Shorter Dairy: Visit 2

On my second trip to the dairy, I was determined to master the art of “stripping out”. The first time I went to the dairy, I had such trouble with this. It seemed that every cow I got was completely unwilling to let-down so that I could strip her out. There truly is a skill to milking cows by hand, and so far my skills were lacking immensely.

But this time I was determined. I tried different techniques, one handed, two handed, two fingers, four fingers, and every combination in between. Finally I seemed to find a happy medium that worked for most of the cows that came through, and I was so glad I did, for once I was not the last one to complete the milking!

Being in the parlor, sunken beneath the feet of the cows, you really become aware of the size of Holsteins. Not only are they big, but they are tall. They look like the Shaquille O’Neil of the cattle world. On my second trip out to the dairy, I had more time to look around and observe because I already knew what I was supposed to be doing. From the underside of a Holstein, you can see these massive arteries leading to the udder, and the tendons and muscles holding up the udder are so strong. Being that close to these animals really made me understand what a physical demand it is on these animals to produce so much milk and sustain such a large udder.

Once milking was finished, we got to feed the babies once again. They are growing like crazy, just two weeks ago they were so small and now they are almost twice their size! It is so exciting and amazing to see that one day they will be as big as the full grown Holsteins I spent most of the day milking.

Shorter Dairy: Visit 1

I feel like the dairy world is one that is very shut off to the rest of the world. If you are involved in dairy, or your family is, you know it like the back of your hand. If you are outside of the dairy world, stepping into a milking parlor is a very alien experience.

By this time in the year, I had learned the basic procedures of milking in my Animal Science 1000 class. But learning and doing, I have come to find, are two very different things.

A group of three of us made the trip out to the Shorter Dairy, to get experience with the daily task of milking. We arrived just as the Jersey herd was being loaded into the milking parlor. We were told that the Jersey’s are milked first due to their high butterfat content; the milk sinks to the bottom on the tank.

We were immediately thrown into milking, and learned basically by mimicking what the other workers were doing. The cows are loaded on either side of the milking parlor into individual stalls and restrained by a brisket bar, which limits their movement. Each cow must have their teats dipped in an iodine solution, which is wiped off to clean the teats. Then the teats are “stripped out”, this involves manually pulling milk from each teat. Once these steps have been completed, I pressed the green button to release the automatic milker, which is powered by suction. I placed one tube on each teat, and the milking begins.

Each cow has an I.D. collar, and when they step into the parlor, and individual computer at each station brings up the information on that particular cow. As my cow was being milked I was able to compare her production to yesterday’s production, see if she was pregnant, and monitor her rate of production. The automated milkers release when the cows production declines past a certain level. Some cows will give a lot quickly, while others are more reluctant to let down their milk as fast. The speed in which the cows give milk also determines what group they are placed in. Dairy cows are grouped by nutritional needs. The bigger producers are grouped together and given more feed, where as cows that produce less are given less feed. As the milker pulls off, “post-dip” is applied to the teats in order to provide a barrier from bacteria while the sphincters are still open.

This process continued for a solid 3 hours, as we milked the entire Jersey herd and then the Holstein herd. The work pace is fast, but the milking parlor has a rhythm to it, and once you find that rhythm, the work becomes much easier.

After milking was completed, we got the ultimate reward, feeding the calves. Dairy calves are just about the cutest thing you will ever encounter. They are separated from their mothers just after they receive the colostrum from the first milk, and relocated to an area full of “calf-hutches".

These look like miniature dog houses, with a chain and collar placed around the calf to restrain it. The calf-hutches provide the calf with protection from the weather, but also protection from disease and injury.

The calves we fed were only about a week old and were receiving bottled milk. They were so precious, and we were lucky enough the get to stay outside and interact with them a little longer than usual. I discovered that the will suckle on anything and love to touch and nuzzle up to anything around, which at the time, happened to be us.

It was the perfect ending to a very fast and furious day, but I’m looking forward to my next trip out to the dairy!

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.

