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Follow organic dairy farmer Jonathan Gates as he reports weekly from his Vermont family farm. Howmars Farm is a certified organic dairy farm, one of many Organic Valley/CROPP Cooperative farmer members who supply the milk that goes into making Stonyfield's yogurts and smoothies. The entire family pitches in on this third-generation farm. Check out some of the happenings on his farm and post your comments. Jonathan loves to get feedback from readers.
01/26/2012 - 8:59am
When I am visiting with other farmers who are not organic producers, one of the first questions they ask me is what do I do to treat sick cows since we're not allowed to use antibiotics. I then give "the speech" about all the approved-for-organic use products I use in managing the health of my dairy herd, some of which are the same things the conventional farmers use. And I emphasize that good management practices like clean housing, good feed, clean milking equipment, proper milking practices, and regular herd checks will keep animals healthy, so you don't need to worry about treating a lot of sick animals. With all of this said, I recently had to use antibiotics to save a cow's life.
A first-calf heifer, PJ, had calved (given birth) about three months ago and was doing great. She was giving lots of milk and wasn't afraid of pushing some of the older cows around to get the place at the feed bunk that she wanted. Then she started having some problems. She fell a couple of times out in the free-stall area, and then one morning at milking she fell right in front of the milking parlor door. We were able to coax her into one of the maternity pens. I called our vet service, and later in the morning Dr. K and a vet student came to check on PJ.I called our vet service, and later in the morning Dr. K and a vet student came to check on PJ. By then, she was showing some symptoms that were giving me an inkling of what was going on. She was starting to circle to the right, and any effort to make her turn the other way was unsuccessful. After checking her out. Dr. K was sure she had listeria, or "circling disease". It is a bacterial disease that affects the central nervous system of the animal. It is fatal if untreated, and there is no non-organic remedy for the disease. Our only chance to save PJ was to give her antibiotics.
It is clearly stated in our organic standards that we need to do whatever we can to keep an animal from suffering and to prevent their death when possible. This includes the use of antibiotics, under the advice and guidance of a veterinarian. This meant that if we pulled PJ through her illness, we could not keep her on our farm to produce milk for us ever again..
Dr. K felt the disease had not progressed too far, and that PJ would probably pull through with good care and proper medicine. I didn't hesitate in my decision to go ahead with the treatment. Before the vets left the farm, PJ had been given her first dose of antibiotic intravenously. I was to give her the same treatment over the next four days and hope for the best. The other thing I did was to call the NOFA-VT office to let them know I had treated a cow with antibiotics, what her ID tag was, and that I would be selling her as soon as she was better. The next 48 hours were touch and go. PJ got worse in the next 24 to 36 hours, but then she started gradually improving. I was diligent in giving her the antibiotic through the IV tube, and in keeping her fed and watered. On the third day, she was standing up again and she just kept getting better.
A few days ago, three weeks after starting treatment, I called my neighbors, the Coreys, to see if they were interested in buying PJ to add to their dairy herd. I was so happy when they said they were interested. Patty came down later that afternoon to look at PJ, and was quite sure they would take her. This meant PJ would only be a mile down the road at the Corey farm, and be out grazing in the summer with their mixed herd of Jerseys and Holsteins. The next afternoon, Patty and Kenny loaded PJ into their trailer to take her back to their farm. Today, I visited the Corey farm to see how PJ was doing. Patty brought me to the barn, and I saw PJ nice and comfortable in their spacious tie-stall barn. She was milking great, and was becoming accustomed to her new surroundings. A far cry from a month ago when she was close to dying! I was thankful she could go to such a great farm that was so close to ours. Maybe next summer I'll get a picture of her out on pasture with her new herd mates.
Comments: 1
01/20/2012 - 8:12am
I must have been a very good farmer this year, because Santa brought me a very nice present. How he ever fit that new Kuhn-Knight manure spreader on his sleigh I'll never know. I guess it was just magic. Seriously, it was Santa's helper, Eric from Harvest Equipment, who brought the new spreader behind his sleigh, a Chevy Silverado.
