The New Farmer School
  • Home
  • Education/Contact
  • Work Horse Clinics
  • General Store
  • Farmer Jon's Blog

Herman Nelson

3/30/2014

3 Comments

 
Picture







 
Andrea and I didn’t have thirteen children, but we did have something small, hairy, and unexpected arrive this December.  
 
Mable is our sole remaining milk cow.  This is after selling her mother, Mary.  It seems like a terrible thing, to sell someone’s mother, but Mable doesn’t seem to care.  Her mother was a full-blood Jersey, a breed prone to milk-fever, so we crossed her to a Milking Shorthorn sire, a breed not known for milk-fever.  This made sense, to us.  Mable has the red-and-white colouration of the dad, overlaid with a nice brindling.  
 
Now, here’s the thing about yaks: you can cross a yak with a cow, but the resulting bulls are sterile. The cows remain fertile.  Prevailing wisdom surrounding yaks says that if you wish to accomplish such a breeding, you must separate the yak bull together with the cow you wish to breed.  He is something of an elitist, you see, and will only breed a cow when the pickings get – or are rendered – slim. 
 
Mable was not separated from our small yak herd and we didn’t worry.  We thought one day we might separate her with Clint, our yak bull, when the time seemed right.  Anyway, she started bagging-up in early December, but not much, so we didn’t think much of it.  “She’s becoming a woman,” that sort of thing.  Nothing else to cause alarm seemed to be occurring.  
 
It got cold, so we put her in the old milking barn, the one built by Arnie Arnesson way back when and that we put a new metal roof on because it was on its last legs, although it should stand now for a long time.  Log barns, so the prevailing wisdom goes, don’t fall over, they just get more squat over time, like the folks that build them; and all the other folks, too.  We hope the prevailing wisdom surrounding log barns has more substance behind it than the prevailing wisdom surrounding yaks.  You see, it had only been a few days that Mable was snug in her barn when I went in and thought,
 
“Who let that mongrel in here with the cow?"
 
But I was wrong.  Mable had given birth.  A little calf was there, small, hairy, red-and-white like the mom, and already
  frolicking about, his name: Herman Nelson. Half-yak, one-quarter Jersey, one-quarter Milking Shorthorn.  Not only did we have a new calf, we had learned something more about Clint, our yak bull, Herman’s dad.  Something that we hadn’t thought about before, something that would not have occurred to us: he was not much of a reader.  And this is the thing about yaks, the other thing.  Their calves are small, like a sewing machine.  They make no more difference to the mother’s girlish shape than a couple of beers make to the shape of a long-haul trucker.  The result being that they tend to simply appear, if you are not watching closely.  If you do watch closely, they appear anyway.
 
Just like our ancestors did. 
 




3 Comments
koks link
2/8/2015 09:01:34 pm

I am really enjoying reading your well written articles. I think you spend numerous effort and time updating your site. I have bookmarked it and I am taking a look ahead to reading new articles&^^^^

Reply
body-bo link
10/26/2015 11:03:21 am

I also enjoy reading the comments, but notice that a lot of people should stay on topic to try and add value to the original blog post. I would also encourage everyone to bookmark this page to your favorite service to help spread the word. I'll use this information for my essay topics.

Reply
Stairlifts Ohio link
3/7/2023 11:04:34 am

Great reading this

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Have a look at our "Education/Contact" page for info on the author.

    Archives

    March 2020
    February 2020
    April 2014
    March 2014
    November 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011

    Categories

    All
    Cbc
    Celente
    Chicken Tractor
    Climate Change
    Clydesdale
    Cold Climate Gardening
    Dovecote
    Farm
    Lousy Filthy Arctic.
    Mob Grazing
    Organic
    Pastured Poultry
    Pigeon
    Politics
    Raised Beds
    Rock-dove
    Row Cover
    Shit Beetle
    Sustainable
    To Hell With Cows
    Yaks

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • Education/Contact
  • Work Horse Clinics
  • General Store
  • Farmer Jon's Blog