Pregging Cows with Dr. Jeff

There’s bears in the bottoms. It’s been established by eyewitnesses that there’s definitely two individuals that are hungrily wandering around in the willows below our house; one looks like a large boar (male) and the other like a 2-year old or yearling cub. There’s several winter-kill elk and deer scattered throughout the dense birch and willow thickets along the river, and a “bone-pile” of the occasional cow we have that’ll succumb to liver disease, heart failure or just plain old age. Caryl’s best friend Donna used to say when losing a cow on their ranch that “God saw need to feed the wild critters too.”

So, we have to keep a close eye on the willows near our home. We leave an active contingent of guard dogs on watch at all times. Either it’s a border collie or two during the day, who will pick up their scent on the wind and become a nuisance enough to a bear that he or she runs off, or our Great Pyr, Allie Shacker, at night. She can be heard all night long making the rounds, keeping bears out of our backyard. She’s bigger and more formidable and aggressive than many bears.

We’ve had a few warm spells over the last few weeks where the mercury pegged at 60; the snow melted, the ground started thawing, and the bears emerged from their winter den-sleep. It doesn’t surprise me that they made a home along the river; there’s usually abundant food around for an omnivore with winterkill, dead or dying salmon, grass for grazing, berries, afterbirth from cows and wild game calving, and of course, the cow that returns to the soil on which it lived its long life. 

I say long life because our old cows are significantly older than most people’s old cows. Ones that get older—like over 12 years old—certainly may not be able to traverse the big country of the range anymore, so we keep them at home. They still raise a calf and get nicely fat while doing it on summer grass. Most of my neighbors will cull those older cows out of the herd—usually anything over 10 years of age goes. “They are no longer efficient,” they say. We won’t even talk about feedlot-on-concrete dairy cows here, as for most of those operations, a 5-year old cow is old. Life on the hard rock of concrete eating the cow equivalent of rocket fuel to make milk literally burns those girls out; they become the burgers found in our embarrassing preponderance of fast-food eateries.

The simple difference between us and our neighbors in how we run those “older” cows has to do with our pasture management. We categorically “multipaddock graze” even our mama cows and their babies. This means that those cows move nearly every other day, all growing season-long. It allows them to only eat really great, nutrient dense grass instead of grass that’s getting woody and stemmy. Most of America’s pasture cows are run on continuously grazed paddocks, or at best on paddocks where the fully mature and tall grass is grazed down to the “nubbins,” and then the cows are moved. It means that the cow has to work harder for it, as they are designed to acquire grass with their tongues through a tearing motion. They simply can’t eat short grass with their tongues.

The other problem that arises from a long-term visit to a paddock is that the cow will eat all the stuff she likes first. And then, when it grows back, she’ll eat it again. And again. Until the plant dies. In a short period of just a few years, they’ll eat out all the plant biodiversity from a given piece of ground. That means that first, for the cow, she is not getting even a quarter of the nutrient diversity she could have gotten from a plant-diverse paddock. Secondly, the loss of plants means the loss of soil biology. Those organisms dependent on those over-grazed plants that died die out as well. Now, everything starts crumbling. Soil doesn’t hold water anymore because the “sponge” of biodiversity in the soil is missing. Soil erosion happens from runoff. It’s a compounding mess. 

The cow suffers from malnutrition because food is harder to get, and it has gone from the human equivalent of a full fare of grass-fed or wild protein and a rich, diverse garden of produce to Top Ramen. 

And the cow fades away. Old age is no longer old. Instead of an 18-year old cow still having calves on Alderspring, a 12-year old cow won’t even be able to conceive when put out to pasture with an interested bull.

Several weeks ago, we were “pregging” cows with our vet, Dr. Jeff Bennetts. That’s pregnancy checking. Each cow is brought up to the “squeeze chute” for their one and only annual trip up the chute, and he places a long-plastic glove-sleeved arm into her rectum where he can feel what is going on in the uterus. He’s the very best vet I’ve ever retained the services of. He’s quiet with the cows, and any animal we keep on the place. He’s one of those vets where it feels like he might like animals better than people. That may or may not be true, given the day, but he is certainly the animal advocate. 

And that is exactly what you want in a vet. He may not tell you what you want to hear, but at least he’ll tell you for the sake of the animal. 

As his arm reached to armpit deep, far up the rectum of one of our cows, I spoke to him across the chute, over the tailhead of the 154^th cow out of the 246 we would check that day. Dr. Jeff doesn’t really raise his voice. It’s basically your problem if you can’t hear him. So you get in there close, with just the hips and swinging tail of a 1250 pound not-so-happy wild black Angus mama between you. 

First of all, I needed to address the most important stuff with the good Doctor. I knew he was about my age; somewhere in the ripe for retirement neighborhood of 60-ish. “So, Doc. Do you have any hobbies?”

