This bouncing baby girl weighed 79.5 pounds

Or I worked on a dairy farm for three days and I'm still cleaning my clothes.

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This is the latest installment in a series commissioned by Cowboys and Indians Magazine called Western Work. So far I have shaved bucking bulls’ horns, shoveled pig shit, bucked hay and for today’s story, worked on a dairy farm.

You don’t know the calf of it

I bent at the knees, wrapped my hands under her belly, and lifted. Carrying this calf that was roughly 10 minutes old was like carrying a slimy, slippery, leathery bag of Jell-O. I put her in a wheelbarrow emblazoned with “calf taxi” on the side and started walking. I wheeled her out of the “back lot,” as students and staff at College of the Ozarks’ W. Alton Jones Dairy call the area where they keep pregnant cows; through the mat barn, short for maternity barn, where newborn calves live before joining the herd; and into another building, where I picked her up out of the calf taxi and plopped her indelicately onto a grain scale.

This bouncing baby girl weighed 79.5 pounds. The sun was starting to set as I pulled her back to the mat barn, where Reggie Kemna, a senior and the head of C of O’s dairy herd like her father before her, built a pen that I filled with straw. I lifted the calf again and and placed her inside—much more carefully this time.

Feeling more paternal with every passing minute, I took notes about other calves dancing in their stalls upon her arrival, her imperfect first steps, and her first word— “moo,” of course, at 6:10 p.m., not even half an hour into her life. All that was missing from this father-daughter bonding was a name. A name! Yes! She needed a name! The “rule” at C of O is the person who finds a newborn calf gets to name it. And Kemna was far too busy to do that just now.

I spent three days working on the 100-head dairy farm and separate beef farm at C of O near Branson, Missouri. I visited C of O in part because I have a good friend who is an ag professor there, in part because its dairy operation is ranked No 1 in the nation, and in part because I thought the school’s “Hard Work U” philosophy of educating students aligned perfectly with our “Working The West” mission.

Some students I worked alongside grew up on farms, are majoring in agriculture, and plan to return to their home farms after graduating. But not all. Caden Prock, whom I accompanied on rounds through two beef pastures, is a history major who aspires to become a teacher and has no agriculture background. Why is he working on a beef farm? C of O students get free tuition in exchange for working on campus, and being outside walking the fields beats any other gig he would get. For him, at least.

Caden, Reggie, and the rest of the students tolerated my endless “Why are you doing that?” queries. From them, I learned to milk a cow: disinfect the udders by dipping them in blue fluid, pull on them three times to get the milk flowing/make sure there’s no mastitis, wipe them clean, then attach the suction device that does the actual milking.

I learned that if it’s raining when you work on fences, then it’s raining when you work on fences.

I learned that if you dump food into a trough and cows and bulls pile in to eat, one of them will stomp on your foot, and it will hurt.

I learned that grooming calves is hypnotically relaxing. I touched more cows and calves in one hour among the beef cattle than in the rest of my life combined. Throughout my three days at C of O, I heard everybody else make something like kissing sounds to get the animals to move when they were reluctant to do so. I felt foolish doing that, so I used encouraging sarcasm (that’s my love language) instead.

I learned none of that matters. If a cow doesn’t want to walk, it’s not going to walk.

But the most important lesson I learned was about stewardship—of the land, the cows, and the students. Dairy manager Ryan Bilyeu and I piled into his truck for a tour of the on-campus dairy farm. He narrated what was growing in each field and why. Corn here, oats there, and that one over there, well, that’s a field at which they are applying the Biblical principle of rest every seventh year, so they won’t harvest anything there.

That careful stewardship has as its end goal finding the best combination of food to make the cows as healthy as possible so they will produce the best milk possible, so the humans who drink it will be as healthy as possible. All that work: Bilyeu loved my calf far before I did.

I looked around the mat barn. All the other calves appeared to have been bathed and groomed. In truth, they had simply licked themselves clean and dried off. By contrast, my baby girl’s hair was still matted and gross. Dally Wiesner and I turned a straw bale into a highchair. She and I laid the calf down flat on it, with her head hanging off one end, to prepare her to be fed. Someone brought milk straight from Annabelle, her mom. It’s critical that a calf ’s first few days of milk come from her mother because it will be full of colostrum, which is packed with life-giving nutrients and life-saving antibodies.

I tipped the bottle to her lips, and it reminded me of feeding my real-life daughters. . . if they weighed 79.5 pounds, were sprawled across a straw bale, and covered in white and black nastiness.

My paternal notetaking continued. She tried to stand at 6:42 p.m., wobbled and faceplanted. She stood on all fours for the first time at 6:43, though others might quibble that the absence of faceplanting is not the presence of standing. Over the next two days, I repeatedly walked through the maternity barn even though there was no reason to. Slowly, she started to look clean and pretty like the rest. I swear one time she recognized me, either by sight or smell, and tried to stand.

I was delighted when, a few days later, I received a picture of her—my, how she had grown!—with her name attached: Angelica.

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