Smart men learn from their mistakes

Hello, this blog is brought to you by Ethan! 

My senior year in high school has been almost entirely online (since Halloween) so I’ve been at home and able to work on the farm everyday. 

This week has been pretty crazy.  On Monday, I was talking on the phone while I was closing gates after feeding the heifers and dry cows. There are four gates that need to be closed and chained.  I closed all four gates, but I only chained three. Wouldn’t you know it that the gate I forgot to chain was also the most important one of all!  Since chores were done, I went down to the shop and Dad and I decided that today was a good day to put the new wheel bearings in the side-by-side. We took the back wheels off and then stopped for lunch.

When we were inside, after lunch, taking a few minutes to relax we started to hear Clyde, our mini donkey, honking or braying (we call it honking because that is what he sounds like) and both dogs started barking.  I looked outside and saw five heifers running down the road!  Mom was at work in town but thankfully Hannah was home so Hannah, me, and dad sprinted out the door to chase them back into their pen on foot because the side-by-side was in the shop without back wheels.  They went back to where they belonged pretty well but as we turned the corner around the barn we saw that there were about 35 more of them that were out!  It turns out that the little heifers got out and then ran through the dry cow fence. All of our outside cattle were out. 

It took about 30 minutes to round them all up and then sort them back into the right pens, but when we counted them we were missing two heifers.  We ended up finding them stuck in the middle of our manure pit—up to their necks.  It’s not the first time that this has happened to us but it has been several years since we’ve had to rescue one and we have never had two stuck at the same time.  We put a plank down so we could walk out to them and get a chain around their neck to help guide them out.  They both came out nicely and both are fine, just a bit dirty.