The Hardest Part

Farming has been a part of my life for almost half of it by now. I can’t count the numerous hours I have spent among the dairy cows in the barn taking care of them, or the countless times I have agvocated on social media or on this blog. I can’t imagine myself ever doing anything different. It’s definitely not the only thing that I do, or will do with my life when I graduate college, but I can’t imagine it ever not being a part of my life anymore. Even with the bad days and the hard times, it is always still worth it, for the cows much more than for me.

But with all that, comes like I just mentioned, the hard times. The hardest part about farming is the days when there’s nothing more that can be done. It’s the days when something comes out of the blue that couldn’t be seen or guessed, and suddenly the worst happens. It’s happened plenty of times over the years, and the last time was just a few days ago.

About six years ago now I experienced my first cow dying. It was on Halloween, 2013, and it was a Jersey, along with being my first Jersey. If you’ve been following my blog or you know me, you definitely know this already. Recently another one of my cows who is a half Holstein, half Jersey was due to have her calf. She had a great, happy, bouncy Jersey a week and a half earlier than she was supposed to. For the first day I was nervous, because normally that early leads to a bunch of problems in either the mom or the calf. But for the first few days, everything was completely fine. Which is probably why this hurts so much.

Her name was Jamey. I loved her the moment I met her a few days after she was born. There was no reason to believe that anything was wrong or would’ve been wrong by the end of the week. She was just a normal, bouncy calf. Impressively she even drank her milk perfectly, and drank a full bottle. We don’t know and once again like so many times before will probably never know for sure, but that right there could’ve been the problem.

Maybe it was my fault. Maybe it was someone else’s fault. Maybe it was nobody’s fault. It was more likely nobody’s fault, but I can’t help but feel like it was mine. I always do a little bit.

Something calves can get some time is bloat. I don’t know if that’s the correct term for it, or if it’s supposed to be they got bloated or what it is exactly. But either way when calves get bloated, something that is done is to give them a bit of Dawn dish soap, and walk them around in the barn. It’s happened to many of our calves before, there was no reason to think it would’ve been anything different. Maybe it was because she was a week and a half early. It was most likely that, and because something inside was probably not formed correctly or something along those lines. Something we could never have predicted or known about until it was too late.

As you might have been able to guess by now, Jamey got bloated. Only we didn’t catch it in time, or because of being a week and a half early there was a bigger problem and we didn’t know. That’s the worst part about all of this, is we didn’t know.

Jamey didn’t make it. Eight days of finally having something happy involving a Jersey in October after six years, and now it’s worse.

This is the hardest part about being a dairy farmer. I always know that someone really doesn’t know what it’s like to be a dairy farmer when they try to tell me that farmers only care about profit, and they don’t actually give a crap about the cows themselves. Oh how wrong that statement is.

I only knew Jamey for eight days, and it still feels like my heart has ripped from my chest. Three days later and I can still hardly write this without crying or wanting to cry. Things like this should never happen, and yet things like this are so unexpected and unable to be caught or prepared for that it doesn’t help to say that. The worst lesson to learn about farming is the terror at any cow getting sick, and the heartbreak when they’re gone. More than that, farmers more than anyone really know what it means to have to learn to move on. And even after an eight day old calf comes into your life and passes, that’s still one of the hardest things to do.

Life with asthma

I normally just write about farming things but I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, because it’s just as much a part of my life as anything that I do. I have had asthma since I was eight months old, with one period of time in there where it had faded enough that I didn’t need to do anything about it. I don’t remember being told that it was gone, but I do remember a few days in there when I realized how much harder it was getting to breathe, and I remember telling my mom that we should go see the doctor. I remember the appointment and getting Advair once again and for the first time in my life getting an inhaler. I wish I could say I never had to use that thing, but if I could say that then I obviously wouldn’t have needed it.

I don’t remember how I felt on that day, but I sure know how I feel when I have to use my inhaler. I know how it feels when I can’t breathe, I know how terrible it feels. There have only been a few times in my life where I’ve felt utterly helpless, and at least 50% of the time it’s after I’ve had to use my inhaler.

I don’t really know why, but I think that feeling is really why I don’t like to talk about it. I never realized I didn’t like to talk about it until one day in high school I mentioned it in the middle of a conversation and my two best friends I had at the time freaked out. Do you know how weird it is to realize you’ve never told your best friends you have this problem? Because I didn’t either until that day.

Not being able to breathe as well as others was the number one reason I never got into sports, at least not running ones. It’s also the number one reason I hated gym class. It would’ve been fine except for all the teachers I had would continuously yell at me, whether it was running the mile (I know y’all know what type of torture that was, but imagine it when you can’t breathe after half a lap or earlier) or just tea doing anything that involved exercise. I can’t tell you the amount of times I was told to “just keep going you’ll be fine!” When you’re in the middle of an asthma attack that’s not what you want to hear.

Before I graduated high school I entered into my school’s fitness class thinking it would be better than gym. In ways it was, but in some ways it was worse. I remember jogging on the treadmill and having to stop because I couldn’t keep going because of my asthma, and my teacher looking at me like I was dying, and realizing she didn’t know or hadn’t realized I had asthma either. If I had thought she would let up on me a bit after that I was wrong. After that it once again became “you can do it!” But this time added to it was “you shouldn’t be so scared of it, you keep exercising and by the time you graduate I bet we’ll have gotten rid of it!” Nope. No. Just no. If it was that easy don’t you think I would’ve done it a long time ago? And I’m not scared of it, maybe I used to be but once you’ve had something for twenty years you know how to deal with it, but that doesn’t mean you want to, or should be forced to use your stupid inhaler that’s supposed to be for emergencies only, every other day.

