Surprise Calf & Mama Drama, Pigs on Cogon Grass Eradication Duty, Goats Being Goats & More!

Grant and I had quite the adventures with the cattle Saturday, Sunday and Monday morning!

These days, we often buy cows in addition to steers and sometimes they end up having calves. The cattle were working their way through the field where we are building our house for the last week or so.

On Saturday, Grant moved them into the internal road section, adjacent to the next field we were moving them into. It was only about a day’s worth of grazing but had some nice grass and morning glory and importantly, shade for a really hot day. Midday on Saturday, they seemed to be loving it, some of them fully laying in the cool (albeit dry) ditches.

Then it started storming on Saturday evening and a neighbor mentioned in a neighborhood Facebook group that she had a cow walk through her yard. Besides us, many of our neighbors keep cattle and we didn’t think it would makes sense that one of ours would have a reason to jump multiple fences and be wandering by itself, but nonetheless, we drove a loop around the neighborhood, didn’t see it, called some neighbors to check their herds and then checked our herd. Ours were all accounted for.

The next morning, the herd had jumped over (and bent) the gates in one of the fields adjacent to the road. We didn’t really figure out why, other than the grass looked pretty tasty in that field.

Meanwhile, a skittish white cow was walking around the ditch area in the the direction of the field they had come from the day before. Later that morning after moving some pigs around, we got her back with the herd.

Then! We go out on Sunday evening and she clearly jumped a taller gate and bent it, too (thankfully she didn’t get her ankle caught and break her leg or anything). Momentarily it was unclear was she was so adamant about going back towards the other field.

Then it all made sense — we saw a black calf next to her!

We let the pair be for a bit while we opened gates and moved the rest of the herd across the internal road to the field they were supposed to be in.

The plan was then to walk mama and calf to join the rest of the herd, but by the time we were ready, she had gone back to a spot in the previous field the cattle were in. She was in a section of pines and the calf was bedded down. So we decided to not stress them out by trying to move them and revisit in the morning.

Well, by Monday morning, I was walking out to check on the pigs and there she was in the internal road, walking towards the herd. Cattle are definitely herd animals and it seemed like she wanted it both ways — to tuck her calf away somewhere safe and graze with the rest of the herd while it was sleeping.

So we got her in with the herd and then drove the farm truck into the field to load up the calf and bring it to her!

The only problem with that was that Saturday night (before we knew about the calf), we had moved the goats into the field the cattle had just left, so we had to play a little defense with the goats!

Naturally, they literally jumped on the truck when we stopped to close the gates behind us. Just classic goats.

I would say that their presence both helped and hurt catching the calf… there were times when it wandered towards then for some kind of strength in numbers, but then, they were also yelling and running around like crazy, following the truck and generally being the chaotic little beings that they are!

We found the calf bedded down, but it popped up and ran away way faster than we expected. And this led us to conclude that likely the mama cow didn’t jump the fence to have her calf away from the rest of the herd, but rather she had it several days ago and did a very good job of hiding it. And both the times she jumped the fence, she was simply trying to get back to it. The calf seemed so much stronger and more aware than a typical newborn.

Eventually we got the calf in some tall brush and I kept talking to it and looking at me from a few feet away while Grant literally crawled on hands and knees behind it to grab its leg. Once we got her, she didn’t even fight, just collapsed like a dead weight!

Then we drove her up the internal road to reunite her with her mother and the silly cow didn’t even thank us!

Meanwhile, we got the sows who just weaned their big beautiful litters of piglets a few weeks ago onto a section of land that we’ve never had pigs on before.

We only finished the perimeter fencing in this area last summer, so it’s just been grazed by the cattle and the goats a couple of times.

There’s pines, plus some other saplings like wax myrtles in this section and the goats did a good job at clearing out a lot of the blackberry and other vines and weeds beneath.

But there is a lot of invasive cogon grass, which the goats and cattle will eat but don’t love and which has a rhizome root structure that is hard to get rid of. Luckily pigs love to root and they do seem to like munching on the cogon rhizome roots. They have successfully gotten rid of cogon grass in other patches on the farm in the past.

After we move the pigs out of here, we can bring the cattle back as the grazing season winds down and put some hay bales in here, too. They will help spread out the hay waste and then eventually we can seed the area and have a much more functioning silvopasture in this section!

Besides all those adventures, the chickens are doing their thing, foraging grass and weeds, seed heads, bugs and worms (and kitchen scraps when I dole them out), beautiful swamp mallow are blooming and the pollinators are happy and farm kitties are mostly being lazy in the heat, but also occasionally hunting rodents.