When contemplating what the worst job on the dairy is, we have several contenders. There is tarping the feed pile as we dodge rat- and silage water-filled tires; there is dealing with retained placentas that chose a later date of exit than the calf that filled it. Dealing with abscesses or backward calves, and the one thing I was dealing with this morning that seemed like great article fodder: dehorning calves.
We’ve come a long way as an industry. Our current strategy of providing a pain blocker and using a debudder on younger calves seems to be the most effective for both the dehorner and the calf. Our historical practice of gouging and burning looked more like a bloodletting ritual from the Middle Ages. The smell of burning hair is still permanently etched into my barn clothes. There is something about the smell of burning hair to get a fellow really excited about the A.I. book and looking up polled bulls.
As I was dehorning calves, I received a text message from an employee, and I couldn’t tell if he was asking for a day off or wanted to quit his job entirely.
The advent of Google Translate has provided a great opportunity for us to communicate with those for whom English is a second language, or not a language they communicate in at all. It does, however, lead to some interesting text messages. Communicating with voice-to-text and autocorrect is hard enough without introducing a language barrier.
There was an instance a couple of years ago where I sent a text asking for a salesman to drop off a Drench Mate. For those who may not know, Drench Mate is a bucket and manual pump that we use to pump cows’ stomachs with vitamins and minerals when a cow is dehydrated or stressed. My phone in its infinite wisdom, however, changed my request for a Drench Mate into a request for a French maid.
Needless to say, our fearless salesman found this quite humorous. Mrs. Faber was less impressed and was kind of curious as to why my phone felt that a French maid was a reasonable request.
It’s shocking to think that only several decades ago we didn’t even have access to mobile phones. When you left the farm to get parts, you couldn’t get a text message asking you for additional parts. The only option was calling the parts store and telling them to have additional parts to be brought back. There are incredible efficiencies to be gained by having access to our phones, and with new technologies comes the learning curve of having to adapt to them.
A farmer’s relationship to their phone is an interesting one, as it usually has the volume turned all the way up so the ring can overcome the sound of a tractor or a milk pump. This offensively loud ring typically makes for an obnoxious disruption at the dinner table or a co-op kitchen meeting.
Who knows what sort of changes we are going to have in the next 40 years? But as we move into better practices for dehorning or implementing cellphones and technologies, make sure you don’t send out requests for French maids to your sales people.
