Posted by: tlnemethy | October 13, 2013

A Lick and A Fondling

The cows and I seem to be getting along quite nicely. Usually, they’re pretty skittish and avoid you entirely unless you happen to be feeding them. But lately, I’ve been doing at least one feeding a day and have started to push their boundaries a bit. All the cows have a sweet Flintstones-esque hairdo because they brush up against a lot of burrs and stick tights when we have them forage outside the barn paddock. I’m sure it itches. Their tails are covered in them too and if they ever swing it at you it really hurts because it’s solid burr.  A pain in the ass, sure. But adorable to look at.

It must have just been a really mild day for the cows, but I had the best afternoon ever yesterday. First, 18 licked my face. This is a big deal since I’m always trying to touch the cows and they just shoot me this glare before darting off to eat at a different pile of hay. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. Anyways, I was kneeling down at the fence posts, pretty much creeping on Little Toe interacting with the other calf when I see 18 casually stroll over to me and put her head through the rails. I didn’t move a muscle. In fact, I really didn’t even want to shift my glance at her because that slight of a motion might have set her running. 18

She has to turn her head sideways to get it through the slats because her head is just so massive. She’s a big Bessie. She checks out the bill of my ball cap, sniffing it noisily while I get a clear view inside a nostril. I’m still motionless. Then she moves down my hat to my face, giving me the best close up of her shiny nose that I’m probably ever gonna get. She sniffs at my mouth and suddenly I’m very aware that I just ate a large slice of apple zucchini bread. I smell like dessert. She wants to eat my face. Then out comes her oversized cat-tongue. Basically, it was like soggy sandpaper grating off half my cheek. At least I don’t need to exfoliate that side tonight.  She smelled like warm hay. Probably because she’d just been eating it, but it made me wonder if they always smell like hay.

She backed away after realizing that I did not taste like an apple. But I think her interest in me sparked some from the rest. Everyone came over to congregate by the fence. I felt ogled…and it was wonderful. I stood up and reached out to the nearest cow, anticipating a hasty retreat, but was shocked to find the cow totally cool with me touching her forehead. I rubbed her head for like fifteen minutes before my hand got tired and I just let it dangle there. Then, like a really big dog, she started nudging my hand with her head. My eyes were probably bugged out and I know for a fact that I had a goofy-ass expression on my face. Of course, I resumed the petting more vigorously and with an added gusto.

These cows are stoking my ego.

Leave a Comment

Posted in Brixey Or Bust: Organic Farming | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: tlnemethy | October 6, 2013

Big Toe and Little Toe

There is now a smallish, fluffy, knobby-kneed creature stilting around the barn corral that wasn’t there when I first arrived in the Ozarks. She’s cute and curious, also stubborn in her search for milk, and she’s been ceremoniously named after me. Tori. Little Tori, the cow.DSCF0221

I missed her birth. We’d been venturing guesses as to her due date practically from the moment I stepped foot in the barn, but there were no real indicators. It could be a few weeks or it could be in a handful of days. Cows are hard to read sometimes, especially when the mother is a first time heifer. Nine months that little girl was cooking away in her mother. Like a little person. Nine months.

Good things come to those who wait, right?

Well, I just so happened to take the night of her birth to drive my car down the rock-laden road to get some cell reception and call my mother. It’d been a while since there isn’t a great cell reception in the middle of the boonies. That, and my car really should get up and stretch her metaphorical legs every once in a while so she doesn’t get too sedentary and lose all her will to run.

I called my mum all excited. There were so many tales to be told and I was bursting at the seams since we’d been playing phone tag for a bit. I was idling there in the vacant lot of an old church and just chatting away about the farm and the cows and the snake sightings. And in that moment, I was missing the birth. Damn. Just my luck.

DSCF0225

She even scowls like me

But once I got back to the farm and noticed a small-scale jujube sorting session in my kitchen, I was notified of an interesting tidbit. Apparently, the calf would be named after me if it was a girl. If it was a boy it’d have been name Twayne. I was stoked, but the odds of it being a girl seemed pretty slim since statistically they’ve only calved a handful of girls in forty years of farming. Boys, boys, boys. There must be something in the Ozark water.

