The earliest Easter for 95 years, coupled with a rather dreary spring has kind of thrown us all out. Calving started while the cows where in the barn, and with the odd snow flurry and bitter night time temperatures there was little prospect of turning them all out. However, a winter barn with four months worth of manure underfoot is no place for a newborn calf, and so the mums and babies have to brave it out in the elements. This led to three of them developing ‘dickey’ tummies and requiring twice daily doses of scour tablets and re-hydration drinks.

These are a simple combination of sodium diacetate and glucose (salt & sugar to you and me) which is administered by diluting with 2 litres of water. A simple and effective solution which both provides the calves with all they need while restricting the amount of mothers milk they will intake.

How do you get a calf to willingly take 2 litres of medicinal potion twice a day? Well in this we are added by a clever gadget known as a Calf Reviver, which is an humane force–feeding device consisting of a long clear tube attached to a plastic bottle. You gently insert the tube into the calves mouth and ease it down its throat to a marked point on the tube – this will ensure the end is well past the wind pipe. You then hold the bottle in the air at arms length so that the fluid is gravity-fed into the calf’s stomach.

This is actually much easier than it sounds and would be painless for both calf and farmer if it were not for the perverse attitude of the cow. Instead of standing back and quietly thanking you for treating their loved-ones, our Galloway cows tend to take great exception to you manhandling their offspring.

If you are lucky they will contain their protest to bellowing loudly while pawring the ground with their front hooves. This type of angry mum can be kept at bay by an accomplice with a large stick to wave. The more aggressive mums will chase you round the field as soon as look at you and over the years there have been more injuries on farms attributed to cows with calves than to bulls.

One of our mothers fell into this extreme category and so we had to develop a new technique using the pick-up truck.

The driver (Cathy or Mitchell) would drive into the field and position the truck between the cow and calf, which would leave the passenger (me) a couple of vital seconds to leap out, pick up the calf and toss it into the pick-up bed, nimbly jumping in after it before (hopefully) the cow had the chance to circumnavigate the truck. We would then drive across the field with the cow in hot pursuit while I administered the medicine in the back. Once treated, it is a simple matter to stop the truck, lower the calf over the side and drive off into the sunset leaving the mother to reunite with her beloved!