Looking on the Bright Side

Everywhere around the world, this is currently a very stressful time. Even if one doesn’t have the COVID-19 virus, or know someone with it, they are affected in some way. Specifically for me, as a college student, a few days ago we were told like many others that the rest of the semester is being done online.

Now, I am not one to complain about being home for a longer period of time, especially as a dairy farmer, but it does mess up a lot of things to do with the college. So no, I’m not a huge fan of what has had to happen, but nobody is. It would be very weird if they were. The way I see it, the shutting down of universities and colleges, and now high schools in some areas too, is similar to the events of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. In the book, kids at Hogwarts are being petrified by a Basilisk. Specifically those with non magical parents are the ones being petrified, but the professors were still going to close the school in order to keep all of the students safe. Safety is what is most important in this time. So when I hear people complaining about this whole situation, I sometimes have to resist the urge to yell at them. The only way that this virus is going to go away is through people being smart and I think when we look back on this years later we will be happy that in some ways we overreacted, and not underreacted. Though I still don’t understand the whole toilet paper shortage thing, but I’m not going to get into that now.

As a dairy farmer in a small town, it is pretty easy for me to self distance myself. In fact, as someone with a compromised immune system, I’m much more likely to get it out at my college then I am being home. And while I’m not too worried about myself getting it, I am very worried about members of my family getting it, especially since if they were, it would’ve probably come from me if I had gone back to college. As it is, things are a mess now and everyone is still trying to figure things out, but at least I know that I have a lot less of a risk of giving it to people that I love.

Now being in the barn is one of the only places over the last few days where I’ve had a break from hearing about the virus. But there has been extra stress for us over these last few days too. All of a sudden our one worker that we have that has been helping every day since December stopped showing up on certain days, and then told us randomly one day that they quit. A few days later they said they would come back, but then we completely lost contact with him, and he wouldn’t respond to our messages or anything. SO that being said, the barn has had it’s own stressors over the last few days since I’ve come home, since we really need help with my grandpa not being able to do as much with having hip problems, including having hip surgery last Monday. And then my dad has all of his heart and back problems can’t do as much either. So we were sort of left out to dry in a way that we really couldn’t be. But as of a few days ago we have gotten a new worker, and so far she has been amazing.

This last week has felt like three. But in this extremely stressful time for so many I have been trying to remind myself of the good things going on, not just the bad. Specific examples of that being our new batch of ducks that we got last weekend, and that my cow Jasmine had another beautiful girl calf a few days ago. While everything else is still a mess, I find focusing on things like this, along with really anything to do with my animals now that we have solved the main problem at the barn, has helped me a lot. I highly recommend finding at least two things each day to remind yourself to be happy during this time. It can even be something small, like the fact that spring starts soon and the weather is slowly getting warmer. Things like this serve as a reminder that while things are a mess, everything will be figured out in time. As Samwise Gamgee says in The Lord of the Rings, “There’s some good left in this world… And it’s worth fighting for.”

During stressful times, try to look on the bright side of things. I think you’ll find that things will start to look better when you do.

My Fantastic Beasts

As a farmer and an animal lover I have always loved or felt a very strong connection to movies and books involving animals. How to Train Your Dragon is an example, but since it’s release in I believe 2017, the Harry Potter prequel movie, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has been my absolute favorite movie of all time.

For those who don’t know, the movie focuses on a wizard, Newt Scamander, and his adventures in NYC with his magical case full of creatures. From the moment I first saw the movie I have felt extremely connected to Newt as a character. And this has to do with both his personality and his animals. As a person I consider myself a bit of a loner sometimes, and also extremely socially awkward all the time, and many times I find it much easier to be with my animals than with humans. That’s not to say I don’t have any friends or I never talk, I’ve gotten much better at that over the years. But I’m still and probably always will be an extremely awkward person. And the same can be said about Newt Scamander.

But more important are the animals in the movie, and also the connection that Newt has to them. Throughout the movie the love and care Newt has for his creatures is obvious, especially in the moments where they make it obvious that owning and breeding the creatures is illegal in the movie. There is nothing that Newt wouldn’t do for his creatures, which can be seen for viewers after about ten minutes into the movie and throughout the rest of it.

So how does this connect to me? Well to begin, since my grandpa’s day, my family has owned a dairy farm. I bet most people could’ve guessed that by the title of my blog being called A Dairy Farmer’s Truth. For a long time it was my grandpa and my dad working on the farm with the help of our neighbors and my aunt and sometimes me and my sister. But for a very long time, I had no interest in working on the farm myself. In fact when I was younger I wanted a horse, and I even took riding lessons for a while. But then, I can’t completely explain what connected in my brain, but in 2012 when we were doing our yearly visit to the county fair, I saw a breed of dairy cow called Linebacks. Everything changed after that.

It wasn’t long after that when I had my own lineback, Katy, and I began to show cows at the fair. These days I have what my family calls my own herd among our actual herd, which is mostly Holstein, or the black and white cows. This was about eight years ago now.

