Around The Farm...
Hello everybody!  Happy May!!  How are all of you doing?  Things are pretty crazy out here in Eighty Four, PA with all the May activities we have going on at The SpringHouse.  Allow me to share some of them with you.

 

April and May are out big Farm Tour months so right now, we are in the thick of farm tours.  Let me tell you about yesterday's.  We had almost two hundred people here (preschoolers and their parents) for a farm tour and most of them had already milked the cow, fed the calves and watched the modern milking in the milking parlor when Jane called me over to tell me a cow was having a calf in the maternity pen.  I hustled my group outside of the parlor to see this most amazing sight.  The cow was a first-calf heifer so she was having a little trouble.  Bill got the pulling links (one of my "tourers" called them the calf forceps, but they go around the calf's hooves, not her head), and he and Katrina tried with all their might to pull that huge calf out of the cow.  They were pulling so hard that they actually pulled the cow a foot or two through the sawdust.  Well, that calf was not budging!  We knew the calf was not in distress because his hooves were twitching and his tongue was flicking (they did get the calf's nose out enough to clean it out, but that was as far as he was going).  So my brother Sam got the pulling jack which works much like a car jack.  He fitted the U-shaped base around both side of the cows flanks (she was laying down, so one under her and one on top).  Then, he clipped the pulling links to the jack and slowly "jacked" the links tighter and tighter until the calf started sliding out.