Chapter Four

 

    

                                                CHAPTER FOUR

                                           Milk Testing in April 1991

 

   In 1991, back when I was on monthly DHIA milk testing, I wrote this column.

 

   In the spring, my monthly DHIA barn sheet is a mess. Goats are freshening and drying up continually, which means old dates on the barn sheet must be crossed out and new ones entered. My supervisor takes care of this with the help of my calendar, although my supervisor doesn’t consider the calendar a very great help.

   It’s not that the information isn’t available on the calendar. It is. Everything that happens in my barn is duly entered alongside the date in the appropriate one-inch square, including which sheep lamb when with how many eyes and rams, which goats kid when with how many does and bucks, when who is dried, when who is wormed, who is treated for whatever, what sort of wild ducks are on the pond that day, the Gettysburg Address (if I happened to be trying to relearn it), etc. Some days are pretty crowded.

   Add to the crowding my less-than-perfect handwriting (some would say illegible) and you have, according to my tester, a giant headache. Or she has a headache after trying to decipher the mess.

   On March test day, my supervisor asked what day I had dried Cha Cha.

   “Just look for her name on the calendar somewhere in February,” I told my tester.

   After some moments of squint-eyed head scratching, Bev said, “Aha! Here she is! ‘Burped and fry-treated Cha Cha’.”

   “Huh?!” I asked, puzzled. So I looked. There, in plain letters, I had written “bumped and dry-treated Cha Cha”. Plain to me, anyway. To Bev it looked like “burped and fry-treated”.

   Before I dry my does, I “bump” them. That is, I press up on the right side of their abdomen, just in front of the udder, to see if I can feel kids kicking. If I feel kids, I infuse the udder with a dry treatment and quit milking the doe. If I don’t feel kids, I keep milking until the kids make themselves felt or until the doe looks obviously pregnant.

   Coco was obviously pregnant. She freshened with three kids. On the next test day my tester searched through the squigglings on my calendar trying to find Coco’s fresh date.

   “This must be it,” she said. ‘Coco feast 2 bid’. Or maybe ‘fcash 2 bid’. ‘Past 2 bid’? Were the two of you playing poker?”

   What the calendar said was “Coco fresh 2b 1d”, which obviously means Coco freshened with two bucks and one doe.

   After that my supervisor really got into the spirit of the thing. “Ah, I see Gentian freshened with one smashed fly buck and one hieroglyphic smashed fly doe.”

   There was, of course, a perfectly reasonable explanation. When my sheep lamb, I use the biological symbols for male and female (the little circles with a cross on the bottom for female or an arrow out the top right for male) to denote rams and ewe lambs. This is to keep from confusing sheep lambings with goat freshenings.

   I had mistakenly used symbols at first for Gentian’s kids, then crossed the symbols out and replaced them with “b” and “d”. Gentian had 1b & 1(+1)d. That is, one live buckling and one live doeling (plus another doeling born dead). The crossed-out symbols were Bev’s smashed flies.

   My supervisor next scoured the calendar for clues about Phaedra’s dry date. “Here she is!” (Bev was having a great time by now.) “’Phaedra fried and fly-treated.’”

   “That’s ‘dried and dry-treated,” I corrected.

   “Nope. It’s definitely fried and fly-treated. I’d swear to it.”

   I glared at her, but it didn’t do any good. She kept right on giggling.

   “Please,” I admonished between clenched teeth, “write Phaedra’s dry date on the barn sheet.”

   “Oh sure. Sorry.”

   She wrote, but I could hear little muffled giggles. Then she turned back to the calendar. “It says here you’re supposed to burp Vanessa today. Have you done that yet? How do you get her on your shoulder? Ha! Ha! Ha!

   “And next week you need to ‘fry Snowdrop if burped’. I guess she wouldn’t taste good full of gas, would she? Ha! Ha! Hee! Hee! Hee!”

   I would get a new tester, one who shows more respect, but I have been advised that anyone else would throw up their hands in disgust rather than try to decipher my calendar.