Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

Feeding beef cows is not rocket science. They graze all day on green pasture, and, depending on the time of year, you supplement their diet with hay. Alfalfa hay is the best, and a favorite of the cows.

Feeding hay is a pretty big job in the winter, when they need so much more food energy than only grass can provide. In the late spring they need almost no hay at all, and in fact prefer the tender green grass to hay. But in late summer as the grass toughens, the cows again start looking for hay.

When my parents go somewhere overnight, or for weeks at a time, we take care of their animals, the most important of these being the Limousins, their beautiful red beef cows. Dad's instructions are usually vague, with lots of wiggle room: "Feed them enough. If they don't clean it up by the next feeding, cut them way back." Then sometimes, like last weekend, Dad gets oddly specific: "Give the cows on the north side 27 flakes, and the south cows none. Unless, of course, the south cows are standing there, in which case, give them four flakes." Um, okay.

So last Saturday morning I was up on the stack tossing alfalfa hay flakes down into the concrete and iron manger below me. Done it a million times, nothing new, can almost do it in my sleep -- until. Until I looked down and saw that I had inadvertently dropped a piece of baling twine down into the manger. Darn. When this happens, it's important to retrieve it, because some cow could possibly eat the twine. Cows are not known for their brains or discriminating taste.

Back when I was a little kid, hay bales were secured with three wires, made of metal. Dropping one of THOSE into the manger was a crisis. I know it sounds crazy, but cows really did ingest the wires, and then you had a real problem. A cow with a wire in her belly was a cow in trouble. The wire, or any scrap metal that dumb cows might eat, lodges in the honeycombed walls of the reticulum, one of the cow's four stomach chambers. Inflammation results, and the cow fails to gain weight, or, if she's a milking cow, her milk production drops.

The wire solution was surprisingly elegant and simple: all heifers were given cow magnets before they entered the milking herd. No, not those colorful refrigerator decorations, but 4-inch stainless steel magnetic cylinders which the cows were forced to ingest as if they were big vitamin tablets.

The magnets were preventive medicine against stray wires in the cows' stomachs, because all metal simply adhered itself to the magnets and stayed put nicely.

But, since hay bales are now wrapped with twine instead of wire, there should be no danger, right?

Wrong.

That Saturday morning as I watched a stray twine slither into the manger below me, I was horrified (and annoyed, let's face it) to see a cow already eating the darned thing. Stupid cow. Time to go down and save her from herself.

The minefield that is the haystack includes such dangers as
-- sharp alfalfa stems
-- black widows
-- unnoticed gaps between bales into which your entire leg disappears
-- cut bales that collapse under your weight
-- wobbly bales that teeter under your feet
-- feral kittens (dangerous because you'll soon be feeding them and calling them Fluffy)
It is rare, but it is also possible for poorly-stacked bales to collapse under your weight; it happened to my middle brother once. He was standing on the corner of a stack when it gave way beneath him. Luckily for him he was inside a pole barn, and near an iron support post for the barn. He grabbed the post and hung on as the stack crumbled out from under him, and survived with sore muscles instead of a broken neck.

But my least favorite hay hazard is caused by feeding hay into the wind. You find yourself suddenly in a cloud of swirling alfalfa dust and flakes, blinking and sneezing and shaking out your t-shirt. Wearing a bra full of hay particles is about as miserable as it gets, but there are no advisories for such things, and no one writes cowboy songs about that.