Hot! Hot! Hot!

Everyone asks how the cattle do in this heat and it’s a good question.  Cattle don’t sweat, similar to dogs. So they cool by drinking water and flushing it through their system. On these hot days a cow will drink 25 gallons or more! Most of that comes right out the back end since they don’t sweat. Our cattle will drink over 20,000 gallons of water per day from our spring fed pond. We installed extra gravity fed water lines to improve the water flow a couple years ago and my checks today showed they were keeping up. So we focus on three things to keep the cattle cool;

1. Shade

2. Plenty of water

3. Ventilated space.

We also limit movement of the cattle and if we need to do anything we get it done before it gets hot. We had a vet out to preg check cows today and we started getting things ready at 5:30am and the vet worked from 7am-10am.  Cows were kept in the shade and seemed to handle the activity but we were all sweated wet and ready to call it quits at 10am.

The picture is of yesterday’s sunrise, we moved our start time up to 5:45am everyday to try to get our employees out before it gets really hot (but usually we just work more hours).

Anyways, looks like a long summer ahead and we will do our best to keep the ladies cool!