Wily Wagyu

After several years’ worth of experience with beef-on-dairy calves, I’m beginning to think that beef-cross calves aren’t suitable for calving on pasture. I absolutely love beef-cross calves’ vigor, but sometimes that vigor is too much for our system. 

Our first Wagyu-cross calves were born this month and proved the Angus- and Limousin-cross calves are amateurs in comparison.

The first Wagyu calf was a wanderer. We found her trotting around with the far-off dry cows – two paddocks away from the close-up dry cows.

  The second Wagyu calf was a hider. 

While bringing Monika to town for drivers’ training that morning, I spotted a newborn calf in the pasture next to Eve, one of our young Jerseys. I sent a message to our family group chat: “New beef calf.” That’s code for “someone needs to drop what they’re doing and fetch the calf before it becomes too mobile”. By contrast, a “new dairy calf” message means: “As soon as you finish the task you’re working on, please get the calf.”

Glen went to get the calf. Our newer 4-wheeler, the one with a little box on the back that’s perfect for securely transporting calves, is still at the repair shop in town waiting for a part to arrive. Our older 4-wheeler has no such box, so the calf collector must hold the calf on his or her lap while driving. Being that this calf was half-Jersey, this method should have worked just fine.

But it didn’t. Glen had to set the calf down in the grass to close the gate between the pasture and the path to our yard. When he did, the little troublemaker jumped up and bolted into the cornfield adjacent to the path. The neighbor’s corn field, mind you.

Glen sent an S.O.S. message, so Dan and I went to help. We looked and looked and looked. But finding a calf that’s the color of a shadow in the middle of 8-foot tall corn proved unsuccessful.

We needed to get back to our other chores, so we decided to wait until evening to resume the search. We were also hoping that the calf would get hungry and/or Eve would call for the calf and it would wander out of the corn. Or, at the least, make enough noise for us to hear it in the corn.

Neither happened. The calf stayed in the corn and that night Eve went looking for her calf. She looked so intently that she went through two electric fences and ended up in the neighbor’s front yard. (It also stormed that night, which might have contributed to Eve’s errant mission.)

Thankfully, Eve is halter trained, so getting her home was not the rodeo it could have been at 6:00 a.m.

Later that morning, while bringing the second group of cows in from the pasture, I noticed that Ella – Eve’s mother – was lowing into the cornfield about 20 rows down from where Glen last saw the calf.

After getting Ella and the other cows into the barn, I circled back around to the spot where Ella had presumably been calling for her grand-calf. Shortly after I slid between the stalks in the first row, I heard the little bugger running through the corn. The good news was that she was between me and the barn, not me and the remaining 80 acres of the field; the bad news was that I couldn’t see her at all, regardless of how low I stooped or how carefully I tried to peer through the stalks.

I moved in her direction and quickly found a trail of her little hoof prints in the storm-softened soil. She stayed in between the same two rows all the way down the field and around the corner. I called Monika and asked her to go watch the end of the row, in the event the calf kept running.

It’s been a long time since I’ve tracked an animal, but hers were easy to follow. Which helped relieve my frustration at losing an eight hundred dollar calf and at being soaked by the intermittent rain that had continued that morning.

The tracks showed that half way up the field the calf snuck between two stalks of corn and turned into our lawn. After that, there were no more tracks. We couldn’t find her anywhere in the yard and couldn’t find any tracks going back into the cornfield.

Completely stumped as to where she could have gone and admitting that this was one wily calf, we came up with a Plan C. That evening, we would tether Eve and Ella to the trees next to the cornfield and lure the calf out with their maternal moos.

That afternoon, while working on Daphne’s new chicken coop, Daphne called me over to her pullet coop to show me a burrow in the ground next to the coop. 

The kids and I were inspecting the hole when Murky started barking over by the house. When his bark took on his varmint tone, I went to investigate. He was looking into the shrubs that surround a large spruce tree. I crouched down to his level and spotted something dark in the shrubs.

“Crud!” I said. “There’s something in there.”

I crept around the shrubs to get a better look. The girls kept back, knowing that it’s usually never good when a wild critter is in your yard in the middle of the day. Through a small clearing on the other side of the shrubs, I was finally able to identify Murky’s varmint: the missing Wagyu calf, curled up in a tiny ball for an afternoon snooze.

“It’s the calf,” I laughed. At that same moment, Dan came running back out of the house with his 12-gauge and three shells, ready to dispatch whatever varmint was hiding in the shrubs. He had run for the reinforcement the second I spotted something.

We all had a good laugh. Dan returned the gun to the safe and we surrounded the shrubs before moving in to capture the calf, wary that it might bolt again. It didn’t. Dan grabbed the calf and carried it to the barn. I thanked Murky for finding the calf. And we shook our heads at the crazy conclusion to the story of the missing Wagyu. When the calf ran out of the cornfield that morning, it must have run straight into our front yard and found its new hiding spot in the shrubs.

Thankfully, that’s the last Wagyu calf due to arrive this summer. This fall, we’ll think twice before deciding on more for next summer.

Sadie Frericks and her husband, Glen, milk 100 cows near Melrose, Minnesota. They have three children: Dan, Monika, and Daphne. Sadie also writes a blog at www.dairygoodlife.com. She can be reached at [email protected].