A Year on a Dairy Farm · March: A Calf Is Born

March: A Calf Is Born, part 2

This is part of the system. It is not hidden. It is just how it works. There is no version of dairy — no organic version, no grass-fed version, no European version, no small-farm version, no version anyone has yet figured out — in which half the calves born do not need to be male. The cow has to be pregnant to give milk; pregnancy makes calves; half the calves are male; the male calves do not give milk. That sentence is the entire arithmetic.

The calf in the straw in front of Tom is a heifer. She will stay on the farm. In two years she will have her first calf and join the milking string. She is, in the language of the farm, a replacement — a cow being raised to replace, eventually, a cow who is no longer here.

But all of this is for later. Right now she is wet and steaming in the cold air and she has just been born.

Hazel rolls onto her chest. She rests for a moment. Then, in one slow heaving motion, she stands up, and the umbilical cord, still attached, breaks where it is supposed to break, and a little blood lands in the straw, and Hazel turns around and begins to do what cows do.

She licks her calf.

She does not stop licking her calf for forty minutes. She licks her starting at the head — the wet sticky head — and works downward, methodically, with a tongue the size and shape of a thick wet washcloth. She licks the membrane off the calf’s face. She licks the calf’s eyes open. She licks the calf’s neck, her shoulders, her flanks, her belly, her legs. She turns the calf over with her nose so she can lick the other side. The calf is breathing. The calf opens her eyes. The calf does not yet know what eyes are.

Tom watches from outside the gate. He does not go in. There are things he will need to do — he will need to dip the calf’s navel in iodine to prevent infection, he will need to make sure the calf gets colostrum, the rich first milk that contains the antibodies the calf needs to survive her first weeks of life — but he does not need to do any of them yet. Right now Hazel is doing what Hazel was made to do. The licking is not just affection, though it is also affection. The licking dries the calf, stimulates her circulation, warms her, helps her breathe. The licking is what the calf needs in order to live, and Hazel knows it without knowing she knows it.

It is two-fifty-six. The calf, still wet, still mostly Hazel’s tongue, lifts her head.

A calf, if she is healthy, stands within the first hour of life. She does this on her own. She does it badly at first. It takes her several attempts, with much sliding and folding of legs and unexpected sitting down. Hazel keeps licking her. The calf, in the middle of being licked, decides to try standing again. Her front legs come out first. She gets her head up. She gets one back leg under her. The other back leg gets confused. She falls over.

This is normal. Tom does not help.

By three-fifteen the calf is standing, swaying, her head down, on legs that look impossibly long for the rest of her. By three-twenty she has taken her first step. By three-twenty-five she is looking for the udder, by smell — she does not know what an udder is, but she knows a thing about her mother’s body draws her — and she finds a teat, and she latches.

The first milk a cow makes is not regular milk. It is colostrum: thick, yellow, sticky, incomparably rich in antibodies and growth factors and nutrients. The calf is born with no immune system to speak of. She gets her immune system from the colostrum, in the first few hours of life, through a window that closes by about twenty-four hours. After that, her gut can no longer absorb the antibodies whole. Tom will, in a little while, milk Hazel separately and bottle-feed the calf to make sure she gets the full amount; that is the modern dairy practice, and it has measurably reduced calf mortality. But this first drink, right now, in the dark, from her mother — is its own thing. Tom watches for a few seconds and looks away.

He goes inside the pen, kneels in the straw, dips the calf’s umbilical stump in a small cup of iodine. The calf does not seem to notice. Hazel does not seem to notice. He walks back out and closes the gate.

It is three-thirty-eight. He is going to bed.

At seven the next morning Anna comes down to the barn in a pair of his old rubber boots and her grandmother’s coat. Tom is back in the parlor with Marcelino. The cows have been milked. The barn is in its full daytime version of itself, which is a different country from the country of three a.m.

“Did she come?”

“She came.”

“Is it —”

“Heifer.”