He was concentrating, looking past me to nowhere in particular, trying to interpret the feel of expected uterine “cotyledons” through the wall of the rectum to be able to date where the in-utero calf is in the term of cow pregnancy, about 283 days on average. At 3 months, the cotyledons become palpable. 

“She’s good. Next!” 

“Well? I mean, golf, or fishing?”

“No not really.” He plunged his arm into the next cow. This one was a red Angus, and wouldn’t calm down until his arm settled deep. Several hand scoops of almost fully processed manure preceded the full-up-to-armpit palpation. 

“Well, that’s wonderful news. I’m guessing that means you won’t have to retire.” I caught his eyes for a split second, and a flash of a smile. 

It took awhile for his response to that. Then, “She’s good.” And a quick look through the steel bars of the chute: “No, I guess I won’t. She’s good. Next!”

“Well, that’s great, ‘cause I sure didn’t want to have to hunt around for another vet,” I said. 

Dr. Jeff flashed back a quick half-grin. He doesn’t hand those out very often. They’re like Paul Hollywood handshakes. If you don’t know what that is, dear reader, Google it. 

“Next!”

A few cows later, an older girl stepped in the hydraulic squeeze. It’s a quiet chute, and Dr. Jeff brought it. It definitely minimizes stress with the noise reduction involved with a quiet running cow catcher. Remember that these are no dairy cows. Most of them are pretty wild, in a literal sense of the word. We don’t handle them much, and they show it. They will absolutely not tolerate anyone touching their calf. Attack is likely. Many of these cows have singlehandedly fended off wolves, cougars, coyotes and bears.

Her number was B67. Jeff watched her walk in. He didn’t even open the bars of the chute to preg her. “She’s open. Let her out.” he said. “Open” meant she had no calf inside her. 

“What makes you say that?” I asked. She was in pretty good flesh, and not leaning out like a really old cow would.

“I’m 99% certain she’s got liver damage. Just by the way she looks. She doesn’t have much time left. I’m guessing the flukes got her liver pretty much gone. She won’t function for long.” As the cow walked away, I saw that she was off. She just wasn’t “bright,” as we call a cow that is firing on all cylinders. Her head hung a little low, and the brisket area between her front legs was just a little swollen. 

The “flukes” he spoke about are native parasites that live part of their life cycle as a parasite to a snail. They in turn release a tiny pre-fluke that lives in a cyst anchored in grassy vegetation in swampy areas, and usually occupy stems that are tall and out of the water. They, then are consumed by a host animal like a cow, moose, or elk, and then parasitize their liver with “flukes,” or flatworms that eat the liver from the inside out, and lay eggs that are then re-deposited by the animal. 

“But Doc,” I said. “Our livers from our cattle have been coming up clean.” They get checked very intensely by our processing crew and the USDA inspectors. Flukey livers are very easy to identify, even from a distance. But Alderspring livers have been coming up clean as a whistle. 

Dr. Jeff thought for just a second, and simply said “I know why.” 

I took the bait. “Why?” 

“It’s because you are rotationally grazing and keeping your river-bottom grass grazed. You bought this cow from a neighbor, didn’t you?”

“Yes, we did, about 2 years ago.”

“Well, she didn’t come off a place that practices that. I know them.” He recognized the neighbor’s brand on the cow. We did buy her and now she produced organic calves for us after living on our organic ground and eating our organic hay. But she was born on another ranch, and as near as I could remember about their ranch there was no grazing system where she hailed from.

It was pretty continuous grazing.

He continued: “She ate those long grasses along the river bottom. Those cysts were on the grass. Your cattle never let the grass get that high, and they move within a day or so.”

All of sudden it added up in my mind: our cattle, raised by us, had broken the life cycle. The flukes didn’t have a chance. We lived with them, but they couldn’t ever reach our cattle.

By simply moving our beeves every day to every few days, we have clean livers. Not by giving them wormers, a.k.a chemical “flukicides,” but simply by emulating nature by letting our cattle move to new grass. Generally, everybody that is not organic in the world of cattle production in the US uses chemicals to control fluke. But some still slip through the cracks, especially in older cows.

Sadly, B67s fate was sealed. Dr. Jeff was right. She faded away in just a week.

It underscored to me how what we do or don’t do matters so much. If we lose sight of the design of nature, and confine our cows to eat everything down to the ground, or this piece of tall grass that they don’t really want to eat anyway, we get in trouble. There’s consequences when we point our direction outside of what nature did. 

I think we’ll just keep trying to work in sync with the ecosystem. After all, it is a beautiful life, albeit a life in chaos with the storm of biodiversity we see, hear and smell. There’s no rectilinear fencing or row cropping on Alderspring, thank God. It’s still a wild-at-heart ranch.

Happy Trails

Glenn