LightHouseAcres

Always learning

That is one thing about living on a homestead, you learn something new. You make difficult decisions.

Right now we are trying to figure out what is wrong with our milk cow. Her production has dropped in half. Her stool seems to be more loose than normal. She is still eating and drinking from what we can tell. I looked up, on the net yesterday, diarreha for a cow. Everything I found was not helpful or hopeful for that matter. We seperated her from her calf to see if she was holding up milk. Hoping that was the problem. We got only 10lbs (about 1 gal) last night and this morning only 6lbs (not even a half a gallon). The calf is nursing off of our other cow for now. We will probably switch to bottle feeding her calf until we can figure out what exactly the problem is. My worst fears are Johne's Disease pronounced Yo-knee's. If so we would have to cull both mama's and babies. Plus we wouldn't be able to put another ruminant animal in that section of our property for a long time. Our friends had this happen to them last year. They lost 3 preg cows to this disease.

My back is getting better but not fast enough for me :) My hubby has been doing the milking for me. The other chores are being done by my oldest dd. We are going with a friend today to look at some Berkshire pigs. This friend is thinking of raising them. I guess they are supposed to be one of the better porks to raise. The pork meat is supposed to be marbled like a cows?? Something I need to research on. My hubby and I said we would never have pigs........and we have pigs. I said we would never have a horse.......we have had 3 horses now. Never say you won't get something as it will probably happen.

Have a great Saturday!