Some Place Like Home
Small Farm Cost Ac-cow-nting
By Dave Milano

Having a family cow is rewarding, instructive, and sensationally inefficient. We try to keep a good arm’s length away from the objective credit-debit calculus and snuggle up to the non-quantifiable factors, like a lovely aesthetic, and our top-drawer milk, butter, cream, yogurt, cheese, ice cream, buttermilk, kefir... Did I forget anything?

Actually, it’s pretty easy to stay focused on the upside. But the ever-present and frankly astounding drain on our formerly free time, and notably not-so-free money, cannot be completely ignored. I spend as much time with milking, winter feeding, watering, and countless other management tasks as many farmers do who own forty cows, and we have far more per capita invested in barn space, fencing, tools, and equipment than any real farmer would tolerate. My dairying friends shake their heads. “If you have one, you might as well have a hundred” is the common (and commonly expressed) wisdom.

Since every cow event here affects one hundred percent of our milking herd, management mishaps bring that farmerly aphorism into particularly clear focus. This year, for instance, we had trouble breeding Carmen. She happens to be one of those “silent heat” cows, offering not the tiniest hint that she’s ovulating, a short 18-hour window at most. Every missed cycle digs a deeper hole, and artificial insemination shots in the dark are foolish and expensive.

Plenty of advice and counsel poured in from eagerly helpful dairymen. We listened attentively, read all the articles we could find, and applied every scheme we could. Even a few seemingly unreasonable ideas got their due, but every bit of book and farmer wisdom failed us. 

“Get a bull,” some urged, if half-heartedly, for while a bull knows all and would solve the problem handily, even a crackpot farmer has a self-preservation instinct—keeping a bull, especially for a yearly fifteen seconds of work, is out of the question.
“Doesn’t your steer help?” Well, T-Bone would surely have given us the sign we needed—instinct is strong even after castration—but at the not-so-tender age of sixteen months, he was still nursing, so we had to segregate him in another pasture to preserve Carmen’s milk and prevent chewing injuries on her teats. (That little pasture-dance, not incidentally, also caused a detour in our grass management strategy).

“Watch more carefully,” exhorted one earnest farmer. “Sometimes it shows up as just a wink maybe, or a nuzzle that she didn’t give you yesterday.” Oh.

The artificial insemination (A.I.) expert suggested a hormone injection to stimulate ovulation. Reluctantly tried that, and failed. One sure-fire solution after another failed to do the trick.

In the end, we did get her bred by noticing an almost imperceptible sign of a completed cycle, then counting days to predict the next one, and taking a half-blind shot with the A.I. man. Whatever—it worked. And though we will miss our target delivery date by nearly three months, we will get our calf. Better late than never. And as humans do, we will then concentrate on the invariably redemptive event of a new life and forget, for a while anyway, that little episode’s cost accounting.

Dave Milano, a former suburbanite turned part-time Tioga County farmer, is our newest columnist at Mountain Home magazine. You can contact him at someplacelikehome@mountainhomemag.com. See his blog at www.mundanedaily.com.