Hardware Disease

ost cow folks I know keep a cow magnet or two on their fridge.  Sure, they hold the photos on real tight, but they are usually on the fridge so you can find them.  We have lots of other magnets on the fridge too, but none near as important as a cow magnet.  Old farms and new farms have about the same chance of cattle dying of hardware disease.  Hardware disease in cattle is not the same thing as hardware disease in husbands.  With cows, it involves ingesting pieces of metal or wire, and with husbands it’s usually the affliction that causes them to go to farm sales and auctions and drag home junk good stuff.  Both can be fatal… .

dog jumping, Belly Acres logging, honeymoon, garden plowing

On old farms you have old bone yards of equipment, ancient fencing with wire and staples, and just general odds and ends.  Goodness knows I turn up some piece of farm flotsam almost daily in my travels on this thirteen decade old farm.  With new farms you have construction debris and workers not in the know, or on old farms with repairs you have construction debris too, and even with workers in the know, stuff happens.

For the roofing project we put down used greenhouse plastic sheets that we have kept for just such projects.  Usually they reside on the stacked compost rows, but catching nails trumps compost covering.

Cedar Shakes and mucho nails!

You know how it goes, a nail goes flying, or worse yet a roofing screw and into the grass no less.  Grass that a cow or calf will probably be grazing at some point.  Gah!  No one even wanted to tell me about the bucket of nails that fell through the sheathing during this project.  That info kind of slipped out, like info has a habit of doing…I didn’t fuss, we’re only human.  But we did give Jane a magnet for added insurance, since her winter quarters are in the building that received the new roof.

You never get them all

I wanted to start putting Jane in for the night starting Sunday,  So on Saturday I made what was probably my third round of due diligence checking the feeders, and all the bedding in the loafing shed, and any place I thought she might be snuffling around during her nights in.  I didn’t find anything and crossed my fingers that her magnet would do the trick.

Last piece of roofing

It’s not that cows go out of their way to eat metal, it’s more how they eat by tearing off big mouthfuls of forage that gets them in trouble.  With no top teeth to bite with like sheep or horses, they aren’t so apt to feel a piece of metal and once they swallow it, they run the risk of a puncture internally, and if that doesn’t happen they just may have a low-grade infection which contributes to general malaise, affecting weight gain or milk production.  The magnet works by hopefully attracting the metal if it does get swallowed and can keep the offending hardware in place so it can’t migrate.  As a child I would pore over our livestock books, and the photos of hardware taken from cows at slaughter horrified and captivated me.  I couldn’t imagine all those sharp, pointy things inside of living cow.

These days the old-time remedy of giving a cow a magnet only helps so much.  Modern day farms contain modern-day materials.  Or rather modern-day uses of common things in everyday life such as rigid plastic buckets that can get brittle and chip or break, aluminum pop cans that get tossed out in a hayfield and shredded with feed equipment, hog mowed pvc water pipe, and the ubiquitous plastic baling twine.  Magnets only help with metal.  I recently read a story about a sick dairy cow that went down at an educational farm.  First diagnosis by the attending vet was milk fever, treatment followed without much change, and many other things were tried and the cow finally passed.  A postmortem exam revealed a basketball-sized ball of plastic baling twine that had been impacting cow’s digestive system and eventually killing her.  It seems that many folks were “learning” how to farm, but being taught by folks who didn’t know that you need to keep that twine picked up and out of the reach of the livestock there.  Calves are notorious for putting anything in their mouths, and cows too I guess.  We use sisal on our bales, but our straw comes with plastic twine, and we try to keep on top of keeping it picked up and put away.

twine for recycling

I’m not trying to scare anyone, just passing on some tips, because there are always foreign objects around on farms, so we try to just make it a habit to keep things picked up, and in the case of Jane we added the magnet in hopes that if she finds something we missed, it will keep her safe.