Calves cows trucks and stuff

While we were in Canada there were a number of heifer calves born, and on Tuesday Garry pulled a backwards one while I was teaching English. It was another heifer calf, I think it is seven in a row, maybe we will get to a 50% male/ female ratio yet. It is even more than half Holstein because her mother is part Holstein.

it's a girl too!

Brewers grain is here!

pulling in the delivery truck 

On Thursday before the big snow, Garry had a delivery of brewers' grain come, their new truck can't come in our yard and dump in our pits, Garry took a few photos. You can see there is less snow than now, they used the tractor to pull it in the driveway. 

Early this week Garry had the "good vet" out to see a sick cow, that had calved a month ago, and was not eating. Garry was sure she had a DA- twisted stomach- since he could hear a pinging sound through his stethoscope, a classic diagnosis. He was frustrated when the vet did not check her for this, possibly because they don't operate on cows for them here. Max hates it when Garry argues with the veterinarians. Garry hates that they don't know as much as he does about some cow diseases. The vet pumped her stomach full of upset tummy stuff, and decided they should tie her up at the end of the barn and just feed her hay. That was Wednesday, the idea was she'd be better or sold for meat, if she was not recovering. 

 Garry was wishing he had gotten a toggle kit while we were home. The boys in Canada fix most of the cows with this themselves now, by doing what we used to call the magic stitch - instead of a full operation cutting open the cows side, this procedure rolls the cow over to untwist her stomach- the absomason one- cows have several stomachs! Then a stitch is made to hold it in place through the belly. 

On Thursday the cow was nibbling hay, but Garry decided to enlist the students in the afternoon lab to roll the cow over- literally you take the lying down cow, get a hold of her legs and roll and roll her onto her back and over onto her other side--and when the big gas bubble moved, hope it stayed in place even without a stitch-- he had Victor look for some kind of big needle toggle substitute in case it was needed, but as of Saturday morning she was sounding good although she's still eating just hay, he is hoping for a full recovery.