The magical ability of cows...

On Monday and Tuesday we had the chance to do some cattle work on the farm. Aside from driving around chicken buses, Farmer Mark also runs a cattle herd on his property. Our job - to help round-up, tag and emasculate all the new baby calves (and yes, emasculate is exactly what you are thinking it is).

We were all quite excited to start this new job, especially because it involved the cutest of the all the cows - babies! - but we soon realized that no matter how cute the calves are, giant animals that have fits of projectile shit can be really a downer.

The three of us - Bastiaan, me and Johnny (who is the new wwoofer from Wales - *insert sheep joke here*) - all headed out on Monday morning to separate the calves from their mothers.

The cows and their babies had been placed into holding pens already, we just had to now separate the cows into a different pen from the calves.

At first it was all "awwwwww they are so cute. Look at them with their moms, cutey wootey baby cows"

And then we watched the cute baby cow wander over to its mother. "Awwww" and then we watch it bump its cute baby head into her for attention "Awwwwwwww!" and then it made a baby cow moooo "AWWWWW!"

....and then we watched the mom just take a shit on its head. Just shit right on her baby's head. Everywhere. It was just everywhere.

It was about then that I realized that cows have this magic ability just to make it rain shit everywhere they go. I literally do not think they ever stop shitting. I swear I was standing about 15 feet from the nearest cow and shit still landed on me like it just rained from the sky. Twice. And that baby cow we saw get a royal shit on the head was only the beginning. By the time we separated all of the calves from the cows I was dirtier and smellier then I had ever been on the farm.

On Tuesday morning we all got up at the crack of dawn (literally 5:00am) because we needed to get an early start on tagging and castrating all of these calves.

I had the relatively easy job of documenting the entire process (ear tag number, M/F, etc) while the guys had the joy of  getting kicked, shit on and ran over by 168 baby cows.

This process was only supposed to take us 3 hours, but it ended up taking us 6 hours because every 5 seconds a mob of angry mother cows would bust through a fence in the yard and we would have to go chasing after them with giant rattles on a stick to herd them back out. Yeah, cows are scared of giant rattles. You can get them to run anywhere by making a slight jingling noise. Those long tube things that make rain noises when you flip them upside-down - those would be gold for herding mob of cattle.

 All and all, it was quite the long and smelly day on the farm.

Elise