one week after Bella had her calf and it died, we milked her and only got 4 L, rather than 12 L.  We also noticed that replacement calf Romeo was happy lying down in the paddock instead of standing by the gate to wait for his milk.  We put 2 and 2 together, but we didn't believe it until we saw it later, after breakfast. first we saw Bella licking Romeo clean and then she let him have a drink. Bella with her new calf :) It looks like Bella has officially adopted Romeo, and all of her own accord, no trickery required (only because we didn't think Bella would fall for it).  We are very proud of her. We are very pleased to have recruited a share-milker, a very greedy little share-milker at that! ...