On Thursday Simple tale shows nature on a knife-edge
Read Anton’s column every week in the Western Morning News
ALong experience has taught me .... the harder you fight nature, the harder it fights back. Better to work with it, and nudge it along when it goes askew
S predicted, the pace is picking up hereabouts, with calves and lambs arriving fast and…. well, soggily. To date, at least the successes outnumber the fails. With everything happening, all hands are to the pumps, and we’re all pretty hard pressed still.
Every day brings fresh problems to unravel, and calamities to avert. My personal best to date has been a South Devon who’d calved in the snow one evening at the end of last week, and was found stood over a flat out calf. I’d noticed she was mooching off away from her mates, but by the time I got back to her, the calf was out and its mouth already cool to the touch. I could see straight away the calf needed to come in PDQ, and colostrum tubing into it. So I went back to the house, gently suggested to my long suffering beloved that I’d be needing some help. She obligingly got kitted up, and came out to reverse a tractor slowly in across 2 fields, with calfie in the loader bucket, as I walked behind the cow who’d surely follow along sniffing her treasure as we trundled home. Well, that was the plan. In reality, the cow had started getting antsy by the time we got back. Not nasty, but rather confused and upset – her precious new baby wasn’t getting up and about-however much she licked it. I flopped the calf in on a wedge of straw I’d thought to put in the cold bucket, and tried to persuade her to follow it as Alison slipped into reverse. Not a bit of it. The young cow put her head up and started galumphing about faster than an ageing hill farmer could master. By now, 10-12 of her mates had come along to join the fun, so Alison hopped out of the cab, and we drove the whole lot in. Selecting a very biddable mate, we shed the rest off as we snuck them in the gate, and walked the 2 down to the crush. And at this moment, I’d like to observe that the layout of these old steadings is hardly by chance. The house and yard are right on a reliable spring line, so housed stock – and the farmers family – always have good water. This is nestled right under the best of the free draining mowing ground, to provide winter fodder for the stock, after the spring lambing and calving is dealt with. These fields in turn are served by a ‘drift lane’ that runs down through them to the steading. The layout is centuries old, and when the spinning plates start to wobble, I’m reminded how useful such a sensible layout remains. We were soon able to get yon cow in the – newly fettled – crush, and get a couple of litres of golden colostrum from her, tubed straight into her baby which was in the tractor bucket pulled up handy. Then on down into a waiting linhay, iodine baby’s navel to stop nasty bugs sneaking in, and flump it onto a nest of clean straw. By then, the light was failing, and after another 12 hour day I’d had enough. Whatever its fate, it would be tomorrow’s problem.
After a quick scoot round in the morning – thankfully finding no disasters – I returned to the outfit, fully expecting to have to take mum back up to the crush to milk her out some more, to try and get baby going. But lo! The cow had calmed right down, calfie could stand with a bit of help, and its temperature was back up to speed. And joy of joys, with very little encouragement, I got it latched on and feeding itself, as mum calmly turned her head to sniff as it started to wag its tail.
I stood over it as it emptied 2 quarters, then went on about my day relieved. That evening, it wouldn’t button on at all, and seemingly wasn’t hungry… but the other 2 quarters were emptied. The next morning, it was skipping round the pen, all 4 feet clear of the ground. By golly I count myself a lucky man, not just to have turned that new life around so quickly, but to find pleasure in such simple black and white matters.
Telling this simple tale reminds me – we could of course put up aircraft hangar-sized buildings, house all the cattle, and such problems wouldn’t arise – the calf might never even have got cold in the snow. But long experience has taught me that different problems would soon come along – the harder you fight nature, the harder it fights back. Better to work with it, and nudge it along when it goes askew.