About a year after Katy, more things began to happen. I lost my first cow, a Jersey named Hazelnut, and at the same time, my mom temporarily lost her job. During this time she had also began to develop and interest in alpacas. She learned more about them during this time without a job, and by 2014 we had seven alpacas and an alpaca farm in what used to be our backyard. Only a few months in, everything was still a learning process, and we lost one of our boys to something called a menengial worm, which is commonly spread through snails and slugs spread through deer poop. And since our house sits across the road from the woods, deer an a very common sight around here.

That being said, good things always tend to follow the bad, especially in farming, from what I’ve experienced. Just last year we almost lost our remaining two boys to the same worm, but with luck, and the will of God, we were able to save them. If we hadn’t lost Prince back in 2015, we probably would have no more boys today.

Another thing we learned concerning this was that ducks eat the snails and slugs that cause the menengial worm. So last year during March we got ourselves four ducks. This in itself was and still is another learning experience. We found ourselves learning how to incubate eggs, and the difference between types of eggs. And then a few months ago, we learned that we also had hawks around here, and that hawks like to get ducks. I bet you can guess what happened next. So, this next March we plan on getting more, but only after we do some work and building out in the alpaca field to protect them from hawks.

Other animals we have include cats and dogs both inside and outside the house. And also for a little while, back before I got into dairy cows my sister and I each had a rabbit that we took care of. A few years ago my sister’s died of old age, and we got another one at a different county fair than the one that I show cows in. We were assured by the owners that the one we bought was a boy, to go with the other boy that I had back at home. This it turns out, was not true. So at one point the rabbits bit a hole through the divider in the middle, and a little while later we had baby rabbits. We eventually ended up with ten. This was a few years ago now, and many have died of old age, so we are now down to three, which is still more than we started with. And after the events of the last few weeks and months, which include my dad getting diagnosed with congestive heart failure and having a defibrillator put in a few weeks ago, and my grandpa dislocating his hip for the third time on Christmas, I have become the only one with time to take care of the rabbits anymore. So just a few days ago I decided that I guess they were now my rabbits.

As you can tell I have about as many creatures as Newt Scamander. And like he does in the movie, I take care of and love them with all of my heart. Another similarity I find that also connects me to this story so much is the amount of people in the movie that don’t understand his creatures and are trying to get rid of them. This reminds me of the millions of times I have done my best to educate people on farming through social media and this blog. Indeed Newt writes a book on how the creatures should be protected and not killed. I myself have written a small book on my life on the farm with all of my creatures, which I self published, but I hope to maybe refine and publish through a bigger, actual publisher in the future. There are also a few things that Newt says in the movie along the lines of trying to educate other wizards about his creatures and protect them from humans, who are as he says, “the most dangerous creature on the planet”. I couldn’t agree with that statement more.

But protecting animals from humans really comes in farming. I have tried many times to educate people on my animals and my farms on social media and this blog all the time. There are many bad ideas and stereotypes about farming out there everywhere that people got into their heads by being uneducated. Those ideas include; shearing alpacas hurts them, when in reality it is just like getting a haircut and keeps them from overheating in the summer, moving dairy calves away from their mothers is cruel and that they cry for each other, when in reality 99% of the time the mother cows don’t even know what happened and won’t even give their newborn calves a second look, and moving the calf away is for the protection of all parties involved. Also more recently I have heard that artificial insemination is supposedly rape, which is not correct at all in that cows and animals have no concept of consent, and also go about reproduction in much different ways than humans. In fact every three weeks cows will come in heat, meaning their bodies are screaming at them to reproduce, and they will jump on anything they can, including humans or other cows. AI is the best way to calm this process and to protect the herd. In fact one of my cows in my herd had a back problem a few years back because of being jumped on like that and had to stay inside during the summer for a bit. There is also one more idea that agriculture is the biggest factor in climate change and is what everyone needs to be cutting down on and getting rid of. And I can see that maybe in large scale agriculture there is some things that maybe could be done more efficiently, but there are so many other things in cities and just in general that could be done that would dramatically reduce climate change more than getting rid of farming ever could.

What a lot of people don’t realize is how much farming is important for every day lives of humans, and also how much farmers take care of an love their animals. And that goes for every single one that I discussed above. Of course there are bad people in every bunch, and that’s most likely where the bad ideas come from in the first place. Which is why my 2020 resolution is to continue and work more on educating people about farming and all of my animals. I can’t call it my New Year’s Resolution because I didn’t really think of it until yesterday, and also putting it in that category will more likely make me forget. But education in everything is important, especially in farming. Which is why if you’ve read this and stayed with me up to this point I encourage you to comment on here or read and comment any of my other posts with questions you may have. I will gladly have civilized conversations with anyone and would love to spread my knowledge into the world to work on giving farming a better name. Farming is important, and animals are taken care of and loved 99.99% of the time. Without it, all of these animals would be lost, and like it or not most likely so would the human race. Farming isn’t going anywhere, but most likely neither are the people who spread rumors and refuse to understand it. Which is why I will never stop trying to educate people.