Updates

It Saturday and late this afternoon we had yet another bull calf- one of the heifers was calving and Yana was worried and got Garry out to the barn to pull the calf (Maxim was just leaving for the church in Zaporosia- they meet Saturday evening- and are up to buying 60 liters of milk- Max says he likes it and there are many pretty young girls) Garry says the calf was nearly born by the time he got the calf pulling chains on its legs to help it out. By the time I got there with the camera it was out and they were checking if it was breathing well. Since it was so small Yana was calling it girl, but when they looked- another bull. Here he is getting licked off by his mother, and the cow next to her.

Garry was artificially breeding one of the heifers he bought that was "recently fresh" back in October- skinny, sick, the one that had the bad case of coliform mastitis. She not only made a full recovery, she looks like a different cow today. Like Zera our first heifer we bought, she should be pregnant already, but is in good health, and should become pregnant soon (hopefully now in her case.) We are using semen imported from Canada- for non-farmers bull semen is frozen in straws- little plastic tubes- and kept super frozen in liquid nitrogen until thawed to breed a cow "in heat" - cows show visible signs and typical mannerisms when they are at the right time in their cycle.
Normally cows are bred for the first time about 60 days after they have a calf, since ideally they should calf every year, and sometimes they do not become pregnant on the first try. Garry has AI'd (artificially inseminated) a few cows for people in the village, as the last bull in the village was turned into dinner in January. Unfotunately many of the village cows are just eating straw now as feed is running low, and that is not ideal for getting pregnant, which is why many of them have been calving in recent months- nine months after they got out to eat the lush spring grass. AI is safer, because bulls can be dangerous to keep around, plus you should have better offspring as you can use the best sires availiable.



Right now we are stuck at about 620 liters of milk a day, many cows that calved three months ago are not still going up in production like before, some are even going down a bit so even with some fresh ones, the amount of milk doesn't keep going up like in January and February. Since February the milker ladies are working long hours with milking 28 cows by hand, but they are happy, because they are making more money than anyone else in the village.

There's a photo of the pen of young calves- including the four heifer calves are no longer getting milk to drink. The red one is Shishlik the bull calf of Zera's that's supposed to be dinner. The sixth heifer calf that was born last week is tied up by herself, Maxim tells me that Mint the ladies' dog likes to lick the milk off her face when she's done drinking her bucket (the ladies feed the calves milk three times a day- after they get done milking.) I gave Garry a hand since he was tying up some of the heifers and dry cows that go outside for the day in the empty stalls, the rest stay in the end pen for the night (they can go in and eat during the day) Maxim says they may be stolen if they are out in the fence all night.

Here's the tractor in front of the barn- as you can see there are still muddy ruts. The temperature has been around freezing- just over during the day,I am missing the nice warm weather of Monday when it looked like spring was here! Just as we were leaving the barn a man came to talk to Garry, turned out he had a month old heifer calf he wanted to sell (yes Garry found this out in Russian, and agreed on a price- not sure when she's arriving here.)