Blizzard babies a weighty responsibility
Staff writer
If recent snows messed up your weekend plans or caused you to spend an hour chipping ice off your car, it’s good to have some perspective. After all, you could have been a newborn calf.
With late spring a popular time to breed cattle, many calves are being born now in freezing temperatures.
Most calves born in these conditions are fine, according to rancher Jess Whiteman.
“If they can get up, and the mother can lick them off, and they can get up and nurse, usually they’re OK,” Whiteman said.
But some — around 25%, according to Whiteman — struggle in the cold.
These calves need to be warmed up quickly, or they could die.
“You’ve got to be pretty judicial in checking them,” he said. “Time is of the essence.”
Matt Meyerhoff, who works for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, has memories of calving in freezing weather.
“If they weren’t up immediately, you may have had to bring them inside,” he said. “We used to take them down in the basement, next to the wood stove. I’ve seen lots of people put them in pickup trucks with the heater on for a while to let them warm up.”
Whiteman, who is calving heifers right now, brings susceptible newborns inside his garage to warm them up.
He has been calving at this time of year for two decades, but only a handful of times has the weather been this cold.
It’s important to take precautions in such conditions.
Whiteman lays down fresh straw over the snow each day so expecting mothers and newborns have a dry place to lie down.
“Duct taping the ears to the head helps,” Jessica Gernhard, a part-time rancher who runs the county’s Animal Health Center, added.
It’s not uncommon for calves to lose ears to frostbite when the temperature is below 10 degrees.
The reason a rancher might calf so early in the year is often scheduling.
Whiteman grows crops on his farm, and needs to spend early spring planting rather than calving.
“If I was just doing cows, I’d probably pick April to calf,” he said.
Another reason is that calving early gives the young extra time to feed and grow.
The hope is “that you can get them big enough come spring that you can turn them on grass,” rancher Darvin Markley said.
By the time summer rolls around, the rancher will have a nice fat calf ready to go.
Calving in winter can also reduce costs, as the cow can graze after giving birth rather than being fed extra during the winter months.
“It’s a sad way to put it, but when hay and roughage costs are high, even if you lose calves in January, February to the snow, sometimes it’s still economically [beneficial],” Gernhard said.
But to some farmers, calving in winter just isn’t worth the risk.
“We can handle cold, and we can handle snow, but both at the same time are pretty tough,” rancher Nick Kraus said.
Randy Savage, who runs Mud Creek Cattle Co., agreed.
“It’s been 30-plus years since I calved this time of year,” he said.
The weather, the matchup with his schedule, and the fact he’s not “a big crop farmer” were reasons Savage prefers to calf in mid-spring.
“I’m not as busy in March and April as those guys,” he said.
Donnie Hett has calved in January before but does not do so anymore.
When asked what advice he would give someone calving in the current temperatures, Hett was curt: “Start praying for warm weather.”
Whiteman admitted that calving in fall, which he also does, is a far simpler process.
“Fall calving, I don’t check them a whole lot,” he said. “Here I have to check them pretty often.”
As Whiteman drove up to his heifers Friday afternoon, he saw one sitting down on a recently-laid-out patch of straw.
Sure enough, it was giving birth.
The newborn’s tongue and legs could be seen poking out of the mother.
It was 25 degrees — much warmer than earlier in the week, when the temperature hovered near zero.
Still, as the newborn emerged, its body steamed in the cold.
The calf exited its mother, falling into straw Whiteman had set up for it. For a few seconds, it was perfectly still.
Then it shook itself, opened its large eyes, and got up. This one wouldn’t need to be warmed.
Meanwhile, the mother wandered away from her child. Heifers sometimes don’t know when a calf is theirs, Whiteman said.
“If she was a cow, she’d be chasing me around right now,” he said as he approached the newborn.
But after a minute or two, the heifer came over to her calf, still steaming with warmth, and began to lick its head and back.
“She’s doing her job,” Whiteman said approvingly.