Since coming to college I’ve used it less. And somehow I’ve become more comfortable talking about it. In high school I knew like two other people who had asthma, and one of them was my cousin, the other my best friend. Here you make one small mention of it in a group chat, and next thing you know you’ve met five other people who have it too. Then a work friend’s sister has it, then suddenly you’re talking about it in a Nonfiction Writing class and you realize you finally don’t feel weird talking about it. But you know it’s still hard to have it happen and to even have to think about pulling out your inhaler in front of people. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been tempted to throw my inhaler across the room. Last time was literally a few hours ago when I went out in the cold and felt my lungs get the cold and heavy feeling I get in the cold weather sometimes, and suddenly I felt like I might pass out before I got back to my room and I had to concentrate on every step so I wouldn’t fall out there in the cold. I’ve heard my grandpa talk about having problems breathing in the cold, and it’s the same thing. It’s not just a problem older people can have, it’s something that I’m sure most of not all asthmatics have experienced.

The last major attack I had was when my dog pulled out of my grip and ran away from me up the road. There was a hunter on the road that she was originally going after but after he got in the car she just kept running. I ran after her, calling to the hunter to help but if you think he did you’d be wrong. I panicked thinking I wouldn’t get to her and it was a Sunday so outside was pretty deserted. I did eventually catch her, but was weazing the rest of the day.

That’s what it’s like with asthma. It’s not something terrible to live with and talk about, not like cancer or something like that. That’s not at all what I’m getting at with this post. I do think it needs to be recognized more. Anytime I go outside and smell smoke from a cigarette or weed from someone in my dorm hallway smoking it, I have to cover my nose and try to not breathe as much for fear of getting light headed and having an asthma attack right then and there. And if someone doesn’t have it it almost seems like they barely realize it exists sometimes. Not unless it affects them directly. Well take it from an asthmatic. It exists, it sucks, but most of the time it’s fine. If you know someone with asthma you don’t have to watch them every second of the day. They’re not just gonna stop breathing right in front of you. But don’t expect them to run places fast or to smoke or be able to handle being near smoke. And most importantly don’t tell them if they keep going it’ll just go away because that’s not how it works. Just treat them like a person, but be there for them if they need you. Because life happens, especially when you have asthma.

2018

As we have arrived at the last day of 2018, we have reached the day where people take time to reflect back on the year they had. My year has been a mix of good and bad; a lot more bad then I would’ve liked. The bad go something like this: my dog died, Flopsy the barn cat died, Eclipse died (see previous blog posts), my cat died, the events of September happened that everyone in my town and surrounding communities know about (once again see previous post), both of my grandmas fell and ended up in the hospital, and a friend of mine that I made last semester died of cancer.

Now the good things; my new dog, Dickens came, then our new cat, Mannix came. Our other cat got really depressed but she stayed around and got happier when the two new kids came. I finished my second semester of my freshman year, and my first semester of sophomore year. I joined my college newspaper, I started this blog, I met so many great new people and made many new friends. I published my first (and second) book. My grandmas recovered. Lunar Eclipse was born. I have two Jersey calves coming any day now.

Altogether the good definitely outnumber the bad, even though there were times in these last few months that it felt like the bad would never end. And of course there were some things that don’t fit in either category and are more nostalgic, my last year at the fair and two of my friends from the last five or six years moved to Michigan and onto a new future.

So here we are at the end of what was probably the weirdest year of my life. Things are looking up all the time and I feel more ready to move into the new year and the next semester of my college experience than I have in a long time. I probably felt the same at the beginning of this last year. It’s typical for one to say something like bring it on when going into a new year, and I probably did around this time last year. All I’m gonna say to 2019 is please be nice to me, and don’t be so weird. Into the next year we go.

On College

So I don’t really have anything to talk about today but I thought I should say that a week from today I head back to college for my sophomore year. With this in mind I have to concentrate on packing and getting everything ready this week and then once school starts again I’m going to have a lot of other things to concentrate on, so from now on I’ll only be blogging when I have time and if I have something on my mind about agriculture that I really need to talk about and I’ll try to go back to every day in the summer again.

The Truth from a Dairy Farmer

In the world today there are many problems with the dairy industry. From losing money and the price of milk going down, to having to get rid of the farm all together, it seems like things continually get worse. And a lot of the time the problems are helped along by wrong thoughts, ideas and beliefs. But in many places farms are continuing on, despite all the hardships. I’ve been helping on my family dairy farm since I was in the eighth grade, and that was when I decided I wanted to be the one to take it over. Even though I plan on doing this, I also plan on writing my own stories and becoming a published author. Last year was my freshman year of college and when I told my new-found friends, professors, and bosses what my plan for my life was it was always met with surprise. It wasn’t a bad surprise, it was just that most of the time people wondered why I was in college when I was going to take over the farm, especially since I am a woman, and that I am also going to spend my time writing too. So that is my hope by starting this blog and telling stories I have seen with my own eyes and experienced myself I will hopefully remove some of the wrong ideas the world has about the dairy farming, and hopefully will make it less of a surprise for someone, specifically a woman, to be a dairy farmer and also an author.