Cow Down

The day started out just like any other. It was Friday September 25th 2020. Everything was going to plan, morning chores were finished in the barn on time and Joe and his crew were chopping our corn for us with his self-propelled chopper.  This was the second day of chopping and it looked like it was going to be the last. The first day went pretty well and they did arrive a little late so we were late to getting started but it looked like we were going to make up for the lost time today. They came earlier then the day before and got to work. Now Joe was in charge of chopping corn, there were two dump truck drivers carrying the corn from the field to the silo where my dad was packing it with the tractor. You might be wondering where I was during all of this I was up in the house doing my writing assignment for English class. If you can imagine having big dump trucks drive by your house every ten minutes can make it extremely hard to work. I couldn’t wait to be finished with my work so I could go outside and watch the action. 

You may be wondering when all the trouble started to happen, well. Since it was September it was warm enough for the cows to go out in the pasture. Since they are outside they needed to be brought back in for milking. Since my dad was occupied with packing the silo, my sister, my mom, and I were in charge of bringing in the cows. This isn’t a very hard task on a normal day but this wasn’t a normal day. In order to get the cows from the pasture into the barn. We had to lead them through the barnyard. Now the barnyard is right next to the silo which is getting filled with corn and all the cows can smell is corn. So as you can imagine it was very hard to convince the cows that it was better to head to the barn. Once they passed that they were all wound up, which makes it harder to get them in their stalls. Not all the cows know where their stalls are and they will go to different stalls before they wind up in their own. One cow in particular named Cola, decided that she wanted to go to a different stall. This is fine because we can just back her up and lead her to her own. Tonight when she was backing out of the stall she got her front right foot caught in the gutter grate. It happens sometimes and most of the time the cows can get their feet out of themselves but this time Cola couldn’t. During this time my sister had to go run and get your dad and a grandfather to come and help us.  Meanwhile when she's doing this to my mom and I had to keep Cola calm so she didn't get herself more hurt and other cows away from her. Once my dad and grandfather got there we started to try to pull her foot out of the gutter grate but it wasn't budging. In order to get her foot out I had to run up to the shop and grab a giant crowbar to pry the gutter grate apart to get her foot out. After a while we did manage to get her foot out and her into her stall without her hurting herself more.

Once she was okay, it was back to work. As we were getting her unstuck the dump trucks came with two more loads of corn. So my father and grandfather needed to get back to packing because they were way far behind. We were late when we started bringing in cows and now we were very far behind. Once the cows were all in the barn and the corn was all in the silo it was time to cover the silo just in case it rained and ruined all the hard work we did. As you can imagine this made us very late starting milking. Let's just say that I was exhausted at the end of the day and glad that Cola was okay and they got all the corn in.

 

lvaughan

VT

18 years old

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