Well, we all know that it happened to be a girl. I very well might have teared up a bit when I found out that I now had a legacy at the farm. So touching. I don’t think I would have felt more profoundly ecstatic if my legacy had been a child rather than a cow.

The first time I wandered down to the barn and saw her, she was curled up by her mom. Just a jumble of bony angles and sharp points. Precious. I was supposed to take a picture of her and feed the rest of the herd all in one fell swoop.

Holding out the pat of hay to her mom, I craned my neck as far to the side as it could get, just to glimpse the little one bumping around on her udder. Mom grabbed some hay from my hand and chewed noisily, her body mostly positioned between baby and me. I threw down a few more pats, scattering them a bit around the opposite side of the heifer in the chance of getting a cute picture. Stumbling around, Tori wobbled her way over to me and just looked at me while I crouched in the barn muck. We were eye to eye. She blinked at me a few times with her dopey eyes and then returned to her search for milk.

As much fun as it is having a namesake, it’s also really weird to hear your name discussed randomly throughout the day, often times catching me off-guard thinking I’m actually the one being discussed. To remedy this dilemma, we resorted to my near-constant moniker of Toe. Now, I’m Big Toe and the calf is Little Toe. Confusion solved.

Leave a Comment

Posted in Brixey Or Bust: Organic Farming | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: tlnemethy | October 3, 2013

Take My Strong Hand

Similar to the feeling my hands felt in Naknek, Alaska, my poor wittle fingers are now like those of an arthritic retired carpenter. I wake up in the morning and flex everything out, just for a morning routine that ensures I am, in fact, still alive and kickin’. Kickin’ is an exaggeration, of course. I can barely walk through my tight calves and decimated toes. Damn you frostbite for making my little piggies weak!

Not sure what the deal is with the fingers though. It probably has to do with the countless hours spent pulling the devil’s hair out of the earth. Part of the wonders of organic farming include no pesticides to kill those pesky weeds that we take for granted. In place of those pesticides, there is me. I’ve been working on a single blueberry patch covered in Bermuda grass for over a week, most of it wasn’t solo either. The first day three of us spent hours pulling the stubborn hell weed from around the fragile looking limbs of tiny blueberry bushes and didn’t even come close to finishing the row. I have a personal vendetta raging around the weeds of the blueberry patch.

We moved on from weeding to a wonderful new adventure called barn mucking. Apparently, the idea of clearing as a mess is made does not indeed relate to barns and cow shit. Instead, a new layer of hay is added to the shitty floor of the stall after it gets too mucky. This makes one hell of a layer cake of heavy, wet-concrete thick, shit paste. It was awesome.

From camp, we learned that I was an amazing shit mover. It’s a gift, really. Cow shit, pig shit, not too much of a difference. About halfway through the four hours it took to effectively clear out over a foot and a half of tramped down poopy I was toasted. My meager muscles were pissed at me and I was winded to boot. But I was smiling. I’d developed a system to pick up the muck with my pitchfork, a well thought up plan of scooping what seemed like it’d be way too effortless of a scoop and then being surprised with the strain it took to shift my fork a foot in the air and around a corner before being deposited on the growing mountain of stink. Might I add that the barn walls were covered in an intricate lacework of spider webs built for maximum scaring effect and also optimal mobility. I avoided wall segments, but you couldn’t help but see their spindly legs poking out of corners or see the flash of movement as they retreated back inside their den tunnels.

Like working at camp socialized me to children, Missouri is socializing me to countless spiders that like to lurk in barns and on the stems of weeds I’m pulling. Snakes too, really. I had the pleasure of riding in a truck bed after dropping off a mound of weeds and brush only to see a snake flicker its tongue at me from the other wheel well. Little dudes are little dudes, but finding yourself sitting in a truck bed with a slithery fellow is mildly disconcerting anyways.

Snake count to this day: three slithering, and one in a freezer bag. Spider count: However many minutes I spend outside on a daily.

Leave a Comment

Posted in Brixey Or Bust: Organic Farming | Tags: , , , ,

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Categories