Lifestyles

Bramblings: Part of the herd

By BECKY NELSON
By Becky Nelson

I don’t remember many years that we didn’t have cattle on the farm. When I was young, my grandmother had been running the farm as a widow for decades. When her children grew and headed off the farm, she hired help to get the chores done and keep the farm sustainable. When my dad came back from a stint in the Army, he moved in next door and helped her keep the farm going as she aged. As I grew up, there were a handful of dairy cows that we milked by hand to provide us with enough milk for two families and a few pigs. When the business of growing and raising replacement heifers for local dairies became unprofitable, the size of the herd shrank and we tended just a milk cow or two for many years.

Interspersed with the dairy cattle were always a couple of beef critters for our freezers. Quite often they were the product of the dairy cows and some beef bull that impregnated her through a tube of artificial insemination. Once in a while we raised a Hereford beef bull, but keeping bulls is dangerous work and an intensive project. Herefords are about the most gentle of bulls, but keeping them separated from the herd when the timing isn’t right for pregnancies and keeping their massive bodies and raging hormones under control isn’t ever an easy job. For those reasons we most often relied on a fellow who came to the farm when a cow was in heat and impregnated her through AI.

Cows kinda get under your skin. I really enjoyed my time in the barn as a kid. Filling a milk pail with milk with your head leaning up against the warmth of the cow as you milked on a frosty morning or evening was a beautiful thing. My dad used to squirt a stream of milk to the barn cats, my grandmother would fork hay from the haymow into the manger in a quiet sweep and I could hear the cows munching and rattling against the ties that held them while we worked with them. There are remembered images, smells and sounds of the barn that will always work to soothe my thoughts when I remember them. There is something about working with herd animals that quiets me.

People aren’t all that different than cows. Once in a while we would get a feisty heifer or a steer that spent a little too long as a bull that would raise havoc with the rest of the herd. We do that as people, too. There are the rabble rousers, the instigators, the oppositional few that sometimes make the life of the herd a misery. With cattle, it’s an easy choice to ship the bad apple off to a different pasture with a different group or alone for a few days to figure things out for herself before letting her back into the herd when she can get along with the others, or rehome her where she can be herself and not interfere with the lives of the other cows. When danger was present, the herd would protect one another with a head butt or a kick. And when a Mama had a calf, there was no better protector on the planet than that gal if anything threatened her baby. But most days, in most conditions, all of the individuals in the herd got along okay. We need to manage our lives like we manage the herd. We need to cut those out of our personal herd that make our lives miserable and spend our time enjoying the day to day routine. We need to take the moments to enjoy the warmth and routine of the barn and let others enjoy their own routines as well. We need to respect the needs of the herd…the roof over their heads, their full bellies, their time to relax in the sun, their time to produce. The best thing about cows is the herd. Everyone seems to find their place at the feed tub. There are leaders and there are followers, and unless there is a threat or neglect, they seem to get along in life just fine. Every once in a while there was a loner who grazed away from the herd but didn’t upset the apple cart, and that was okay.

In these difficult political and social times with the pandemic raging and the politics of the day dividing us more than bringing us together, we need to start thinking a bit more like a herd. We need to start getting along, graze alongside those we care for and those we don’t, protect one another when there is a danger, follow the leader when we need to or take another path if we choose without disrupting the rest of us with undue turmoil. There’s a lot we could learn from cows.

Becky Nelson is co-owner of Beaver Pond Farm in Newport, New Hampshire. You can contact her through the farm page on Facebook and Instagram, visit the retail store or email her at [email protected].

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