My Bull’s Acting Crazy + Why I’m Happy About It

Good morning, Mr. Brown. You up and at them with your Jeep? The dump trucks are here. We're getting loads of mulch for our orchards, our berry patches and orchards coming in. We're gonna be working on that Monday and Tuesday. What's the matter with it, Mr. Brown?

It's out of battery.

You let the battery go? Yeah, well, they drive this thing into the ground, that battery. Okay, I will. Let's make sure we can even start the tractor because we might not even be moving that. Our mower's in the shop. We need to move this trailer. We need to finish working on the lane system to extend it a little bit further so we can— the cows need a fresh paddock today. A lot of our success is going to depend on this starting. It says it's charged. It was dead yesterday. Let's see. Not yet, Mr. Brown.

Hold on.

1, 2, 3. Nothing. There, there we go. Here we go. No, gosh, come on.

That feels better.

This thing is dead as dead. All right, back to the old faithful. Here's the wheelbarrow with lots of our supplies. Okay, right here the cows have been. You can't barely tell with the camera, but over here is fresh uneaten grass. We need to get them in here. We got to run this perimeter along the road. I'd say if we can get up to there, we're probably doing pretty good. And then we'll run a temp line across and I'll have this paddock for a couple of days. There's a lot of grass in here. Josiah, if you're feeling saucy come clear a path right through here to that line right there. I'd say you equip between a machete, an axe, a hatchet, a knife. I think you can probably handle this job.

Jonah's knife.

Good night. All right, we got this perimeter up. We don't We do only have time to do one strand, so I opted for the bottom strand as opposed to the top because I think the cow's more likely to go under than over, and this will help keep the calf in. The cows are also more likely to stay in if the calf's going. Josiah, we got to do the cross fence and then we got to mend the lane. If all goes well, we won't be too late. We have about 12 minutes.

All right, here we go.

Just, uh, let's take this. We'll come back We'll come back for our line for it, huh? Should we do it all at once? We'll come back.

Yeah, we'll do it and come back.

Right through there, Josiah. You did it. You cleared us away.

Yeah.

The last one, Josiah. We had one spare. We've got our fence up now. It's all ready for them to come in. Now we just have to fix their lane. We have 2 minutes. Point it down at me. So it looks like all we lack here, Josiah, is a gap from here to here. We got our rope up here. That's gonna be an easy fix. Boom! There it is, buddy. We did it. They can go down all the way and get there. But guess what? Work continues. Because that's just a couple of days, and then we got to keep going. So we got more perimeter and cross fence to go. But the good thing about this is once these lanes and these perimeters are established, it's breeze. It's going to be a breeze moving these cows to our property. Goal is to find— they're way over there. Less than 15 minutes, we can take them way over there. Behind the house and that other pasture. That's across the entire farm. Come on, Flossie. We think that Flossie might be coming into heat. Stud Muffin's been extra interested. Oh shoot, we didn't, uh, put up the gate at the road. You think they'll behave? All right, let's risk it. Okay, we're gonna risk you going across the road. All right, stud, we don't want you, we want Phyllis. Come on, come on, give us Phyllis. There you go, there you go. Come on, Phyllis. Huh, we don't want you either, bear. Oh good, they're calm so far.

Look at Flossie frolicking across the road.

Okay, she's going, Josiah. That was easy. Taking a bit. Oh, watch out. Golly. They're gonna leave a mark. So what was I saying? Oh, taking advantage of the fact that these— that cows are creatures of habit. Shoot, we didn't have our fence up there. Whoops, we had to open that for the mulch trucks. Oh boy, I gotta cut her off before she gets out of the house. Hey, hey! Oh, we have a lane up. That's good. Come on, we'll get you some green grass after we milk.

And look at this, a delicious amount of milk.

Yes, thank you, Phyllis.

And Flossie did good too, but this is like particularly creamy.

The more foamy it gets, the more creamy it is.

Wow.

Yeah, you know, it turns out all that fence work didn't even keep Flossie in.

She still got out. Look what's coming down the road. Hey, will you go turn our fence off? Just— I looked up after breakfast and the cows are running down the road. We'll just put the line up right here. Well, there they go in the yard. Come on, if we herd them up towards the fence, we're gonna herd them down into the chute, into the lane. Now I hope they don't go across the road. Oh good, Flossie took them the right way.

I honestly think, and this is a good problem, especially with some of the problems we've had in the past. The good problem is that I think Flossie's in heat. And she's just trying to get away from Studman.

Muffin, he's all over her. This is ridiculous. There we go.

Gah!

Look. Look. Flossie's coming in heat.

Watch her.

Watch her. He's not gonna do it. Josiah, let's go see what went wrong. I'm pretty sure that's too low. Bear just walked right over it, although Flossie just went under it over there to get to her calf. We're going to double this up. Watch, here we go, here we go. Look, he's got to be after her because she's in heat. All right, we got him back in. I put another strand on this. For some reason, Flossie was really trying to get out there though, up there where Jonah is. The Flossy's been getting out, so let's double it up.

All right, we got this line up, got two lines up, and I have a sneaky suspicion that electricity isn't even getting to here.