Beef Unit: Vaccinations

Now beef cattle are just about the only form of Livestock I am familiar with. My Grandparents have always kept a herd of Brangus cattle, which thank you to Dr. Coleman and ANSC 1000 I now know are a hybrid consisting of 3/8 Brahman and 5/8 Angus. Additionally, the internship I had with a large animal vet primarily consisted of working beef cattle sales.

Needless to say I was very excited to go out to Auburn's Beef Unit. In my personal experience I have always enjoyed beef cattle people, they are very blunt, sarcastic, and have a good sense of humor. George Richburg did not disappoint when it came to this.

Let me set the scene here:

Our class consists of 8 girls, all of whom have no former experience with large animals. All of us have taken or are taking ANSC 1000, where we are basically scared to death by Dr. Coleman telling us how we can potentially die by a cow hitting us with their poll, or have

our calf muscle sliced open by an angry sow.

George comes limping into class with crutches and what looks like a body cast. I knew immediately that the exact same thought was going through all of our minds, "Holy crap, he totally got trampled by a cow." Finally one of us asked, "Um, just to clarify things, did an animal hurt you?"

George simply laughed and said, "No I rolled my truck a couple of times and flew through the windshield". George, we're glad you weren't trampled by a bull and we're glad you're here. George proceeded to explain to us some basic management techniques that Auburn used on their cattle, including ear notching, tattoo-ing, and vaccinating for Black Leg. This sounded like some pretty heavy duty tasks to me, and I was just a tad nervous when we were told that we were expected to do these during our lab

Thursday.

After the group met briefly and signed in with George in the office at the Beef Unit, we made our down to the chute. This was my first encounter with the “Silencer”.

The Silencer, a hydraulic squeeze chute, is intimidating, like its name, but that is where the similarities end. For one thing, this large piece of equipment is certainly not silent in any way shape or form.

The guys that work out at the beef unit had already loaded up the calves we were working with into the chutes leading to the Silencer. A calf would come through and one of the guys would pull the lever of the chute to automatically close on the calf’s head, and then they would proceed to put a little squeeze on around the ribcage to restrain the calf further. Since the calves were so small and the chute was originally designed for larger cows, a good amount of squeeze was required.

I was put on tattoo duty first, which was not as daunting as I had originally anticipated. Once the calf was restrained, I grabbed the calf’s right ear and cleaned the groove 2^nd from the top using a toothbrush. After this I used the same toothbrush to smear a good amount of green tattoo ink onto the location of where the tattoo would be. I then loaded the tattoo gun with the appropriate letter and number sequence, slipped the clamp over the ear in the desired area and squeezed, hard. Most of the calves put up a little fight, but not bad. Once the clamp was removed I went back in and rubbed more tattoo ink into the area. First job, complete!

The second task in our line-up was ear notching. Pretty straightforward but a little sickening the first few times you do it. The purpose of ear notching is to collect a tissue sample to test to make sure that the calved are all healthy. The thing that is unnerving about the ear notch is that, a calf’s ear is pretty thick tissue, but the ear notching tool cuts a triangle out of that ear tissue so easily, almost too easily. Once the tissue sample is collected, it is placed into a numbered vial so that that calf can be later associated with the vial.

The third and final task was subcutaneous injections of the Black Leg vaccination. Subcutaneous refers to the space between the skin and the muscle, and is delivered by pulling the skin away from the neck and injecting into the space created by this. The trick is not to stab yourself with the needle or stick it through the other side of the skin. Luckily I avoided both of these.

We rotated through the different jobs until we had vaccinated, ear notched, and tattoo-ed every calf. As we were rotating, however, we began to notice that the amount of boys working the chutes and the silencer seemed to multiply. I think at one point there were about twelve people in the tiny workspace, 8 of them male, and definitely not enrolled in our class.

Needless to say I think we made quite the impression on the Auburn Beef Unit.

Swine Farm

Pigs. The closest I have ever been to one was my fetal pig dissection senior year, and that was all fine a good partially because they were small and partially because they were also dead.

