Tough Decisions

This week I fortunate enough to have an impromptu visit with my midwife and her student who were in the area for a birth. They were killing time, letting mom’s labor progress a bit more without the pressure of their presence…because midwives are awesome like that. We strive to give our animals the same type of birth that she gives her clients – the comfort of birthing in their own environment, given distance to focus on labor, being ready to help at any moment but without interfering with the natural process that each mom’s body is created to do. Birth is a beautiful thing.

As we visited each of our animals and walked the pastures in the fall sun, we discussed the difficult decisions we are faced with every day on the farm. Farming can be a beautifully romantic thing and there is room for sentiment, but not sentimentality.

One of our 4 sows who farrowed this summer did not have a successful birth – she had piglets stuck, we had to call the vet. Out of her 9 piglets only 5 were born alive and only 2 survived, though they were weak and required constant care and nursing.

After all that stress she, of course, rejected her piglets, not allowing them her life-saving colostrum. Manufactured colostrum and milk replacer just isn’t the same as mom’s homemade goodness. The antibodies those babies need to survive and thrive really only comes from mom, which is why only 2 of the 5 made it.

It’s a difficult and heartbreaking thing to witness for both the mom and baby. And it is exhausting. We had to cull her. Our vet recommended not re-breeding her and making her into pork instead, which is exactly what we did. We are so grateful for her service to us and, of course, very excited for the meat.

But it’s always a tough decision. She couldn’t control how she farrowed but she places her life and the life of her piglets in danger is she were to be bred again. And in farming (and nature) there’s no room for that. Especially when I had other sows with 100% survival rates with zero assistance needed.

So to the butcher she went.

We are also faced with the decision of selling one of our favorite milk cows. She was one of the first we purchased from a family homestead and the reality is that she is perfect for a homestead but not a farm that needs to be economically viable. Buttercream is our largest cow, meaning she requires the most feed and forage to maintain her weight and produce milk (i.e. the most expensive to keep) yet she is also our worst milk producer. She freshened at barely 4 gallons per day and quickly settled around 2 gallons per day.

{By comparison, our 750lb cow just freshened at 6 gallons per day and will likely settle around 4 gallons for the majority of her lactation. A few of our other cows freshen in the 8-9 gallon range and require less feed to maintain, making them more economical for our farm.}

This is perfect for a homestead/family milk cow but is not enough for to justify feeding her and requiring our resources. Milk cows also need to freshen (have a calf) each year to keep in milk. We’ve been re-breeding her since February with no luck. She’s 10 months into the lactation, so she should be calving again in January or February but she’s still not bred. In the meantime we’ve had several other cows calve and be re-bred again. And those other cows produce more milk than she does.

She is the sweetest cow, never kicks, an awesome herd leader. We love her. But we can’t keep her. We cannot afford to have an unproductive 950lb pet cow who serves no purpose. And that’s farming.

So, she finds a new home on a family homestead.

This year we’ve also lost half of our 30 turkeys because our non-GMO feed was being mixed improperly, resulting in serious vitamin and mineral deficiencies in about half of our birds. When the feed isn’t mixed thoroughly, some of it has highly concentrated areas of nutrition while other areas are almost devoid of nutrition.

After watching turkeys develop paralysis and splayed legs and finally tracking down the problem, we had to make decisions about culling birds that couldn’t survive and thrive.

Every bird that can’t wake, forage or make it to the feed and water loses money. It’s also not the quality of life we want for our animals.

So, we had to kill them. Cut our losses and focus on getting the remaining birds healthy and recognizing that the most humane thing to do was kill those animals rather than let them starve to death. We are now getting properly mixed feed from Starbard Farms Feed in Lowell and the ones that survived are thriving.

This is farming.

We had a milk cow calve on Monday morning this week, though. We checked her at 9 in the morning and she showed no signs of imminent calving. We checked her again at 11am, and she was licking off her calf in the pasture, soaking in the warm fall sunshine. No problems, no complications. We left her to pass and eat her placenta and hoped her calf would start nursing her colostrum. We didn’t bring them up until evening milking to examine her and the calf.

At milking time, we had to separate that calf from his mom. He wasn’t nursing and needed her colostrum to survive. The best thing is for us to milk out her colostrum and milk and bottled feed him. The colostrum is his immune system for the first 3 months of life and he was almost certainly die without it.

We separated them, fed the baby and milked mom. It was relatively uneventful and neither party put up much of a fuss. But there’s a solid chance we will have to sell that baby, too, because he’s a bull. We don’t keep bulls for breeding, as much as I would like to. If we made him a steer we would raise him for 2 years and then butcher him for meat. That’s reality.

This is also farming. It is beautiful and romantic, but it is also tough. It’s difficult to make those life and death decisions on a daily basis, especially when you aren’t raised in that environment.

But those decisions have to be made. They’re made on industrial farms, sustainable farms, small farms, big farms, veggie farms, fruit farms, livestock farms and dairy farms.

Those tough decisions have to be made so others don’t have to. So we can have food on the table. So most people don’t have to give a second thought to food they are preparing and eating. There is a farmer out there who has made those tough decisions for you. And that deserves respect.

Thank a farmer. Know where your food comes from and the numerous difficult decisions that farmer had to make in order to feed you.