Just a Little Poke

Lyle sitting on a non-bloated cow. Me flexing my muscles.

Just a Little Poke (5 July 2019)

Happy Independence Day! Hope you’re all having a great week and building lots of good memories!

Today’s story is about knives. Turns out that knives are very useful on farms.  I usually had a knife in my pocket while out doing chores, but I remember that my dad had one special knife for certain emergency situations. As I remember, this knife had an off-white handle and a straight blade of approximately 8 inches long. The knife was kept in the barn for ready use, kind of like a first aid kit, except it was a knife…

You may be aware that cows have four stomachs. When they first eat grass, or hay, or whatever, they do not chew their food very well. So the mostly-unchewed food goes to the first stomach and waits. At some point, the cow will stop eating and start doing something called chewing cud. If you’ve ever seen a cow laying down and looking like she is lazily chewing gum, you should know that she is not chewing spearmint Doublefresh gum. If she were, her breath would smell much better than it does. That cow has regurgitated the half-chewed food she ate previously and is re-chewing it so it will digest better. I personally have never liked the flavor of regurgitated food, but maybe that’s an acquired taste...

As the cud (regurgitated food) is chewed better it is re-swallowed and proceeds to the next stomachs to provide nourishment for the cow, milk for the farmer, and stuff to fill the manure pit. The cow’s digestive system tends to work pretty well, but there are exceptions. One of these exceptions is the issue of bloating. If you’ve ever eaten a big meal and you’ve felt extra full and maybe a little bloated, you have nothing on the cow. If a cow gets into what my dad always called “too much green feed”, it’s stomach will grow so bloated that it can die.

Young alfalfa (commonly called hay) fits into the “green feed” category, and right across the lane from our pasture was a field of beautiful alfalfa. Cows love young alfalfa plants and I am sure the fences that restrained them from getting to it were a source of frustration for them. After all, we were growing this nutritious food specifically for them, why would we not let them have it? Why must they wait for us to say the alfalfa is ready, cut it, turn it over a couple times in the field to get the moisture content right, and put it into bales before we finally let them have some of that deliciousness?

Well, just like some things in our own lives, when alfalfa is eaten at the right time, under the right circumstances, and in the right quantity, it is a blessing for the cow. However, when eaten under the wrong circumstances, it can endanger her life.

If a cow gets too much of this high-quality food into her stomachs, digestion goes into overdrive and a LOT of gas is produced. Because of a cow’s stomach configuration, these gases are unable to escape, and they literally expand the stomachs just like a balloon. As the cow’s stomachs expand, they compress the cow’s other organs to the point where eventually her lungs will no longer be able to expand. At this point the cow will die of suffocation.

On that happy note, what do you do to help such a cow? First off, we tried very hard to keep all the cows out of the green alfalfa. That is the prevention piece, an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure, so we built good fences. But cows love alfalfa,and they love to escape fences. So whenever a cow escaped our well-designed and super-secure fences, it would almost always go right on over to that beautiful alfalfa and eat, and eat, and eat… until her stomach started to expand. Then she would lay down on her side and her belly would grow, and grow, and grow...

The good news is that it is never difficult to diagnose bloating in a cow- just look for the cow with the ginormous belly laying on her side, usually still in the field of alfalfa! But how can we help her? That is where this special knife comes in. Often the only solution was to use that special knife to cut a hole through the cow’s hide and into her stomach to let the gases escape. As you might imagine, the smell of escaping digestive gases is pretty awful (I guess I should stop complaining about the cow’s stinky breath). But this procedure, if done in time, can save the cow’s life.

So, the morals of this story are…

• First, don’t be like a cow and re-chew your food. It is not delicious.
• Second, sometimes it is best to stay inside the fence. God’s commandments are the most important fences for our safety.
• And third, when we’re in a bind, sometimes we might need a “small poke” to get us on the road to recovery. It might hurt a little, but it may be just what we need to get us back to full health.

Love you all!

Dad