Anna’s whole face lights up the way it has been lighting up since she was four. She walks down to the calving pen. Hazel is standing at the bunk, eating, the long ropy strands of baleage sticking out of her mouth, the placenta passed and removed, her tail crusted with the small dried evidence of the night. The calf is in the straw, dry now, brown-and-white, blinking, awake, exhausted. Anna kneels at the gate and looks at her for a long time.

“What’s her name?”

This is a thing Tom does for the heifer calves born in the night when Anna is home: he lets her name them. He has done it since she was eight.

“Up to you.”

Anna thinks about it. The calf looks back at her with the slow unfocused gaze of a creature who arrived in the world four and a half hours ago and is still working out what most of it is.

“Mabel.”

“Mabel,” Tom says.

He writes it down in the herd book that afternoon. Mabel. Born March 14, 2:31 a.m. Dam: Hazel #47. Sire: 7HO15428. The sire number is the bull whose semen Tom paid for last May. Mabel’s father is a bull who lives in Wisconsin and whom none of them have ever seen and who has, by genetic arithmetic, several hundred daughters scattered across small farms in the upper Midwest and the Northeast that he also has never seen.

For now: Mabel.

By the next evening Mabel is in a hutch.

A hutch is a small individual outdoor pen — a fiberglass dome the size of a doghouse, attached to a wire pen about six feet square, bedded deep in straw — and on Tom’s farm there are eight of them in a row along the south wall of the heifer barn, where the sun warms them. Mabel will live in hers for the next eight weeks. She will be fed twice a day from a bucket: pasteurized milk that comes from her mother and the rest of the milking string, warmed to the right temperature, delivered by Sarah or by Marcelino or by Tom. She will not nurse from Hazel again.

This is the part of dairy that the smartest readers of this book will already have known was coming. It is the part that is hardest to write warmly because there is nothing warm about it. The calf and the cow are separated. They can hear each other for a day or two — Hazel will bellow for Mabel from the milking string; Mabel will bellow back from the hutch. After a few days they stop. Within a week Hazel is back in her routine. Within a month Mabel has bonded to whichever person feeds her morning and night, and that person is a substitute for what she briefly had.

Why is this done? There are reasons. Some are good. Some are pragmatic. The good reasons are about disease — the calf’s gut and immune system are vulnerable in the first weeks, and individual housing reduces transmission — and about ensuring she gets the right amount of colostrum, which is much harder to confirm if she is nursing free-form. The pragmatic reason is that the cow’s milk is what the farm sells. A calf nursing from her mother for twelve weeks would drink several thousand dollars’ worth of milk over that time, and the farm would not exist.

There is a small but growing movement of dairy farms — some in Europe, a few in the U.S. — experimenting with cow-calf dairying, in which the calf stays with the mother for months. The early data suggest both cow and calf are happier. The economics are very hard. Tom knows about it. He has thought about it. He has not done it.

What he does instead is what most small grass-based organic farmers do. He keeps Mabel in a clean dry hutch where she is well-fed and well-cared for, and he tells himself, accurately, that she is treated better than calves on most American dairy farms, and that this is true does not change the other thing that is also true, which is that she is not with her mother.

It is dusk on the second day. Tom does the evening walk-through. The barn is settling. The milking string is back in the stalls. The dry cows are in their pen at the back. Hazel is among the milkers now, eating, her udder full and beginning the work it will do for the next three hundred days.

Out behind the heifer barn, in the eight hutches in a row, eight calves are settling for the night. Mabel is the newest of them. She is curled in a half-circle in the deep straw of her hutch, her head tucked against her flank, her eyes closed. The straw is warm from her body. She is two days old.

Tom stops at her hutch for a moment and watches her sleep.

“Mabel,” he says, quietly, to no one.

Then he closes the gate of the heifer yard, and walks back across the pasture lane in the gathering dark, toward the house, where the lights are on and Sarah is making dinner and Anna is at the kitchen table doing homework she should have done two days ago. The barn is quiet behind him. The cows breathe. Somewhere in the middle of the milking string, Hazel chews her cud.

It is a beginning.

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