New things I learned today!

After I dropped the girls off at school today, I went out to help Jake.  He said he needed help moving some cow/calf pairs to another pasture (which never actually happened).  He said first we needed to get a calf to nurse off a surrogate cow.

When a cow loses a calf it is a great loss.  I read once that it wouldn't be until it's second calf in two years before you can break even on that cow.  To offset costs, sometimes they will take a twin from a mother that abandons one of her calves and try to get the cow to own a twin.  You then have to pen up the cow and calf until that mother will "own" the new calf.  Sometimes the process goes easy, sometimes not.

Jake told me to take this ATV that has a cage and a bed to haul water to the cow and he would take the 4wheeler.  We had to haul the water a good ways.  Jake said look at this, if you put some blocks of wood in the buckets they won't slop out.  I said no way.  He said watch and see. Of course I wanted to know how it works.  He said "I don't know, some kind of Physics or something".  At any rate it does work.  So next time you have to haul water and you look all over for an empty and clean 5 gallon bucket (everybody knows how difficult that is) and you don't want to bother looking for a lid (if you even have one), just get the blocks of wood (that everyone has laying around).

Jake said follow me.  He took down the electric fence for me and we both went through and he put it back up. We went up to the barn, got the calf to nurse, gave the cow water and checked though the cows.  Jake then explained to me where he wanted me to take mineral  to put out to a group of cows.  He said go ahead and get the mineral and salt loaded up.  I went flying down over the hill probably at about 20-25 miles per hour and hit the electric fence without even breaking the buggy.  When something like this happens I always have flash backs to my childhood and I know my dad would've said "why don't you use your head".  I was thinking why did I do that - how stupid and then I laughed.  I called Jake and said "you are going to kick my @$$".  He laughed and said "you hit the fence didn't you."  He laughed and said go ahead, I'll fix it.

I didn't realize how serious it was,but apparently if you are riding a 4wheeler and this happens, you get closed lined and usually get thrown from the ATV and may end up in the hospital.  I hope I never make that mistake again.