Work Experience: Dairy Farm

20ml oxytocin

Yesterday was an incredibly chaotic day, so sorry for this post being uploaded late.

Again I started my Saturday with milking cows. Some people have asked me what I do when a cow tries to kick me when I’m dipping their udders. I presume everybody’s answers to this will be different but I dip just as the cow puts her hoof down, so that she has very little time to react. I've also been told to approach them from between the cow’s back two legs, so that she can’t get a very good aim and catch your arms between her leg and her body (which hurts, trust me!).

One of the cows, with mastitis, was just about to finish her course of antibiotics. So Michael asked me to draw up 20ml of “oxytocin”. This is the drug that is injected into a cow with mastitis, I don’t know whether this is what every dairy farmer uses, but this is what the dairy farm that I go to uses. I thought that this would be a really easy job to do but the antibiotic was like golden syrup. It took a lot of strength to draw up the 20ml and I even had red fingers to show of my struggles.

The inner part of the horn

Michael told me that that morning a calf had died. Including the emotional aspects of losing a calf, I found out that it also means a loss of £200-£300 for the farm.

The outer part of the horn.

After using the power washer to clean the equipment, we got to work on trimming cow’s feet. The first cow, 666, has always been a bit crazy, so getting her into the crush was reasonably difficult. Half way through trimming the first hoof, she started shaking her head about to try and get out of the crush. She didn’t manage to get out, but she did manage to rip off the outer part of her horn. I didn’t know that the horn had a soft inner part so when I saw the blood I was quite worried. Michael told me that it was okay and the outer part of the horn would be on the floor somewhere, but to make sure that no infections set in, we used blue spray on the wound.

The other cow’s feet were all in good condition. But we did shave the tail and the freeze number of one of the cows. The freeze number needed shaving, because in the parlour we couldn’t see her number to put into the computer system so that she could be feed.