The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.
Experience is a wonderful teacher if we pay attention and learn our lessons well the first time. For example, a farm kid will grab an electric fence on purpose just once in their life. My heart still goes into palpations every time I have to stretch the hot wire gate shut to complete the connection as I put French Toast out in the pasture every night. Even as my fingers gingerly pull the yellow connection handle to the hook, I just know somehow the electrical current will jump into my body again.
When we were little, my dad told us kids not to touch the wire fence. It was “hot”. We would stick our faces up to the thin wire and wonder how it could be “hot”. We would help dad pound temporary posts and string a single wire around the harvested corn fields every fall. Once the fence was completed we would turn the cows out in the field to clean up after the combine. We struggled to understand how this little piece of wire was strong enough to keep these big beef cows corralled in the fields and off the road.
After repeated warnings, Dad decided to let us learn our lesson the hard way. Curiosity eventually pulled us to the edge of a choice. Do we trust what Dad told us? Or do we just touch it to see how hot it really was? We touched the wire. At that shocking moment we saw the wisdom of our father’s words. Our bodies were surged with heat as the electrical current sent a shock wave from our fingers, through our bodies and out our toes. We released our grip and dropped to the ground in shock. Our hearts were pounding as if we just finished a marathon race. Needless to say, once was enough for me to learn my lesson to steer clear of electrical fences. No amount of time has erased or even dulled the pain of that shocking lesson. I totally respect a hot wire fence, plugged in or not!
Yet, time has a way of warping our memories of other painful lessons learned and forgotten. For example, labor pains. In the middle of a hard contraction, you can’t remember for the life of you why you agreed to do this! But after time has passed and the painful memories have decreased in their intensity, you’re ready to do it all over again! Thankfully time replaced those few moments of pain with the joyful memory of holding your newborn child for the first time. Helping me to deliver our children, Mark developed a new sense of respect for our cows during calving. He became more patient and empathic toward the cow’s struggle to push the calf out on her terms and on her own time table. He isn’t so quick to grab the chains and to get this over with anymore.
Sometimes lessons learned by experience are forgotten because we see a potentially brighter future. Time can also erase your reasoning for culling an animal right after she calves.
Turquoise was a great framey 2 year old, but lacked the ability to produce high quality milk. We tried to save her, but soon realized her most valuable asset was the calf she was carrying.
She was at the perfect point in her pregnancy to ultra sound the sex of the calf.
The vet was shocked by our disappointment when he announced she was carrying a heifer. This meant we had to keep her over winter instead of shipping her the next day.
Since we decided she wasn’t going to come back into the milk line, we dried her up and kicked her out to the pasture until it was time to deliver her heifer calf.
For the next several months we forgot about Turquoise and her milk quality issues. She was out of sight and out of mind. Then we noticed on the calving chart, she was due to deliver soon. We brought her home to calve. Wow! Being out all winter did wonders for her. She looked great. She filled out her frame. Her udder was balanced, bloomy and beautiful. Memories and reasons for putting her on the cull list were fading fast. We started to envision the next 90 point 3 year old in the barn with her combination of frame and udder. She delivered a healthy heifer calf. We milked Turquoise for the colostrums to help her daughter off to a good start.
After the first milking, we were drawn to the edge of making a decision. At that moment, we seemed to forget why we had dried her off early. We saw the future potential of this cow. We decided to give her another chance to be a great cow.
Looking back, we should have stuck to the original plan of delivering a healthy heifer calf and shipping the cow right afterwards. Instead of promise and potential, we had vet bills and troubles. Her poor milk quality returned and she ended up with a d.a. We quit milking her and kicked her out the door again. She went back on pasture until she put on enough weight to ship. In our defense, she did look beautiful when she calved. We kept looking at the promise and potential and forgetting the reality of her milking abilities.
I’m sure another cow on the SAC list (ship after calving) will have the same second chance Turquoise did. Some will earn their way off the list and others will reaffirm why they were on the list to begin with. We just seem to keep forgetting the lessons learned from earlier experiences or we just see too much potential and a second chance to make it work.
I guess the lesson I’ve learned from these experiences is you have to take a chance at least once to learn not to touch a hot wire fence.
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As their four children pursue dairy careers off the family farm, Natalie and Mark are starting a new adventure of milking registered Holsteins just because they like good cows on their farm north of Rice, Minnesota. (Natalie grew up in Stronghurst, the daughter of Becky and the late Larry Dowell.)
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