There’s an old saying “it never rains but it pours”. In other words, when things start to go wrong, they really do go wrong.

Over the years I have found that this can happen a lot with farming. When things start to go against you, it often adds into a whole string of problems.

A couple of weekends ago I had such a run, with three heifers needing a caesarean section in quick succession.

The first one was at lunchtime on Friday. The calf was coming backwards, and it was too risky to pull, so the vet took it out the side of the animal. Everything was successful, and mother and calf were fine.

There was another heifer out in the calving pens at the time, so I put the MooCall on her that evening and went to bed at 1.30am. The MooCall went off at half two and half three, so I went up to check her. She had made very little progress, so I re-set the MooCall and went back to bed.

The MooCall went off again at five and six, so I got up again and this time she was trying hard to calve. It seemed like a big calf, so I give her some more time. Then at 7.30am I decided that I needed the vet, so at by 8am we were doing another caesarean section.

The calf was just too big, but everything was successful again. It was a tough nine hours, but we had two heifers with two good bull calves on them.

The weekend went on and we had three more calves born unaided, so I thought we had turned the corner, and that was my share of trouble over for this calving season.

But, while I was up lambing sheep on the Sunday night, there was another heifer making slow progress. I watched for a while, but she wasn’t fit to get the calf’s head into the pelvic area.

It was a borderline case. I could put on a head rope and try and pull it out. But I have made too many mistakes down the years, that it has left me wary about over-pulling. I called the vet. The result was a third caesarean section in three days.

Again, cow and calf were fine. It was a challenging weekend and an expensive one, but everything was alive, so I had something to be thankful for.

Differently

When I look back at the chain of events, it makes me wonder why this happened and if there was anything I could have done differently to avoid this.

Lots of things go through my head. Did I bull the heifers too young? Did I use the wrong bulls on them? I have had some calving issues with these bulls in the past, although recently, I have had several calves born to the same bulls without any problems.

As for the size of the heifers, most of the rest of them have calved unassisted, so size isn’t the issue. I have been calving at two years old without any problem for years. However, I have been feeding meal to the heifers to stretch my silage, and I wonder has this caused my problems, particularly in heifers carrying bull calves. But if it was the meal feeding, then you would think that all the calves would have been oversized.

Combination

It’s hard to nail it down to just one thing.

It’s probably a combination of issues and it’s probably just a coincidence that they were all over the one weekend.

It would be nice to think that this won’t happen again, but this is probably only wishful thinking.

The whole experience is a reminder that calving cows is draining, both physically and mentally, and it can be a very fine line between getting it right and getting it wrong.

The problem with sucklers is that if you get it wrong there is no second chance.