Animals at Our Barn

You've seen some of our pictures, but I'm going to describe what's happened on our trip so far.

On Monday, we started out with a place that's easy.  It was the Heifer Barn.  A heifer is a cow that has not had a calf yet.  It's also already older than one year.  We fed them and petted them.  All of the heifers are cows (girls), except there is one bull named Martini.  He is there to get the heifers pregnant.

There are also calves in another part of the farm who are almost heifers.  They are outside of the heifer barn and they are already weaned off of milk.  They only eat grains and pellets and hay.  Before they go to that space, while they are weaning, they are kept in the small animal barn.  That's where all of the small animals and the non-weaned calves are.

There are five calves in the small animal barn that we take care of.  All five names are Infinity, BlackJack, Vegas, Josie, and Raspberry.  The five calves each have their own pen.  Also, they have different eating plans because they're at different stages of weaning off of milk.  Some eat more grain than milk, and that's usually when they're older.

There are other small animals in the small animal barn: Lucky the bunny, Clementine the pig, goats, chicks, and ducks.  The goats have names.  They are Aunt Tootsie, Eva, Zach, Cody, and Aurora.

There's also a dairy barn with Jersey cows.  The dairy barn cows are different from the heifers because the dairy barn cows have already had a calf and the heifers have not had a calf yet.  The dairy barn cows get milked about seven minutes two times a day.  They often get milked by machines rather than by hand.  They do that because it's faster on the machine and the hand way takes longer.

These are a few of the heifers.

This is me and a heifer that has the same name as my mom.

This is Anette smiling for the camera.