Sally and I, DS Mark and granddaughter Hailey all went to the Nourishing Traditions conference in Atlanta, GA. We all got a lot out of it and had fun. My talk was very well received. The people in Georgia are all charmingly polite, friendly and helpful. It is many years since I have been in the South, not since I was a little child. I had a window seat on the airplane both ways and could make out patches of farmland almost the entire distance from Boston to Atlanta. Nothing forested, just one little pasture parcel with homes on the access roads the whole way. I couldn’t make out any livestock at 35,000 feet but there is grass for millions of cows.
We all met a variety of very interesting people. It seemed to me that they all had in common a deep desire to be of help to others, in this case through the agency of better nutrition.
Little Willie got along all right without us, with Marcia’s help, but he was mighty glad to see us. He seems to have done a good job of guarding the homestead. Here he is on Sunday awaiting our return. We got our first snow of the season on Sunday.
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This morning, two days after her due date, Fern went into labor. Thinking Martin was still at camp, we allowed Fern to go out and graze for awhile since she was so mad about being shut in while we were gone. We figured that if she had the calf out in the field, Martin would be available to carry it in. She made a beeline for the Pocket Field which is our most distant field with the greatest privacy, but we had closed the gate. She was willing to settle for a little copse of willow and she stood there several hours with our lead ewe Agnes standing close to her, being her doula. However when we learned that Martin wasn’t around after all, we had to bring her in as we knew we couldn’t carry the calf. Marcia came and helped and it all went very well, but she had to leave before the calf was actually born, which took place at 5:45. The calf was large and a great strain for Fern. When its nose finally appeared and two feet were showing Sally and I each grabbed one ankle with the towel and helped pull the calf down. He is large, dark brown (almost black) and quite vigorous. He has now sucked. We are both very tired.
While waiting for Fern to finish licking the calf, and while he was learning to stand up, I began bringing Fern one-gallon buckets of warm molasses water, each containing one cup of molasses. She drank a total of four gallons of this mixture as fast as she could drink.
November 13, 2013 Wednesday
Yesterday, Tuesday night, we were reasonably confident that Fern would be all right even though she was not eating and drinking well. Sally milked out about three quarts of colostrum with Fern tied in the beefer pen. The baby was sucking well and was too full to help with the milking.
This morning Fern was still reasonably ok about six a.m. when we went to check her, but was definitely in trouble when we checked again at seven a.m. I called Dr. Cooper right away, but he didn’t expect to be able to get here for several hours. Marcia came down and helped us give her some sub-cutaneous calcium. We also used the turkey baster to give her a cup or two of the day before’s colostrum and a bucket of molasses water. Dr. Cooper got here about ten and he gave her the IV calcium and another sub-q bottle. He also gave her a shot of thiamine and another of phosphorus. I sat there for a long time holding her head from flopping and we had her propped up with hay bales and covered with horse blankets. At 12:30 Sally and I gave her a canister of calcium paste by mouth as per Dr. Cooper’s instructions. She was still down at that time which made it relatively easy.
The baby, now named Elvis, was very cooperative. We stuck him in the side pen in there and he slept for hours. We checked her every hour, and in late afternoon when we came to see how she was she had gotten up and the baby was trotting around looking for his dinner. He nursed well on all four quarters.
Her bag feels soft. We watched while she ate some hay for the first time and also drank a couple of gallons of water, but not a whole lot of either. She was still nibbling hay when we came out at five to offer her some chopped up apples. She wasn’t enthusiastic so we went back and chopped up some leaves from the rutabagas that Marcia had brought up on Monday. She was thrilled about those and ate them right down.
November 14, 2013 Thursday
Fern seemed ok at 5 am, but at 7 am her ears were cold and she was weak, in fact so weak that she did not object to our dog Willie’s looking at her calf. Certainly not her usual response to dogs. At that point I got out another container of calcium paste and we gave it to her by mouth. Then Sally followed it with about a pint of warm colostrum to ease her sore throat (and to do whatever other good it might do) as the calcium paste is caustic. She put it down her with my turkey baster into the side of her mouth, holding her head up and making sure that Fern was swallowing. I also got out a bottle of Cal-Nate 1069 (calcium-boroglutinate) solution and gave her half a liter in two sites, sub-q. She was too weak to object when Sally jabbed in the needle. We covered her with blankets and left her to rest. She got up about an hour and a half later and drank water and started to eat her hay, though weakly.
She seemed to improve as the day went on and we let her go outside for a while. She didn’t want to go far from the barn as she didn’t want to leave Elvis but she ate along the fence line and seemed to really want it.
We are more and more convinced that the abrupt change of diet from grass to hay when we had to confine her when we went to Atlanta precipitated the milk fever.
We brought her in around 4 pm and hand milked a few quarts just to make sure everything was moving along properly in the udder. She ate most of her grain.
November 15, 2013 Friday
This morning Fern was pretty quiet but wasn’t ill. She was eating her hay and chewing her cud normally. She had drunk water during the night. We brought her in and milked her by hand and got about a gallon. We tied Elvis near her head. She ate most of her grain.
Later we put a lot of orange flagging on both of them and since it was a beautiful day we let them go out and join the sheep in the field. We watched them with the binoculars. We could see that she was grazing well, and later she lay down and chewed her cud. We still have plenty of grass. She was obviously much gratified to be grazing. We brought her in about 4 pm to be milked again, and her rumen was pretty full. This time we used the machine and got another gallon. Her teats are very small and it’s hard to milk by hand. Elvis is stuffed all the time. He follows her well.
Marcia and Sally went to Puiia’s hardware store. Marcia bought stain and varnish for a project she’s working on, and Sally bought a cute little electric heater which looks like a little fireplace.
©Copyright 2013 Joann S. Rogers
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[Hey - don't forget we still have a few copies of the old version of the book to clear out of the basement - pick one up here). Or get the new one, with lots of new information including Joann's review of A1 & A2 genetics, on Amazon].
