Calving Season

This year we started calving season with 10 black Angus females and 1 black Angus bull out in the pasture. Some of the females were cows and some were heifers. As of June we had 8 calves born without any complications. All but 2 females had dropped calves. I thought that we had a pretty successful calving season. One female that didn't drop a calf was an old cow. She's probably 13 years old and is one of the first cows that we bought when we first moved out to the farm. The other that didn't drop a calf was a heifer that we had purchased last year. We thought that the old cow had reached the age where she wasn't going to produce consistently any more and needed to be sent to town while the new heifer may have miscarried and we didn't find the evidence of it. We were wrong. The old cow had twins about 3 weeks ago and the young heifer had twins yesterday morning. That means that not only did every one of our females have calves but we ended the year with 2 extra! And to make it even better the twins were all heifers. Wow. That makes our calving season not only a blessing but our cup runs over. We had 8 heifers and 4 bull calves born this year. For next year we'll have 18 females producing for us. I think that we'll only run about 2o cow/calf pairs on our farm so if all goes well this winter we'll be selling cattle next year. I know I've said it before, and I'll continue to be amazed by the reality of it - even with all of the hard work and effort that we put into all of the different farm products/projects - we don't control what ultimately succeeds and what fails.