The one thing about working with cows is that life is never boring. They always seem to be throwing some kind of a handling at you.

For the past few weeks, things on the farm were progressing ok. Really, for the first time this year, there was a nice amount of grass on the farm and ground conditions and growth had been pretty good.

The main aim for July is usually just to keep enough grass ahead of stock and maybe get the second cut in, but as the first cut was a little late, then it will more than likely be early August before the second cut will be ready.

However, one of my cows must have thought I was taking it a little easy and decided to give me a little extra work to do.

Cow down

I went to move a batch to fresh grass last Friday evening and found one of them lying on her side unable to get up.

My first thought was grass tetany, so I ran and got a bottle of magnesium and a bottle of calcium and put them into her, but as I was putting the bottles into her, I started thinking if there was anything else that could have led to this problem that was quite frankly ruining my nice sunny Friday evening.

This is an old cow, the second oldest in the herd in fact. She had been earmarked for culling due to her age and for this reason hadn’t been bulled during the breeding season.

I wanted to leave things as simple as possible for my neighbour who was looking after things

Her and two other cows had been kept separate with their calves away from the bull, but I was away on holiday a few weeks ago and I wanted to leave things as simple as possible for my neighbour who was looking after things.

I decided to put the two batches into one and put these cows back in with the bull.

It was when I started to take the rest of the cows out of the field to a fresh paddock and the bull was staying back with the cow that was down, I realised that she was obviously bulling and the bull had managed to hurt her when he was jumping on her.

Fingers crossed

Now, I’m getting to lift her twice a day, carry meal and water to her and fashion makeshift rain covers for her from half-tonne meal bags to try to protect her from the torrential rain we’ve been having for the past few days.

She can stand when I lift her, so, fingers crossed, she might come good, but as all farmers know, there’s no guarantee of that!

The joys!

I probably was getting lazy though, as the only thing I had to do was check cattle before I went to work in the morning!

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