05/09/2026
We all try to post all the good things that happen or the good about our farm. Most of the time there’s nothing I’d rather be doing than farming but you have weeks like this one that remind you of the harsh realities that come with farming and especially livestock. We had a 3 month old calf die on us, it was fine one day and lethargic with high temp the next day and dead the next morning. I went to rotate cows and noticed that calf didn’t come up with the rest of the cattle, went and found it laying on the far side of the paddock by itself, which was very out of the ordinary for a calf that age. Got it moved to the corral and worked through the chute so I could get a temp reading, high fever as suspected. It was 7:30pm by this time, I had no meds on hand as the things it needed require a prescription from a vet, got ahold of vet about 8:30 pm and was scheduled to pick up meds first thing next morning, calf was gone by morning. We believe the calf caught pneumonia due to the drastic temperature swings we’ve had recently and the rain to go with the cooler temperatures. We were able to check our other calves and they all had low grade fevers but weren’t showing symptoms, hopefully we’ve got them all treated and everything goes back to normal. The saying with sick calves is “if they’re showing symptoms, the time to have treated them was yesterday “ and that’s pretty much how it is. This was a first for us to lose a calf that age, typically if you can get them past 2-3 weeks things are good until time to wean. I was told by an older cattleman when I was just starting out that the only way to learn things in the cattle business is by learning from your mistakes and the more costly the mistake the more you’ll learn.