I had a lot on my plate at the time so I figured I would check it out later. It had killed itself abruptly and when I went to restart the tractor it didn’t want to turn over well. I went to work on something else real quick and heard the tractor die. I had the 861 idling to warm up in the cold weather. The second string of bad luck happened while moving the grain drill into the shop. Holstein was one of my original three calves, and I picked her up way down in Springfield with Angus. We had great hopes for Holstein, and it was a tough loss. Our efforts were in vain, as her condition deteriorated to the point that we ended up putting her down. All our efforts didn’t change the downward spiral. We quickly noticed that she had mastitis in the two back quarters and started her on antibiotics. We also started to milk her to get some colostrum. We gave her a day but she wasn’t passing it and we went into action giving her a clean out shot. We were too late and our attempts to resuscitate the calf we pulled were to no avail.Īfter the loss of the calf Holstein retained the placenta. After first letting her try to take care of business we decided to lend a helping hand. I noticed she was in labor that morning, so I was keeping a close eye on her. It seems Holstein contracted mastitis before giving birth, and it probably led to her loosing the calf. Having a dairy breed around meant a higher chance for mastitis, but we didn’t even have a chance to cause the problem in this case. Holstein was our tamest cow, so tame we were literally milking her in the field after the calving trouble. Things don’t always go smooth, but that was exceptionally rough. We ended up having to intervene and long story short we got experience correcting a calf that was trying to come out wrong, pulled the calf, lost the calf and lost the cow. As it worked out she picked nice weather to go into labor, but that is the only thing that went well.
I knew Holstein was bred later, but didn’t think she was due to give birth soon. It seems it is becoming a trend to get our bad luck out of the way early in the year.
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