Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Baby Calves

Taking another break from house cleaning and cooking for company. I had to go for a little walk outside a while ago as it is so beautiful and warm today and NO WIND. The wind we had last week is gone, hopefully for a while anyway.

Took my camera with me and got a few photos of the cows and calves while I was out walking around.

Notice the cow and calf in the background, that is not her calf but the calf of the cow in the foreground. Sometimes the calves look like their mothers and sometimes not. I know that the calf in the photo above and photo below belongs to that cow as she doesn't have any ear tag with a number on it in her left ear and neither does the calf. John has to scan the button tag she has to find out her number and give her a new tag. Sometimes they loose their numbered tag so it has to be replaced with a new tag with the same number. The electronic button tag the cows all have does not show as it is small, the tag you see is one put in last year before she went to pasture to help keep the flies off her face.

Each cow has a number we assign her and write on a tag that gets put in her left ear as well as an electronic tag that we can read with a reader (duh). This numbered tag also has our name, town and state written on the back to help if she gets out and lost to help identify her. When a cow has a calf it gets a numbered tag with the same number as it's mother. Makes keeping track of which calves go with which mothers as well as keeping data for our records. We like to know how that calf performed, did the cow have enough milk, are her genetics good, etc.
You might think the cow and calf in the photo below belong together, right? Click on the photo and read the numbered tags in their ears. The black calf belongs to the cow that is sniffing the calf in the first photo. Told you they could be different colors. That baby has not figured out which mama is it's yet but the cows sure know which calves are theirs. That black calf was just born yesterday.
Guess break time is over...back to work.

Lynn

1 comment:

Elaine Adair said...

Wow- I feel like I've finally been a teensy bit educated on all those tags the cattle have - thanks! One time I went to a branding, which was another version of education. This was a great post! 8-))

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