About Bread…

Bread?? What’s bread got to do with cows? For us, it’s got a lot to do with cows. Stick with me and I’ll explain.

If you’ve read my post about hay-making, you remember that we used to do things a lot differently on the farm than we do now. In addition to improved machinery, something as simple as left-over bread has made a huge difference in how we work with the animals on our farm.

There are several times throughout the year that we have to “work the cows”— put tags in ears to keep track of which cow is which, do a health check of new calves, and perform other general care of the herd. To do this, we need to have most or all of the herd in the barn where we have gates and pens and chutes to help us access the animals safely.

Easier said than done. Have you ever tried to pet a dog or cat that’s wary of humans? They usually run away from you, right? Now imagine that the animal you are trying to get up-close-and-personal with is an 800-pound adolescent steer. Or a 1300-pound mama cow who has been separated from her calf. You really can’t force a cow to do much that it doesn’t want to do. So how do we do it?

Years ago, when we needed to get the herd into the barn, we called on every able-bodied family member to help out. While the cows were in the pasture, we formed a straggly line behind them and walked toward them with 5-foot long livestock sticks, BB guns, and a trained herding dog (if we had one at the time). The cows would nervously head away from us and— hopefully— toward the barn.

But usually about half-way there, the cows would realize something was up and half the herd would break through our human-line, escaping to the safety of the pasture. So, we took as many as we could into the barn to do the work that needed to be done, amid many frightened animal noises, as well as the frustrated noises that the adult men made!

So where does bread come into all of this?

I’m not sure how my dad figured out that this was a thing to do, but about 20 years ago, he started occasionally picking up day-old bread from local food pantries to feed to the cattle. (I don’t know why the food pantry can’t keep it for the next day, but they can’t; they have to throw away their bread supply every night.) When Dad pulled into the barn with a truck-load of bread, we had to open every package and put it out for the cows that day or store it in rodent-proof trashcans for another day. We began to consistently feed bread to the herd once or twice a week… just enough bread to attract them, not a full meal of bread.

And it wasn’t long before the cows began to follow us when we had bread to give them. No BB guns necessary; we haven’t had a farm dog since I was in college. Can you imagine the difference? Let me show you what it’s like when we have a little bit of bread in the back of the truck…

Now, with only the help of one or two adults and my two kids, we are able to lead the entire herd calmly and quietly into the barn whenever we need to. That’s a big difference from us herding them from behind and hoping for the best!

“But cows eat grass!” you say. Yes, that is absolutely right. And our cows eat grass or hay year-round; the bread we give them amounts to less than 1% of their total diet. It’s kind of like giving your kids an occasional sweet treat— my kids come running to the kitchen whenever I’m making a dessert. But it’s definitely not the main thing in their diet. I try to make sure my kids eat healthy food, but sometimes we have dessert, or a cookie at snack-time, or… you get the idea.

When we call the cows, they know we have bread and come running!

Besides getting the herd into the barn, bread helps us keep the cows safe and healthy, too. We do sometimes have a fence go down, or an escape artist that thinks the grass is greener on the other side, or one that gets sick or injured. Because the cows love bread, it’s easy for one person to persuade the wayward girl to walk back through the gate and join the herd. Because the cows love bread, it’s easy to get a cow that needs medical treatment to go in the barn and into the chute so we can help her get back to normal.

For us, the trade-off of an occasional “sweet treat” for the cows is that they aren’t nervous around us anymore. They are calm and trusting around people. And this has made a world of difference for us in our day-to-day workings on the farm.