Fowl, pox and fairs

It’s county fair season and farm kids around the state are showing off the projects and animals they’ve spent many hours working with. Our children and the families that lease cattle from us are busy fitting their animals the next couple of days so they will be ready to head to the fair this Sunday. We will have 16 heifers from our farm going to the fair this year. No cows are going because of the potential of someone bringing home highly pathogenic avian influenza despite many of the kids wanting to take a milking cow to have a better chance at going to the state fair.

It was a hard decision to tell the kids that no one was bringing cows this year, but after hearing about farms losing almost half their milk production and even some animals to the disease outbreak, it didn’t seem like a risk worth taking. Our herd is 100% grass fed, so our heifers develop great capacity and ribs but just never show the early maturity of frame that wins shows. Our eight-year-old cows still look like three year olds which seems much more useful to me than yearlings that look like three-year-old dry cows. If I was in charge of what dairy heifers were judged on the results of many classes would be considerably different, but I’m not. Even if the kids don’t get a state fair trip with their dairy animals, all are also taking poultry projects.

Our sons, Jonnie and Erik, raised Pekin ducks again this year to show as well as picking out a pen of Cornish cross broilers from the group being raised for our retail store that they care for every morning. Our daughter, Hannah, has a group of Bantam Rhode Island Red chickens that she loves and planned to show. Unfortunately, her plans were changed by a communicable disease I’d never seen or even heard of, fowl pox.

With only heifers to show this year, we figured the kids would have the best chance to get a state fair trip with their poultry. Hannah’s chickens getting fowl pox made that less likely as she now only had broilers to show and judges are rather inconsistent in what size broilers they like. Sometimes they think our birds are too big and sometimes too small despite bringing generally the same-sized birds to the fair. One of the families that leases heifers from us heard about Hannah’s quarantined chickens and offered to give her a pen of extra Bantams they had, which she happily accepted. We now have three tiny chickens with funny mutton chops and feathery feet in a pen in our garage, clucking and crowing. We can’t put them with the quarantined chickens or our flock of laying hens so that’s where they will live until the fair .

Jonnie will be showing two pigs he bought this spring as well. He has a Duroc cross barrow named Yon Yonson and a Spot gilt named Petunia. While we have raised pigs for decades, this is the first time anyone in our family has shown pigs since Emily and I showed pigs together at the fair when we were dating. We’ve been together for over 20 years, so it’s been a while. It would be a surprise if Jonnie’s pigs that spent the summer living in a broken calf hut and wallowing in a mud puddle most of the day won a trip to the state fair over the pigs people paid crazy money for and worked with daily, but you never know. 

Until next time keep living the dream and remember that there are all kinds of different things you’d never expect that can ruin your plans but there are also many wonderful people in the world to help you out when unexpected things happen.

Tim Zweber farms with his wife, Emily, their three children and his parents, Jon and Lisa, near Elko, Minnesota.