If there is one thing I want my boys to learn, it’s that.  Although you would really need to talk to my friends, Phil or Sid, to see if it holds any value or if it’s just a bunch of fodder. 

In some ways, I really wonder if we know what we are doing starting calves.  We’ve done it now for close to 15 years, but in a lot of ways, it still feels like we are beginners at it.

We started with two little red bottle calves that we (surprisingly) kept alive and later sold at small profit.  We soon moved on from bottle calves to buying a few calves locally and turning them out on the pasture for the summer. 

Later, we expanded to start calves that we had shipped in. 

It felt good to get a few loads from Texas.  For some reason, Texas and cattle are synonymous in my mind.  As we worked those calves and grew them up it seemed like we were part of a long line of cattlemen, past, present, and on into the future.  I felt bad for one load especially, they came from a sunny mid-80’s south Texas day to a misty cold Kansas day hovering in the mid 20’s.  They did exceptionally well health wise. 

We got a few loads from Alabama.  They were some sharp looking calves.  Austin thought we could walk a load from one pen without an alley to another, straight off the truck.  I disagreed.  But we tried it anyway and about 30 of them split off to go find their mama.  It took most of the afternoon and some good-hearted neighbors help to get them all back in.  I wondered if they would make it or not, as hard as we had run them, but they all did.

But my heart turned to mush when I saw our loads come in from Pennsylvania.  The Alabama calves looked a lot classier, so it wasn’t the Pennsylvania’s looks that drew me in.  They were good looking calves, don’t get me wrong.  It was the long journey I knew they were on that tore me up.  That journey had pulled them off mama 5-6 days before, then to a strange sale barn lot for a couple days that had every bug known to make a calf sick.  Next it put them on the truck for a solid 30 hours, and finally offloaded them here.  Ahead of them waited viruses that were even then maturing inside them, ready to lay them flat out if they ever gave in.  Ahead of them waited pneumonia, so potent they stood gasping in its straight jacket for 3 days before finally giving in to that final, fatal gulp for air.  Ahead of them waited excruciating heat, wind and dust.  Ahead of them waited foot rot, pink eye, and millions of flies.  Ahead of them, humans, with good, but sometimes flawed, intentions.  Ahead of them all this waited, and they had been on such a hard journey already.  I think that is why my heart turned to mush when I saw them offload, and why, when they died, it took something out of me.

Whether they came from Alabama, Pennsylvania, or Texas, one thing remained front and center in my mind when I was out there, getting them started during their first few weeks here.

Keep the Bunk Clean.

Sure, they have some high-powered drugs out there to save your sick calf.  But those drugs can’t begin to turn their trick if your calf’s stomach isn’t working. 

If you see your bunk has more than crumbs in it 4 hours after you fed them, you have something wrong.  And the first thing you need to do is scoop your bunk clean.

I don’t care if you think that feed is still good.  Get off your bum and get busy.  Scoop it out.  That feed in the bunk says one of two things—either you over fed, or someone out there is getting sick, and you had better start giving them all a hard eye until you see who it is.  If you leave feed in the bunk, chances are, it’ll start tasting off and then the ones thinking about getting sick for sure won’t eat. 

Face it.  Your calf has four stomachs.  I don’t know what percent of its body those stomachs take up, but if they aren’t working right, because of too much feed or they are sick, that’s four times more trouble than you and I have when we go off feed.  And the sooner you can get the problem fixed the better.

Now I don’t feel like I need to keep on sermonizing necessarily.  I’m quite sure I ain’t got the qualifications of a preacher.  But I venture to say, if each one of us could do the same for ourselves, be rather diligent, so to speak, about making our mistakes right on the same day we made em’, and keep an eye out for any sickness starting to happen, that life might spin along quite a bit better than we thought.

Keep the Bunk Clean.