The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.
2-24-2010 column
When I was a little girl, the only way I could be artistic was to “paint-by-numbers”.
I loved those kits. I would paint wild mustangs running through the gorges of New Mexico.
I would highlight a glistening dew drop clinging to a rose petal. I could pretend that I had some artistic talent, when in fact I couldn’t even draw a straight line with a ruler!
Because I “see” colors by numbers, I love when the Holstein classifier comes to our farm for type evaluations.
The job of a classifier is to describe an animal by numbers so that anyone can “see” what she looks like.
After he takes stock of the cow, his fingers start to fly across a numeric pad punching in numbers describing the animal’s front end capacity, rump, foot and leg, mammary system and dairy character.
Once the numbers are crunched into his hand held computer, it will spit out a final score so that a dairyman in Ontario can “see” what she looks like by her breakdowns.
With seven people on our farm that know how to clip cattle, classifying means everything in the barn got a spring haircut.
The clippers were buzzing, hair was flying and the barn was looking like a disaster with a few days to go before the classifier arrived.
Even though we have seven people who can clip, we only have two clippers that work at any given time.
In order to keep everyone busy, the show box was raided for extra curry combs, tail combs and brushes. If the cattle weren’t being clipped, they were being brushed.
Even a few were washed to bring out the contrast of their white and black markings. It is amazing how much lime dust and grime becomes plastered into the shedding hair on a cow’s back during the winter months.
By the time we were done, there wasn’t a cow curling her body and stretching her tongue to reach an annoying itch on the back side of her hip bone. In fact, I think the cattle
really enjoyed the spring cleaning. They seem very relaxed and rested, just like they came home from a week at the spa. When do we get a week of pampering?
We weren’t the only barn with clippers buzzing this month. The Holstein classifier scored from Pearson’s north of Duluth to southwestern Minnesota and many herds in between.
Brian comes from a dairy farm east of Indianapolis, Indiana and loves to talk about cows.
By the sounds of the winter storms raging across the central states,
I think he was glad to be in Minnesota where it has been a calm weather month.
As we were waiting for him to finish up at Hackett’s, we put on the finishing touches.
Extra straw for bedding, double limed the walk and kept guard against a cow making a mess in her stall.
Mark was up in the middle of the night to bag a few special young cows and again at the regular time for the rest of the herd.
He grabbed a quick nap while I kept watch in the barn. I felt like I was on State Fair duty without the mini-doughnuts and milk shakes.
I am not a very good dairy judge, but I am learning by listening.
As Brian explained his breakdowns and final score, I watched the animal and began to “see” the numbers as he described the open sweeping rib, body capacity, set to the leg and a high rear udder attachment.
We had a contest on the side to see if we could guess the final score of a couple of animals.
We have our opinions of what an animal should be scored, but we forget that personality is not a scoring trait. I have my favorites and the ones I think we can do without.
I am always surprised when the ones I like, score less than the ones that don’t like me.
Once Brian broke down their scores it made sense, but I still don’t like the one with the nasty attitude.
Saturday night we met in Joe Thell’s barn to eat pizza and talk about classifying. I think Brian hit most of the members of the Mid-MN Holstein Club this past week. We could still hear his reasons resonating in our heads for the breakdowns.
Channeling those thoughts, we tried to see if we could match his scores on three sisters in Joe’s barn. No one hit them all correctly, but three were only off by a point. Brian must have done a good job of “drawing by numbers”.
Now if I could take the clippers to a couple of shaggy heads in the house, everything would be clipped for spring.
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As their 4 children pursue dairy careers off the farm, Natalie and Mark are starting a new adventure of milking registered Holsteins just because they like good cows on their Minnesota farm. Natalie grew up in Stronghurst, the daughter of Becky and the late Larry Dowell.
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