A Year on a Dairy Farm

3. Chapter 03 March A Calf Is Born

It is two-fourteen in the morning, and Tom is at the gate of the calving pen with a mug of coffee he is mostly not drinking, and Hazel is going to do this on her own.

He came out at one-thirty. She had given him the look. The look is something a farmer who has watched a hundred cows calve learns to read without being able to explain — a way of holding the head, separated slightly from the herd, ears not quite forward, eyes turned more inward than outward. At nine-thirty the night before, on his last walk-through, he had seen it on her, only just, and known. He went to bed in his clothes. He set the alarm for one. He woke up at twelve-fifty without it.

Now he is here, in the half-dark of the calving pen, which is a separate pen at the back of the barn deep with fresh clean straw, the kind that smells faintly sweet and crackles when you walk on it. There is one cow in the pen. Hazel is lying down on her side. Her legs are stretched out. Her tail is up. There is a clear glistening sac the size of a basketball emerging from her, and inside it, you can see two small front hooves.

This is what is supposed to happen.

A cow is pregnant for two hundred and eighty days. Which is to say a cow’s pregnancy is three days shorter than a human’s, almost exactly, which feels like a fact someone made up but is not. Over those nine and a third months a calf grows from a single fertilized cell to an animal weighing seventy or eighty or ninety pounds, with a working circulatory system, a working nervous system, four chambers of stomach folded up and waiting to inflate, a tongue, a coat, eyelashes, hooves. It grows inside the warm dim country of the cow’s body, fed by her blood, breathing through her placenta, suspended in fluid that is the same temperature as her insides.

When it is ready to come out, several things happen at once. The cow’s cervix begins to dilate — a slow soft opening that can take six hours or more, and during which she will stop eating, stand and lie down repeatedly, walk to the back of the herd, look at her flank as though checking on someone behind her. This is the hours-long thing Tom watched at nine-thirty and called the look. After dilation, what is called active labor begins, and the calf, who has been positioned head-first inside the cow for the last few weeks of pregnancy, starts moving toward the world.

The first thing to come out is not the calf. It is a sac of fluid — the amniotic sac, the inner of the two membranes that have been holding the calf — and it appears at the cow’s vulva like a translucent gray-pink water balloon. This is what Tom is looking at now. Inside it, a small dark shape is visible: two front hooves and the tip of a nose, side by side, the way the calf is meant to come.

A normal calf comes nose-first, front feet first, like a swimmer diving off a board. The feet appear, then the nose tucked between them, then the head, and once the head is out the rest of the calf comes quickly, in one long slippery slide, because the shoulders are the widest part of him. If the calf is positioned wrong — if his head is bent back, if he is coming backwards, if a leg is folded under — the farmer has to intervene. Tom has done this. He has reached up inside a cow with a chain and a glove and a steady arm and turned a calf and pulled him through. He is good at it. He does not enjoy it. Tonight he will not need to do it.

Hazel pushes, and the front legs come further. She pushes, and the nose appears.

It is two-thirty-one when the calf is fully out, and he is enormous, and he is alive, and he is — Tom can see this in the half-light, even before Hazel has stood up — a heifer. A female calf.

For the next thing in the book to make sense, you have to know what would have happened if she had not been.

About half of all calves born on a dairy farm are male. They cannot become dairy cows. A male calf grows up to be a bull, and a bull does not give milk. So on every dairy farm in the world, every day, in equal numbers to the female calves who will replace their mothers in the milking string, male calves are born who have no place in the dairy system at all.

What happens to them depends on the farm. On the worst farms, in some parts of the world, male calves are killed shortly after birth. This is not typical in the United States, but it happens. On most American dairy farms, male calves are kept for a few weeks, fed milk replacer, and sold to a veal operation or a beef operation. On a farm like Tom’s, male calves stay in a hutch for the first three or four months alongside the female calves, are fed the same way, and then are sold to a local beef farmer who raises them on grass to about eighteen months and sells the meat. Tom does not name the male calves. The female calves get names because they are going to be on the farm for years; the male calves get tags, because they are not.

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