Nighttime
It is dark, and cold, and over the cow shed Orion hangs, the three gems of his belt always distinctive in the starry sky. On a farm the nighttime silence is filled with animal sounds; the hoot of an owl or bark of a fox, the rustle of a badger in the undergrowth. Tonight I can hear something more work related; the quiet mooing of a cow that signals that an event has occurred; that she has a calf.
Venus and Jupiter conjunction
It is easy to romanticise calving, although less so compared to lambing, which occurs so often on farms straight out of a pastoral scene; stone walls, a cosy farmhouse, lambs in the Aga, snow on the lane, a shed full of traditional breeds of sheep and a hillside dotted with cotton wool ewes and their adorable leggy lambs.
On a block calving farm this season is busy but also organised and clinical and exhausting. 300 cows calve in the 12 weeks, but half will calve in the first fortnight. That’s an industry target, driven by the need to get those cows’ milk in the tank, get the herd out grazing, have heifer calves born at the start of the block so they will be old enough and big enough to join the herd in two years’ time, and give the cows enough time to recover postpartum to get back in calf when we start breeding in mid-May.
At the start of calving our cows are still housed, as the ground is too wet to graze. Our paddocks are set up for 300 cows, so grazing smaller mobs is difficult. Once there are enough cows milking we start to turn them out, usually at the end of February in the day and overnight by a few weeks later. This year it has rained and rained and rained, and the cows have spent one night outside so far. We are running low on stocks of silage, which the cows eat when they are inside, but are luckier than other farms who have already ran out.
Through the day we check the calving shed at regular intervals and take care of any new calves or calving cows. Our last check of the night is at about 10pm; although if there is a cow calving at that time she will be checked later in the night.
Cows who are close to calving are walked up to the calving shed, where they live on a deep straw bed. There is a gate sectioning off part of the shed, and they and their calves move into there when they have calved. There we feed the calf colostrum, tag the calf, dip their navel in iodine to prevent infection, and write the cow and calf’s details on a whiteboard. At the next milking the cow moves into the main herd, and we transport the calf to the calf housing; most of the heifers are housed in a marquee which we put up over an empty silage clamp, and the beef calves live in a traditional building. We have used a lot of sexed semen and have had very few dairy bull calves; they go with the beef calves and as a group they are sold off farm at a couple of weeks old.
At some point in the future I’d like to be able to keep cows and calves together, but even when I do that I would still want to bottle feed them colostrum. Calves are born without any immunity; the structure of the bovine placenta prevents transfer of maternal antibodies to the growing foetus, and so they are dependent on receiving those antibodies in that first feed of colostrum.
With time colostrum loses its antibody content- whether in the udder or in a bucket- and the calf’s digestive system loses its permeability, meaning that any antibodies consumed don’t pass in to their bloodstream. That is why it is really important that all calves get colostrum as soon as possible, and we also test it to make sure it is of sufficient quality. Left solely to suckle you don’t know how much colostrum the calf has drank, or if it was good quality.
When the cows and calves are moved over we get colostrum from the calf shed, and pour it in to milk cartons and warm them in a bucket of hot water, The thin plastic means that by the time the bucket is in the calving shed the colostrum is at calf body temperature and ready to feed.
This is the best bit of these night checks; standing in the straw with a calf keenly drinking their colostrum. You can hear the calf suckling, hear the air in the bottle, feel the bottle getting lighter as the level of milk drops. The calf shakes their tail, standing on wobbly legs. If the calf is still freshly born enough their coat is damp, and the cow might come over and clean the calf with her tongue while you feed them. Sometimes the cow isn’t sure where calf ends and human begins, and you and the milk bottle also get a wash.
Once fed the calf often lies down in the straw, the cow discovers the feeder of silage and goes to eat. With all details written on the whiteboard and a note to say that the calf has had colostrum we can turn off the lights and head back in.
On a clear night you don’t need a torch, in rural West Wales there is little light pollution. Earlier this season the aurora was visible in the county, reaching down from the Arctic to beaches and farms across Ceredigion. At that time I would look to the western horizon in the hope of seeing eerie green light spilling across the sky, but we never saw it. Instead we saw something different; Venus and Jupiter, two bright lights almost touching in a rare conjunction, the first “stars” we would see as the sun dipped into the Celtic Sea just a few miles from the farm.
And all over the country, on dairy farms and beef farms and sheep farms, farmers look at the same constellations in the same sky, from vastly different individual situations, sharing the same experience of new life and the challenges and joys and hopes and despairs that comes with it.
