If Cows Could Talk, Here's What They Would Say . . .

Dear Hopeful Cow Owner,

Before you decide to bring me home and keep me as a family milk cow, here are a few things you should know about me . . .

1) I am a ruminant. I eat my food quickly and burp it up to chew my cud. When I swallow, my cud goes to my rumen, a large “stomach” full of good bacteria that help me ferment and digest my food. My rumen produces gas, which I burp up.  This means I have different needs than horses and other animals you may be used to.

2) I am a herd animal and do not like to be alone.  I’d rather have other cattle for company, but even a sheep or a goat will do.  I also hope to be treated kindly by you because I depend on you.

3) I need some basic infrastructure—at least a fenced pasture, a shelter if you get bad weather, a small pen to confine me when needed, and a way to hold me still in case I need treatment. 

4) In most cases, I need free-choice hay. Even out on pasture, please keep hay available for me. The fiber helps me digest my food. No matter what some people tell you, please don’t feed me moldy hay. If you wouldn’t feed it to a horse, don’t feed it to me.  All pastures are not equal, so my “good green grass” might not be as good as you suppose. And those clumps of long, green grass? That’s where I pooped, and it’s not on the menu!

5) Avoid abrupt changes in my feed, whether grain or spring grass.  Change it gradually and keep it that way for several days before another change. This gives my rumen time to adjust.  And by the way, PLEASE keep all feed double-locked.  If I can, I will sneak in and gorge myself—and that could kill me.

6) I need plenty of water, and if my tank runs dry I will suffer. I use a lot of water for digestion and even more for producing milk. Even in cold weather I need water, and if it’s too icy I won’t drink enough.

7) I need free access to minerals. What I need depends on what part of the country you live in, so please find out what I need. Salt is only one of the minerals I need, and horse salt blocks aren’t sufficient for me.

8) I need shade, enough to lie down in to comfortably chew my cud--trees or a shed, I’m not picky.

9) Think about pests. Flies really bug me. They bite my udder and teats and can give me mastitis or pink eye. Please control the flies! Sometimes I get worms, even though you may never see them. Try to rotate my pastures, and take fecal samples to the vet twice a year. He will tell you what wormer to use for me.

10) I need vaccinations against various diseases and probably a rumen magnet, too.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

11)  Think about my love life.  When I'm in the MOOOd for love, I can bellow loudly, day and night!  If I don't have secure fences, I just might go looking for love in all the wrong places.  I won't produce milk indefinitely; I'll eventually need a new calf, which means either getting a bull, sending me off to a bull, or AI.  How will that work with milking me?  

12) If I should get sick or hurt, PLEASE call the vet if it’s beyond your skill! I can have calving problems, mastitis, milk fever, ketosis, bloat or other things that could permanently hurt or even kill me. If you want me to take care of your family and provide you milk and meat, please care for me in return.

13) And finally, if I’m ever suffering from sickness or injury or old age and not even the vet can help me, PLEASE give me the final gift of love, a peaceful death.

Now let me tell you what I will do for you . . .

1) I will look beautiful in your pasture, giving you joy just by being there.

2) I will give you a calf every year and raise it for you.

3) I will give you affection in return for scratches.

4) I will teach your children responsibility and where their food comes from.

5) I will keep you in tune with nature and the cycle of life.

6) I will give you manure to compost for your garden.

7) I will keep your pastures and your lawn mowed.

8) I will let you be the boss of me--or at least let you think you are.

9) I will give you a reason to get up and go outside every day.

10) I will even be your friend and companion, if you so wish.

11) With care and good management I will share with you the milk that God intended for my calf.   I will not begrudge it, but will give it generously.

12) And when my life is over, I will feed you one last time if you so desire

. . . for I am a cow.

I, the undersigned, do agree and covenant to fulfill my responsibilities toward you, my owner—

The Cow

Will you, Future Cow Owner, agree and covenant to fulfill your responsibilities toward me?  If you do, I have one favor to ask:  Before you bring me home, please buy a copy of Keeping a Family Cow, by Joann S. Grohman and read it from cover to cover!

Somebody Feed These Poor Starving Horses!

Angel and Brandy are apparently so hungry that they have been reduced to eating bark and birdseed. (Although if Angel thinks she can eat this giant oak, I'd say she's barking up the wrong tree!)

Somebody feed these poor starving horses!  Just look at their emaciated rear ends!  (Note that Julie's almost in the Fly-Swatting Club.  Brandy now lets her get just close enough to get in on a little piece of the action.)

Poor Julie is obviously so hungry that she's considering eating the roses instead of smelling them!

Well, maybe she's not quite that hungry, but Brandy sure was! (Too bad I missed the photo!)

Hopefully my readers are feeling well-fed enough to enjoy these roses without eating them.  You'll just have to take my word about how sweet they smell!

Fruit Fly Frenzy: An Experiment with Home-made Fruit Fly Traps

Advisory:  Numerous fruit flies were murdered during this experiment.  If you want a non-lethal fruit fly trap so that you can go release your cute little fruit flies outside, you're going to have to go online and find a different trap!

Trap Number One, Zero Hour

To paraphrase an Ogden Nash poem:

"The Lord in His wisdom made the fruit fly
And then forgot to tell us why."


About 2 weeks ago, fruit flies were driving me crazy!  They were hanging in clouds around my kitchen sink and were even in the bathroom.  I went online and learned that they actually multiply in drains because they love the damp dark nastiness down there.  Ick!

You handle that by pouring some bleach down every drain at night.  Being on a septic system, I'd rather not do that.  I don't want to kill all the good bacteria that live in the damp dark nastiness even farther down there!  More ick!  So I needed a different way to control the fruit flies, and I didn't want to make a trip anywhere to buy a fruit fly trap.

