The Lord Is Good to Me

Phil and I have discussed how to graze the neighbor's land. We're paying for hay right now, and the forage growing next door calls to us.

I suggested that we simply move them up with the electric netting that's held them in the last week. We've had sheep, goats, and cows all together grazing.

However, Phil hesitated to move the animals into the neighbor's land without a strong perimeter fence. Should the netting fail, how would we possibly recapture them?

His wisdom proved right today, when we went outside to do chores and found all 20 animals happily grazing where they pleased. We suspect that, since we hadn't electrified the netting, the cows snagged the fence on their horns, and took it down. (That Fern is one smart cow. We witnessed her systematic take down of netting later in the day.)

We both wandered around the animals, shaking our heads in disbelief. I was ready to get them some new minerals, when suddenly one of the large cows (due almost any day—for the next two months) mounted another cow.

Suddenly I realized: it was FERN she mounted. Fern was in standing heat!

I called Phil in disbelief—this was five days later than I had calculated her heats. He was fairly dismissive until the big cow did it again.

We called Giovanni, who came, yet again. (In answer to previous query: we were charged the paltry sum of $10 transit time and $22 per AI. Should AI work, it will be quite a deal, compared with the price of purchase and upkeep for a bull!)

Phil and I barely managed to get Fern corralled before Giovanni arrived. In between another brief deluge and Fern's prescient caginess, which allowed her to slip away long before she should have known that we wanted to corral her, Phil had quite the task to round her up.

All three of the remaining straws we had ordered exploded on thawing. For whatever reason, four of our eight straws were defective, and when Giovanni went to thaw them, they popped. In fact, the quickly thawing semen shot out of the top, and stayed, two inches up. Giovanni held the bottom of the straw, and as it warmed, the semen sank back in; or, most of it.

Between the three defective straws, we hope that one took.

We saw such a hopeful moment, too. When Giovanni first went into Fern's backend, a huge blob of mucus came out: a great sign of fertility. And it was the right degree of clearness/cloudiness! So great.

At this point, we've done all we can do. We have to figure out what to do about a backup bull now.