Losing a Friend

The farming community has one of the highest suicide rates of the self-employed professions.  Why?   Because farming can be very lonely and depressing when you are sitting inside watching your crop get destroyed by hail, eaten by bugs, or burned up by drought.

In a bad year, you work 80 hours a week for five months to end up with less money than you would have made flipping burgers at the local fast food joint.  In a good year, you make a big payment on that tractor you really need or upgrade a combine that's costing you yield from breaking down so much.  

When I quit my desk job and moved back to Montana in 2013, I was having physical effects of stress on my body, I liked my job, loved the people I worked with, but I needed a change.   I needed a respite from the madhouse that is the east coast corporate world.  

So, I bought seven very overweight, old, and pregnant cows in November of 2013.  In February of 2014, one of the cows broke her leg and we had to butcher her and take her calf via post-mortem C-section.  This farmer-kid turned computer jockey then farmer then learned how to stomach tube the premature calf and fed him for four days, a few ounces of milk replacer at a time every couple hours.  Despite my not knowing what I was doing, the little calf pulled through and started drinking from a bottle and grew up healthy and strong.  His name was Abe.

Since then, my cows have been balm to my soul.  Simply watching the calves frolic, the cows eat, and the steers plow into a bale of straw has been one of my greatest sources of joy since I moved home.  

Often, with great joy also comes great sadness.  I lost a cow yesterday.  She was only three years old and had a nice little calf as well.  With my inexperience comes ignorance and I missed the fact that she had a twisted stomach.   Our incredibly kind veterinarian tried to save her via a "teaching" surgery, but to no avail.  I took her to the vet in a cattle trailer and took her home via a flatbed trailer.  

My long term plan for KD Farms involves cattle, and a lot of them, hopefully.  A crop loss makes you feel crappy about the lost income, perhaps a little hopeless when you think about the bills you need to pay, family to feed and clothe, etc.  When you lose a cow, or at least when I do, it isn't just a lost income, it feels like you lost a friend.  Your heart hurts for a little while and you go through the grieving process (OK, it might be a couple days, not months or anything).  But if I have learned one thing from owning cows over the past couple years it is this: loss isn't fun, but the joy while they're with you makes it all worth it.  #lifelessonsfromkenny

Be blessed.  -Kenny

I took a photo of her as I dropped her off at the vet.  I was pretty sure I wasn't going to see her alive again.