In fact, now that I think about it, I know electricity isn't getting to there. Let's see how we can solve that problem. You see, Flossy is coming into heat, which means she's ready to be breed, which means she acts a little crazy. And so does Stud Muffin. Okay, so our electricity is coming from this, this line, and when we open this, uh, lane, it doesn't make the jump. So what we have to do is make sure electricity is getting to this line, and then where we opened up our lane and our gate, we connect again here and bring electricity down. Somewhere we've got to jump this line this lane with electricity without really getting in the way. You want to still be able to move cows down through here. Oh, look here at the end. Actually, it should be jumping. We got this going across and connecting to our line.

Not hooked up.

What?

It's not hooked up.

What do you mean it's not hooked up? The clip.

Oh, I know.

That's because I turned it off on purpose. All right, let's go turn it on. Do you know where our fence charger is or our tester is? Oh, everything's hooked up right, so maybe it was jumping and she was just crazy enough. Uh, we're gonna have to get us a fence tester.

If it's hooked to the bottom, it won't electric—

oh, that's right, and it was hooked to the bottom.

That's right, because the jump is on the top one, right? Yeah, so that should do it. Okay, good call, buddy. Oh my gosh, look how thick that bacon is, Mr.

Brown.

Don't touch it for a minute, okay?

Oh my word, Rebecca is in town picking up Azure's standard order.

Can you try that?

No, no, you haven't ate the bacon.

That's the best thing I've ever had in my life. How's the bacon down there, Grandma and Grandpa?

It's just delicious.

You saw that harvested Right up the hill. Now you're eating it for this afternoon.

Rebecca went to Tractor Supply, got us a fence tester.

Boys, let's start at the source.

Okay, look, here's the way it works.

What? You put this in the ground, it's your grounding rod. Okay, okay. Then you take this and you put it on your electricity. Right, okay, we're reading 12.5. Okay, so that's real hot, that's real hot.

So we're good and hot at the Energizer, it's not the Energizer, right?

We just want to get going, just going to get working. All right, let's get your Jeep. It's a matter of unplugging the battery, sticking it in, and then getting his Jeep. Okay, but he feels like he's helping with that Jeep, so we'll do that.

Are you serious?

Yeah. Did we not charge it today? Oh boy, it works. Okay, well come on, let's put it to work then. Carry these leashes. All right, there you go. Got you. Turn around and go for it. There's Flossie way up there. Wait, there's the cows. Flossie's way up there. This isn't on because that would be our power source and we didn't connect it to it. So that's okay because there's not a lot of pressure on that. They're not wanting to go that way. Hey, be careful of this. Flossie's been wanting to go up that way. Look at her. Put it in the ground. Let's test it.

Papa, can I put it on it?

Sure, don't touch the actual wire with yourself though. It's not hitting so terribly hard. 3.46, so we've lost a lot of power. It's hitting somewhere on something. And look at little Bessie trying to come up.

When I got out there, I realized Flossie has probably not nursed Bessie in a long time, so I let them nurse the calf.

I don't know how much she's actually milked today. So we need to get mom back in here, let her milk, and then separate. Oh look, the calf now comes. Let him fly. Let him nurse for a little bit. Just— I think we should take this opportunity to— if I can get Bessie.

This will be easy.

Oh shoot, do we not have the other rope halter?

We do, but let me have the rope halter.

Okay, and then you hold the camera on me. All right, stud is being crazy all of a sudden about these calves.

Go!

He doesn't like it. I'm taking them.

And then it was time to get them in and it got crazy with stud muffin.

So what we're going to do now is herd Nellie down the lane. Come on. Come on, go! Hey, get—

his like daddy emotions are coming through, and he was super protective. I've never seen him act like that before.

I've never seen him act like this. It must be because she's in heat. Go down the hill, go down the hill, stud. Come on, let's get them down the hill.

Go!

Here we go. Y'all are going the wrong way. Okay, so I want to herd them back in here and then get Nally, because see, if I go down to get Nally Flossy's gonna go up. Why does she want to go up? All right, now's our chance. They're down there. Let's get Nellie herded in there.

So it was super hard to get the calves separated from them and away, but we finally did it.

All right, here we go, Josiah. Here's our chance. Here's our chance. Get her in the way. I see him. Hey, hey! All right, electrified. Okay, here we go, Josiah. That was crazy, and I think that's why Flossie is escaping, to get out of Studmuffin's way. He's being annoying. That's what they do though when they're in heat. Pester him for 3 days, it's gonna go on. Then she's finally gonna stand. It's gonna be a 12-hour period. He's gonna mount her. It's gonna take about 3 seconds and it's over. Hopefully he'll let us take the calf. Hey, cut it out! Okay, come on. I'm glad we've been halter training this one. Be hard to hurt them without the second line in. Now we're at the end. Hopefully we can grab this.

Uh, this— she's—

but to conclude, I would say that I think this is a great problem to have, especially given last time Violet, our last cow, had failure to thrive, was not doing good on our fescue grasses. She never came into heat and it was like 5, 6 months. Philosophy, bang, 2 months in heat.

I'm super excited about that.

So as we close this vlog, I want to tell you guys this one more time. You got one more chance to get inside of my friend Jill Winger of the Prairie Homestead. She's doing a crash course heritage cooking. She did it all week and dripped out a video every day, or several videos every day for the, what, 5-day period? Well, now for just one day only, Saturday, She's going to give it all away for a day, her entire course. Now, if you're seeing this after the fact, she's putting it up for sale for keeps. Maybe you don't have time to binge watch this Saturday, maybe you do, I don't know. But get in there, check it out for free this Saturday, and if you want it for keeps, I'll leave the link for that too down in the description. Link for both of those down in the description.