Fly waiting patiently through a snow shower for her next command.
Well this whole scenario started with me looking down to the barn from the house to see a couple of the big steers (male bovines that have been castrated) walking around the front of the barn. Well you might say “so what?”. Well, the problem is they should not be there. They are currently closed up in a large field behind the barn. The closure between these two areas is a length of electric fence across the gate area about chest high on a cow. This allows the sheep to come and go but keeps the cattle closed from access around the front of the barn.
This separation is necessary due to the fact that the sheep need a little higher quality hay as they enter into their last eight weeks of gestation. This hay gets feed in the barn and I don’t want the cattle in there. Not to mention I have a couple more early ewes to lamb and I don’t want cattle around small lambs in tight spaces. That is a disaster waiting to happen.
Anyway back to the story…. So I saw these steers in a place they shouldn’t be and I thought that the sheep must of broken the electric on their last pass underneath. This happens sometimes as one ewe will hit it just right and catch the electric up in her wool. This does not shock her as wool must not be a good conductor of electricity. The electric will break if it snags just right.
In traveling to the barn I thought that was the scenario I would find. Upon arrival at said piece of electric I found that it was not broken. This really caught me by surprise as there is plenty of power on that stretch of fence due to it being close to the box that it is powered from. So then I wondered what in the world would of possessed these animals to go under this electric which would of ensured a good shock. I followed them around the field as I wanted to get on the other side of them to take them back to where they belonged.
By the time I caught up with them they were at the waterer in the other field. They didn’t spend to long there until moving on. As I drove by the waterer I noticed the balls were all the way in the bottom. We water our cattle with automatic waterers. These work similar to a toilet. There is a float in the centerthat turns the water on when it begins to drop (for example when the stock are drinking) and then shuts the water back off once the float is raised to the original position. Our wateres are four ball waters. This means that four cows could drink at a time. They have to push a disc shaped piece of plastic down to access the water. This disc or ball helps the waterers to keep from freezing in cold temperatures.
Coldest evening so far this winter. The horses wanting grain.
So I immediately knew what the problem was. The livestock didn’t have any water. The steers had gotten to the point where it was worth going through the electric to find water. As soon as they found no water in the waterer they had gone through the electric for they continued on to where they knew the next waterer was.
As soon as I found out what the problem was I rushed to the house to turn on the back up water supply to the waterers. This immediately began pushing water to all the necessary places. By the time I got back to the next waterer in the line the steers were there getting what they were willing to risk getting shocked for, that satisfying drink of water.
As soon as their bellies were full I headed them back in the direction of home. It wasn’t too much trouble to get them back into the correct field. In hind sight I am really glad that those animals dared the electric because it would of been the next morning at the earliest that I would of found out that there wasn’t any water.
You might be asking why we use waterers verses just allowing the livestock access to the ponds and streams on the farm. The answer to that is that JMD Farm is a member of CREP. This stands for Conservation Reserve Enrichment Program. It is one of many programs that we participate in to better the environment. More on that later.