As caretaker of our animals, our goal is a beautiful life, with one bad day. One bad moment actually, as Andrew and the crew at Avon Locker work to humanely kill the animals on butcher day.
Personally, we had a bad day the other day, as my Dad rolled his ATV. He’s ok, but recovering, as he’s sore all over and his ear needed several stitches.
We were trying to get a cow in and Dad was driving along side her on a side hill and the cow kicked the ATV and somehow it rolled over on top of him and continued rolling off him. I got to him shortly after and we took him to the ER to get checked out and his ear stitched.
One of the reasons we’ve needed to get cows in is we’ve had 8 sets of twins this year, blowing away the old record of 5 sets. Our cows have a difficult time keeping track of twin calves unless we get them in to a smaller pasture by themselves. If we are unable to separate the cow and calves, we bring in whichever calf ends up abandoned and bottle feed it until it can live on grass.
Below is a photo of a bottle calf we took to the library for a kids program and short petting zoo. The kids enjoyed petting the calf. And at the risk of anthropomorphizing, I think the bottle calf enjoyed the attention as well.
Curiousfarmer 
Seems that the farmer absorbs all the bad days so the cattle can skate through with just that one bad day. Glad to hear the ATV incident wasn’t more serious though.
Thanks, Dave. Yes, could have been a lot worse.
Hi, Poking around your site … that’s interesting that you had so many twins … did Matt tell you we had 2 sets of twins from our 6 cows this year?
SuAnn, that’s got to be some kind of record!
Yes, it seems like there must be an environmental effect, because anecdotally, twinning seems to be correlated with the other herds in the area.