Cows are the most wonderful animals, I love them heaps. Cows make great pets.
They’re big yet they’re so gentle. In all the time Ive had cows I’ve never had a bad moment with them. They aren’t aggressive at all and they are even tame enough so that mykids can pat them a little, though they don’t like being patted too much, they tend to pull back when you pat them. Just pull back a little that’s all you need to do.
The best time to pat cows is when you feed them their hay. They just love their hay, and when the grass growth is getting slow because winter is coming you need to supplement their feed with hay or something else like that. I have hay.
Now that means of course that youre committed to feeding your cows every single day of the year. Once there’s no feed left in the field then they need hay each day without fail. So you cant just go away for a few days and leave them or they starve. So youre committed to feeding cows unless you make other arrangements.
I like to feed the cows too, but I like holidays as well so when I go away I have to make some other arrangements. This is how I do it when I need to.
I have various different fields each fenced off. 7 total. So when I have plenty of grass I lock one up and leave it with the long grass in it. Then when I go away I open the gate to that one and the cows discover that the gate is open and head in there, because they may look slow buy cows aren’t.
The cows aren’t silly, they know that there’s grass in there somewhere when they look through the gate and see it so once I open the gate they’re right in there as fast as they can.
Then when I come back I send them out of that paddock and back into the one with no grass and I start feeding them their hay again.
Right after breakfast I feed them the hay. They get 1 1/2 bales of hay every day but if it’s too cold I give them 3 bales of hay and they eat the lot. And they’re not silly, they know when feeding time is, they’re waiting right out the front of the shed for their hay, and they love it.
In fact this morning I gave them 3 bales. But it’s getting warmer soon and the grass is beginning to grow and that’s good because I don’t have a lot of hay left any more. But that’s ok because I’ve got more grass coming so I’ll have more hay soon. (more…)