Humped up against the rain, sleet and snow, here are a few of the calves. Look close-the black ones are hard to see. There are 8 now, 12 days into the calving season; 3 from the Hereford bull and 5 from the Angus. I had hoped there would be more-like maybe 12-but I can't control everything and the bulls are obviously doing their jobs. All the births have been natural and easy (easy for me, anyway). Several more cows look close, so we'll just keep checking and counting. This is one of our favorite times of year.
You can see that the rain and the mild winter so far have the pastures pretty green. The grass is very short, but it must taste good and the cows are keeping their weight up despite less-than-stellar hay quality. I have 30 bales of better hay I'm saving in case there isn't any grass or they start losing weight. Once their calves are a month or 2 old it's hard for them to get enough food to make milk and get ready to re-breed and not lose some weight. One of our native winter grasses is called Rescue Grass, since it comes at the exact time we need it to supplement their diets.
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