Last year, we bought our first two dairy cows. Maude is the larger girl. She is pregnant and should deliver sometime in mid to late June. She is a small standard, impregnated by a mini bull. You can read more about Maude here.
Charlotte is a mid mini heifer, born in late November of 2019. We are hoping to get her pregnant via AI sometime in July for a spring calf in 2021.
Recently, we needed to get these girls their spring vaccinations. Maude is an experienced milk cow, and has been a pleasure to work with, but Charlotte’s breeder had a family crisis at just the wrong time in her development and was unable to work with her as a young calf. Therefore, she is skittish and shy, and does not know how to follow a lead.
Our vet required our cows to be restrained before he could give shots, so son Jarred and I set in to build stanchions for both milking and vetting last week. We are very excited about how they turned out.
These are the two stanchions that we built into the overhang of our dairy barn roof. Eventually, we’ll probably enclose this 12 x 12 foot area so that winter milking will be out of the wind.
What I said as we stood back to survey the finished work was “Gee, I’d love to have that view at breakfast and dinner every day!”
The design of the stanchion on the right is for maximum restraint. Since Charlotte is so skittish and has never been milked, we felt that we needed one of these stanchions to have sides as well as a front restraint.
The wired, green gate on the far right was already in place (and will be replaced with a board wall in future days). The green gate between the two stanchions opens in to form a pen, and the chain for the gate attaches to the opposite one to form a butt restraint for the cow.
In this picture, the goats were exploring the finished stanchions before we put up the green gate between them. These stanchions did their job! The vet has come and gone, and the girls are both vaccinated.