EID, VID, Injections....Oh My

This afternoon we worked our last years calves in readiness to sell them this week. We ran them all through the chute and gave them another ear tag. When the calves are born we tag them with one similar to the blue one and write the cow's number on her calf's tag. This makes it easy to sort the pairs when taking them to the pasture and other times when we need to know who belongs to who. The tags are kind of like getting your ears pierced. This tag is called a VID tag, meaning a visual identity tag. You look at it and read the number...right!

Today we added another tag to the same ear of all the yearling calves - an EID tag. It looks like the white tag above and this is a special tag with a number that can be read with an electronic reader (the same number printed on the outside) and will identify this animal for it's entire life to our farm, the date it was born and it's sex. EID means electronic identity tag.

This isn't our calf but you can see both kinds of tags in this calf's ears. Besides the new ear tag the calves got a booster pneumonia shot.

My job for this process was to record the tag numbers, EID and VID and the sex of the animal in the Excel spread sheet on the laptop computer. I also recorded the information on paper too as a double check. It is very important that this information is correct as it will go to a national registry.

I did get to sit in the pickup (truck) with the window rolled down next to the chute and John would let me know the numbers and other info for every calf. I did get a little chilly by the time we were done since I was just sitting even though the temp. were in the mid 40s today. We had the help of our part time hired man and his high school son. With the sorting system we have it worked pretty well and we got them all done in a couple hours.

Did some beading this evening and hopefully some stitching tomorrow.

Until later,
Lynn