Since early fall, Ben had been working on me and his grandfather to trade manure spreaders. The spreader he was pushing for us to trade for, a Kuhn Knight ProSlinger V-tank spreader , would handle all the different types of material here on the farm, plus we could put sawdust and sand in the stalls using the spreader. No more shoveling. After many phone calls, emails, farm visits by the two competing farm machinery dealerships, and hours of figuring, Eric found the spreader model we needed at a machinery dealership in western New York. Once the paperwork was okayed by Kuhn, Eric sent a truck to bring the new spreader to Swanton and then he delivered it to the farm. He went over the new piece of equipment, answered any questions I had, gave me the obligatory baseball caps with the Kuhn Knight logos, and then pulled our old spreader away with his sleigh.
I know it seems silly to be excited about a manure spreader, but the spreader will make it easier to transport manure down the road (no danger of leaking out on the road), it will do a better job spreading the manure on the fields resulting in higher crop yields, and the fact it will save my back from shoveling sand and sawdust make it a worthwhile investment for the farm. Being a small family farm, we bought the smallest spreader since our tractors are only big enough to run that model. Most of our equipment purchases involve the smallest model in the equipment lineup, reminding of a book we read in a forestry class titled, "Small is Beautiful". It espoused the virtues of small scale operations, like our organic farm. I've had different ag people here on the farm comment that the dairy industry in Vermont was stronger when there were 10 small 50-cow dairies in a community instead of one 500-cow dairy.
We'll use the spreader to stack manure through the winter, because of the winter spreading ban here in Vermont, and come spring we'll enjoy using the new spreader to fertilize the meadows and make the grass grow. Thanks for the spreader, Santa Eric, and I'll be extra good all year to see what you "bring" me next! year!!
Comments: 1
About halfway through the morning milking, when it had begun to get light outside the milking parlor window, we could see steam rising from the sugarhouse across the road from the dairy barn. Yesterday afternoon had been too hot for Dad to boil in the sap we had gathered that day. Instead, he readied everything in the sugarhouse so he could start boiling early this morning to beat the unseasonably hot temperatures promised for the day.
I went to the sugarhouse after morning chores were done to see how Dad was doing. He looked pretty hot, but was doing okay. The storage tank, filled to the brim yesterday, had dropped quite a bit. The front pan was full of rich, fragrant brown bubbles, normal for a late season boiling even though it wasn't late, it was only the third week of March. I fed the fire box in the arch a couple of times for Dad, emptied the stainless steel pail full of hot, steamy syrup into the filters on top of the canning unit, and stacked up some firewood near the woodshed door before I skipped over to the house for a cup of coffee. By the time I went back over to the sugarhouse, Dad was on the homestretch of having the nearly 800 gallons of sap boiled down to just over 15 gallons of grade B maple syrup. For the last hour, I fired the arch, moved wood, and emptied the draw-off pail. I watched Dad move around the sugar rig, over 60 years of experience at work, checking the flow of sap regulated by the two floats on the pans, lifting the lid on the canning unit to see how the syrup was filtering, and filling the tall stainless steel cup with hot syrup while checking the syrup hydrometer floating in the liquid gold to see if it was thick enough.
The sap storage tank made a loud popping noise as it was released of its burden of sap. Time to quit boiling. Dad pulled the floats, and sap flowed into both pans as the fire turned to glowing embers in the arch firebox. I rolled the stainless steel 40-gallon syrup barrel out of the corner and under the spigot of the canning unit. Dad opened the spigot, and a stream of syrup as big as my pinky flowed into the barrel. "That's how I like to can syrup", Dad said. No gallon, half-gallon, quart, or pint containers to painstakingly fill, one by one. Eleven in the morning, and the sap was all boiled in. Dad said it was 43 degrees when he arrived at the sugarhouse at 6:00 AM, and now it was in the nineties with the heat of the wood fire and the sunshine and warm winds outside teaming up to make it almost unbearable inside. Now we were up to 65 gallons produced this year, and maybe this was it. With hot temperatures predicted for the rest of the week, most maple syrup producers were feeling that it would spell the end of this sugaring season. Well, a third of a crop is better than nothing. And this year, even the big producers with all the latest technology couldn't outdo Mother Nature!