Calving season means sleepless nights and cute baby calves,
Blowing snow during night time checks
Bottle-calves and cleaning pens
milking wild heifers and carrying heavy calves
Tired backs and worried mama cows
calling the vet and disinfecting your hands
stocking up on milk replacer and latex gloves
“Honey can you help pull this calf?”
and going out to check before you go to bed
but through it all,
despite the weariness,
you look up and see this:
and this:
And you know you’ll do it all again  next year – because this is what you do.
You raise healthy calves.
You are a beef supplier.
You fight the elements.
Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose.
But you keep fighting – because you are a fighter.
A provider for thousands.
A caretaker of livestock and grasslands.
And even when the bureaucrats and government and vegans protest, slander and demean you – you keep doing what you have done for years.
What your family has done for generations.
You quietly keep on tending livestock and wearing your body out, so that your family (and thousands of others) will have food to eat.
And when you get weary of it all – when your body cracks under the strain of those night checks and calf-pullings in below-zero weather, well, you just stop for a moment and look at the faces of healthy babies, and remember why you are doing it all.
Because tomorrow you will get up and do it all again.
Very well said! We are done calving out here. Well, there are a few more calves to go. And yep, all those long nights are definitely worth it.
Good luck with the rest of your calving.
Cheri
Thanks, Cheri!
I love seeing all the babies running and jumping around! We have 2 more to go in our spring herd. So far everything has gone pretty well.
Hope all your calves are doing well also.
-Lori
We had some bad stuff going on in the beginning of the season… but things are better now. Not sure how many left – still plenty left to calve out. Thankfully our personal herd did well. 🙂 Glad you had a good run! They are SO cute when they run and jump! 🙂