Beef Cattle Calving in Clay Center, Nebraska

Well, not really IN Clay Center, more like 4 miles West of Clay Center which, if you haven't heard from it, is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, at least to an East Coast girl like me!  Although I really wasn't sure how I was going to feel about being in Nebraska for a week, as it turned out, I absolutely loved it.  As I mentioned in my last post, this externship was run at the federal USMARC facility- a meat research facility with somewhere in the range of 6,500 beef cows.  Since we don't have many beef cows in PA, I'll bore you with a little background on how this works.  Beef cows live on pasture pretty much their whole lives.  They are bred (sometimes by bulls, sometimes by artificial insemination) in the spring and then have their calves a little less than a year later. These girls are hardy; most of them have their calves outside on their own!  The calves usually get up not long after, start nursing, and then follow their mothers around for the next few months.  In the fall, the calves are weaned and taken to a feedlot, where they are fed concentrated grain to gain muscle mass until they are slaughtered a few months later.  If given a choice of being one of our domestic food animals, I'd choose to be a beef cow every time!  These gals are HAPPY!  They really spend their lives grazing and taking care of their babies, and they don't have to deal with us very often at all!

 

   During spring calving season, however, they have to be watched a little more closely.  At the USMARC facility, the cows that are ready to calve are brought into a pasture close to one of the pole sheds.  Multiple times a day (and even overnight), cowboys ride through the pasture (on horseback or on Gators) to check on the cows.  For the most part, calving moms are left alone; we only intervene when they are having problems (or if they've been trying to give birth for too long).  When that happens, the cows are herded into the pole shed (by cowboys on horseback) and put into a chute.  Keep in mind that these girls are not pets, so they don't have any interest in being manipulated by people.  Although most of the time the cowboys can pull the calves themselves, they are really good about deferring to us so that we can get some experience as well!  Calves that can't be pulled are operated on right there in the barn, and you'd be surprised how well the cows usually do with this!  You'll see them a day or two later, baby by their side, back out in the field like nothing happened.  The week we were there most of the cows did just what they were supposed to do; they had their babies out in the field on their own.  We did pull 4 calves, and all of them were alive and continued to do well!  Here are a few pictures of us pulling one of the calves.  It's truly a team effort!  One person reaches into the vagina to make sure the head and feet are where they are supposed to be and to help stretch things out, while the rest of us slowly started pulling.  With a little patience and effort, we were able to get this one out without too much trouble!

After the calf gets pulled out, the first priority is to make sure he/she is alive and to help him start breathing.  Since many of these guys have been pushed on for a little too long, they tend to be a little slower than the ones that are born without assistance.  We stimulate them by rubbing their sides, tickling their nose, and clearing out their mouth and nose.  Because it's vital for calves to drink the first milk from their mother (it's full of antibodies that protect them from diseases), whenever calves are born with assistance, we take the time to milk out the colostrum (the first milk) and bottle feed it to the calf, just to make sure that the calf gets what he needs. 

Because most of these cows were doing their job, we didn't have a whole lot of OB work to do.  But that didn't mean we weren't busy!  Every morning, we were picked up by one of cowboys on their way to the pole shed a little before 6 am.  We did the first check of the morning with them in the Gator, driving through the pasture and shining a light on each of the cows to make sure they were doing ok.  After it got light, the fun began!  Every morning, the calves born the previous day or overnight needed to be processed!  They all got ear tags, weighed, and banded (to castrate the little boys).  You can imagine that we weren't always very popular with the moms; some of them were very protective of their babies, so oftentimes one of us had to keep an eye on the mom to make sure she wasn't going to try to come take her baby away! On a few occasions, we had to "steal" the calf for a few minutes by driving off with it in the Gator just to keep from being charged.  In the past, these gals have been known to knock over a Gator or to rip a door off to get to their calf, so we're always extra cautious.

Once the calves have been processed, they (along with their moms) get moved into a fresh pasture. This keeps everyone healthier as brand new calves are kept separated from the older ones, and keeps the pasture a little less chaotic!  This is either done on horseback or by putting the calf into a sled (pulled by the Gator) and luring mom to follow into the next field.  It's always an adventure as sometimes the moms decide they don't care enough to follow or the calf decides he's happy where he is!

Moving the moms and babies by horseback

After all the morning work, we drove around with the veterinarian, Dr. Ondrak, to check in with all of the pole sheds on the facility, making sure that no one had any medical issues.  We ended up splinting a few calves with contracted tendons, amongst other things.  In the afternoons we did necropsies of anything that had died the previous day, including cattle, pigs, and sheep and made a few visits to the pole sheds and feedlot.  On our visit to the feedlot, we did an exploratory surgery to look for any leftover testicular tissue.  In the evenings, we went back out to the pole sheds to do evening checks of all the cows.

Putting splints on a calf with contracted tendons

The little calf a few days later, right before we took off the splints! 

One of the little orphan calves...  Sometimes they have twins and can't always take care of the second one.  We fed these guys twice a day until there is a cow available to take them on.

This cow lost her calf, so we got her to accept this little orphan as her own.

Luke beginning our exploratory surgery on the feedlot steer

The whole week was just great!  I had such a good time getting to work with everyone; they were very patient and fantastic about teaching us!  It was also amazing to really get to see a large-scale beef operation like this, since we have so few beef cattle in the Eastern US.