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Modern agriculture can make people forget how different livestock fit together on the homestead 🐷🐄🐐

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Modern agriculture can make people forget how different livestock fit together on the homestead 🐷🐄🐐

High performance animals like used on professional dairies such as Holsteins or Yorkshire pigs on hog farms can make people forget why different stock is raised for different purposes. Professional farms feed a lot of grain and grass in controlled rations so it’s easy to forget animals unique strengths.

Goats are browsers, they are best for cleaning up areas of brush and woody areas. Their thing is brush not pasture, they aren’t miniature cows.

Cows on the other hand are grass eaters. They turn land that isn’t good for crops into valuable forage that cows can uniquely break down grass and turn it into milk and meat. Grass grows a lot of places where other crops won’t.

Pigs are organic recyclers. Dairy farms had them traditionally to drink waste milk not fit for human consumption. Homesteaders gave them food scraps and spoiled bread.

Corn in Greenville

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It's not like you've never seen this before. Probably by the time you see this picture, it's all chopped up and sitting in a silo somewhere, ready to feed the cows this winter.

Saturday September 23, 2006 — Farming

Why We Separate Baby Calves from their Mother — Derrick Josi | TDF Honest Farming

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Why We Separate Baby Calves from their Mother — Derrick Josi | TDF Honest Farming

Taking calves away from their mama cow is a common practice on dairy farms. Why do we do this? Here’s why:

First of all, let me remind you that cows and people are very different. Cows don’t exist in a family unit like most people do. Cows are herd animals which means they are most comfortable with other cows their size and age. Being without their herd-mates can cause a lot of anxiety for the cows, which is part of why they aren’t very naturally maternal.

Next up, calf safety.

After a calf is born, the mama cow will lick off the calf to clean it up and to help stimulate the calf to get up. However, this can be a safety issue. Sometimes cows will step on, lay on or crush their calf. Dairy cows generally aren’t very maternal. So if the cow abandons the calf, we step in and dry it off ourselves.

We also separate the calf to ensure its health.

Dairy farmers devastated after cows ingested wire leftover from telecom project – VTDigger

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Dairy farmers devastated after cows ingested wire leftover from telecom project – VTDigger

TUNBRIDGE — On the first Friday of July, Amber Hoyt stood in the dairy barn she owns with her husband, Scott. She held a plastic ziplock bag with small, mangled pieces of stainless steel wire in her hand.?

Since December, the Hoyts have pulled the wire from the bodies of three cows that recently died after showing symptoms the farmers hadn’t seen before: sudden bloody noses, a high number of aborted calves, obvious signs of discomfort, a decline in milk production.?

Last fall, the Hoyts found the wire scattered throughout the cows’ feed, which they grew on their land and other fields they rent in the rolling hills of Tunbridge. As the weather cooled and the Hoyts transitioned the cows out of pasture, they began feeding the animals silage, which they make by layering chopped hay from several different fields in a bunker.