However, when I received and email saying that I was expected at the Auburn Swine Extension at 9am on Monday morning to move pigs from the nursery to the finishing floor, all I could think of was Mike Rowe in that episode of Dirty Jobs:

Besides the fact that the pigs make that god awful noise, the process of moving them was very unlike what was shown in that Dirty Jobs episode.
I arrived at the Auburn Swine Unit at about 8:55, dressed in full barn attire: boots, jeans, flannel shirt, and I must say, I was extremely proud of myself for dressing the part. However, after entering the office and meeting Brian Anderson, who would serve as our supervisor for the day, we were quickly told that we would need to loose everything we wore into the facility.
I suppose in response to the swine flu outbreak, the entry and exit policies of the facility have been heightened. By this I mean, we are required to leave everything we brought with us to the facility on the outside. After stripping down, we had to shower off and put on scrubs, socks, bras, some very unflattering underwear, and even hair bands provided by the facility.
Once we were dressed and ready to go, Brian briefed us about our task for the day: moving pigs from the nursery to the finishing floor.
When a pig is born, this process is called farrowing, it stays with its mother and its litter of 10-12 piglets for about 3 weeks or until it is weaned in a separate barn. Here they grow to about 10-12 pounds. From there they are moved to the nursery, away from their mothers.
In the nursery there are square pens lined up next to each other running down both walls with a walkway between the two sides. The floors are concrete and the pens have a rubber mat in the bottom of them. Hanging from the ceiling are temperature meters, one at the front and one at the back of the barn. The temperature is averaged and if the barn becomes too hot the fans are automatically turned on. Food and water troughs, which are filled through an automatic feeding system are also present in the pens. Pigs stay in the nursery for about 7 weeks, or until they reach about 50 pounds, at which time they are moved to the finishing floor. This is where I come in.

Before entering the barn, Brian handed me a clipboard with numbers and highlighted rows. I learned that each row stood for a specific pig, listed by gender, weight, ear notchings, and other information. The ear notching system was both interesting and extremely confusing to me. Pigs ears are notched in specific places, and based on these notchings the owners can derive what number the pig is.

For instance, we had to select all the pigs highlighted in blue on the chart, for a specific buyer. I would call out a number such as "7510" and Brian would scan the pen and pick out that individual pig. I have no idea how he managed to select each individual pig so quickly, especially with them squealing and jumping over each other, making a big fuss. I guess I will learn a little more about this system in my Animal Science 1000 course, but I am not looking forward to it!

After we would select each group, usually about 10-15 pigs, we would herd them toward the scale. I learned quickly that pigs want to go the opposite direction as you, so if I wanted them to go right I would have to come at them from the left. But these animals are not like cows or sheep where they will just blindly follow one another, they are smart and stubborn.

Using a large plastic board with handles I would herd them toward the scale. This is sometimes slow and frustrating, but it depends on each group of pigs. Some moved quickly with minimal pushing and shoving and some just refused to move. Among the most ornery of the groups were the all female groups. I suppose it was because they were self conscious of their weight, because they refused to get on the scale, screaming and throwing a fit every step of the way.

Once on the scale Brian would weigh them as a group and then record the average weight of the group. Over the course of the day we weighed nearly 3,000 pounds of pig.

From the scale we would move them to the finishing floor. I had heard that pigs were very intelligent animals, just after dogs, and they really are. They are curious little things. They want to smell and explore everything. For instance, there happened to be a garden hose on the way to the finishing floor, and every time we would walk past it, it would take about 10 minutes to move the pigs away from the hose. They wanted to sniff it, bite it, and even occasionally get tangled up in it. It is obvious from the little time I spent around them that they like to gather information about their environment with all of their senses.

We continued for about 2 hours, moving pigs from the nursery to the finishing floor, finally completing our task at around 11:30.

We signed out and showered out (thank god for the shower out because swine stench tends to seep into your pores), and said goodbye to the swine farm for now. Even though I am sore, bruised, and still smell slightly of pig, I had a great time at Auburn's Swine facility, and I cannot wait to go back again!