Beef Unit: Weaning and Weighing

After my first experience at the Beef Unit, I was feeling pretty comfortable with cattle. However, that comfort was soon dismissed by the somewhat frightening experience of weaning and weighing.

As I mentioned in the previous entry regarding the Beef Unit, the calves were already loaded into the chutes when we arrived for vaccinations. For this visit we were to experience the ordeal of getting the calves out of the pasture, away from their mothers, and into the chutes.

Now this may have been somewhat enjoyable had the weather been sunny and beautiful, however on this particular day it had been raining for the past 2 days, and freezing. The fields were muddy and slick.

We walked up to the pasture where the feeding troughs were and filled them with feed to lure the cows and calves into the smaller set of gates. This part went as planned, and from there everything else seemed to fail.

Once the cows had eaten their fill we attempted to herd them out of the smaller area while leaving the calves inside. They were not having it, and our attempted herding resulted in some angry cows, running around and causing a raucous, and instead of the calves staying inside the gates, every animal ended up outside of the gates, back into the large pasture.

I never realized how intimidating and powerful cows are, until I had them running at me, within a small, enclosed pen. My instinct was to run and jump over the fence, and it nearly came to that several times. I was amazed by the guys who work at the beef unit, how they could just stand their ground as a 2,000 pound animal charged them.

It was a waiting game from here, like we were playing cat and mouse. We would lure one cow-calf pair in, get the calf, and then loose another as we tried to herd the cow out. After this back and forth shuffling of animals, knee deep in mud, and drenched, we finally had all the calves in the same pen and all the cows back in the pasture.

A whole lot of bellowing followed this, as we moved the group of calves from the pasture down toward the hydraulic chute. The cows were not too happy with the arrangement either, as evident by their incessant bellowing. I guess this is something similar to a parent dropping their kids off at summer camp for the first time.

Once we got the calves down to the chute area, we grouped them by sex and side. We weighed the calves in each group and then moved the group as a whole to a specific pen in the upper area of the beef unit underneath the awning.

With the sounds of calves hollering from the back building, I scampered through the rain and into my car, glad that I was not trampled, and looking forward to getting out of my muddy boots.