Still online, I found numerous suggestions for home-made fruit fly traps.  I decided to perform an experiment, trying several different ones at the same time.  After all, I had plenty of fruit flies to experiment on!

Trap Number One:
Take a glass or jar and add a 1/2 inch of cider vinegar in the bottom.
Add a drop or two of dishwashing liquid to the cider and swirl.  This acts as a surfactant to break the surface tension of the vinegar so flies that land on it will fall in and drown.
Form a sheet of paper into a cone and tape in place.  A smaller opening at the bottom is recommended, but mine worked fine.
Place the cone securely in the glass so fruit flies cannot escape up the sides of the glass.
Set on the counter.

Trap Number Two, Zero Hour

Trap Number Two


Take a glass or jar and add 1/2 inch of cider vinegar in the bottom.
Add a drop of dishwashing liquid (see explanation above).
Cover the jar with plastic wrap and secure with rubber band.
Poke small holes in plastic wrap with a knife.
Set on the counter.

Trap Number Three, Zero Hour

Trap Number Three
Put 1/2 inch wine in bottom of small glass
Add a drop of dishwashing liquid (see explanation above)
Cover glass tightly with plastic wrap.
With a knife, poke a small hole in the plastic wrap.
Insert a piece of drinking straw about 2 inches long, leaving about 1/4 inch of straw poking up from the plastic wrap.  Fruit flies can get in through the straw, but can't find their way out and they drown in the wine.  What a way to go!
Set on counter.

Trap Number One, Two Minutes

Two minutes after I set up Trap Number One, it had already attracted quite a few fruit flies onto the paper.

Trap Number One, Four Minutes 

Two minutes later, at least one fruit fly was caught inside Trap Number One.

Within two days, hordes of fruit flies had drowned in Trap Number One.  This photo was taken four days after Zero Hour, and the vinegar had partially evaporated.  I threw it away at that point.  The job was done (temporarily, I'm sure) as the fruit flies met their fate.  The fruit fly frenzy had fizzled out!

Trap Number Two was much slower to work.  After I found the straw trick online, I added a straw in one of the holes.  The trap then began to catch some flies.  I think the plastic was too far above the vinegar for the flies to be attracted by the vinegar.


Trap Number Three caught nary a fly as far as I could see.  We've caught more fruit flies in a bottle of wine left uncorked for a few minutes than we did in our trap.  I know that, because they've been poured into my glass on more than one occasion! That's where having lived in Africa comes in handy--I just fish the fly out of my wine and enjoy the wine!

So you see that you actually can catch flies with vinegar.  In fact, you'll catch more flies with vinegar than with honey!  So much for that old adage!

And if you're plagued with the fruit flies' larger cousins, house flies, I find a simple fly paper a very effective way to catch them.  Not very aesthetic, but effective.

I must confess that while watching "Hoarders" this past winter, I did pause the TV at the point where the film crew zoomed in on an ancient fly paper hanging from the ceiling. I had to hurry into the mudroom and yank my old one down!

Fly Control

We have a multi-pronged approach to fly control here.  Earlier in the summer, the animals were miserable with hordes of flies holding conventions around their eyes.  I spray the horses with Endure (the best-working spray I've found), but Sara is scared of the spray bottle.

So right now, we're trying scaring the flies with bizarre hair-dos on the horses!

I wish!  The first part of our approach is mixing DE (diatomaceous earth) in the animals' feed.  Not only does it kill internal parasites, but it is purported to reduce or eliminate flies breeding in the manure by killing the larvae (I hate that nasty M-word!)

Here is Sara, eagerly trotting over to get her feed.  (Remember those horns as you read the next post.)

Here she is eagerly licking up every last bit of feed and DE--and some that she imagines is there!  Earlier in the summer, she could hardly eat for tossing her head back to get the flies off her shoulders.  It bugged me (sorry!) no end that I couldn't do anything to give her relief.

The next part of our fly-control is following a recommendation we got at the Co-op: Give the animals a salt block that's impregnated with sulfur.  Sulfur supposedly makes them taste bad to the flies!  It also looks pretty in the field!  :)

The third prong of our fly control involves hanging a canvas bag with an insecticide inside.  (Say that five times fast!)  This is not "natural," but we were willing to try anything to give the animals relief.  We hung it in an area of shade where they like to rest, but they don't graze there.  So far, we only see signs of horse manure there, so we imagine that Sara doesn't feel comfortable enough with her field-mates to hang out that closely.  And since we're not planning to eat the horses, we don't mind some chemical insecticide on them!

Up near the house I've set up a birthday present from a farm-girl friend who gave me a fly trap among other goodies.  It involves emptying a tube of really smelly bait (think of rotting meat) into the bottom of a plastic bottle, adding some water, and setting it outside.  It really does work, although it's not for inside use unless you like your kitchen smelling of rotten meat!

We have another method on trial up at the barn.  This involves a roll of sticky white 1/4" wide tape that we stretch about six feet above the ground.  We learned this tip at Roland Vaughan's Redhill Valley Dexter farm in Cleveland, TN.  It seems that flies like to roost!  Who knew?  So they alight on this light-colored "wire" and can't resist sticking around permanently!  We've also caught a wasp or two, which makes us like the idea even better.  And we caught a couple of small feathers, but apparently the birds escaped.

Next spring we hope to implement a final prong to our fly control--and a very natural one.  Who wouldn't love a fly-devouring creature that also laid eggs and looked picturesque?  We learned this trick at Warren and Sally Coad's Freedom Farms Dexter farm in Philadelphia, TN.  They raise Muscovy ducks which just live to eat flies.  Now that's an animal any farmer can love!  We're waiting til next spring because the younger ducks eat more, so they should be growing and hungry when fly season arrives.

Flies, beware!  Zephyr Hill farm is out to get you, one way or another!