Here's one of my favorite family stories from 2018.

Ruby's Story

On a warm summer day, I watched from the dining room window as the rain poured down and the red vet truck pulled back to the pasture where our red angus heifer grazed. Ruby was due to have her calf any day and it looked like it was happening soon. "Today's the day," I said in the voice message to the vet, my husband Ralph, a few hours earlier before the rain started. It looked as though Ruby was starting to calve just as the rain clouds moved in. 

We were excited and had been anxious for this day to come. Two years earlier we were given Ruby by my parents, retired dairy farmers, who raise a small herd of red angus beef cattle. She didn't take to the mom and and was a little sick and needed to be bottle fed several times a day. As a stay-at-home mom I was happy to have the new calf at our 3-acre hobby farm and the kids were excited as well. After 40 years of bottle and bucket feeding dairy calves on their dairy farm, my mom was also happy to pass her along. It didn't take long for the name to be decided. Our two older sons, fascinated with rocks and gems, suggested Ruby, which of course, her red color fit the name perfectly. She's pictured below a few years ago after bringing her home.

Bring Ruby home a few days after she was born in 2016.
Now at this point if you're a farmer, you're probably thinking we're crazy spoiling this one little calf and me writing about it seems a little nuts. I have two best friends, one is a dairy farmer and the other is a beef farmer, both with a lot of head of cattle, and I'm pretty sure they just shake their heads at me most days as I spoil all these farm animals out here, but honestly, it is fun.

So, over the year we spoiled Ruby, she'd follow the kids around in the pen and was sweet as can be. A year later we paged through a book of sires looking for a bull we'd like to breed her with. Side note, we also have close college friends from Minneapolis, Minn., who came to visit right around the time we were looking for a bull and now they thought this was absolutely crazy. I have to chuckle every time I think about it, having to explain the whole process of how farmers can often choose the sire for their cows from a book and then order the semen. They were in awe. It's an honest to goodness case of the story, "The City Mouse and the Country Mouse." When we go to the big city we are just as bewildered at some things, but that's what makes it a fun friendship. Moving on...

So, we chose a bull called Pie Cinch. He looked really nice, but most important to me, he was listed as having a great temperament. With only having 3 acres and four kids climbing in and out of pens, it was important to me that this calf had a good personality. The kids were excited, already picking out names, if it was a girl they'd call it "Ruhbarb Pie." 

Life went on and Ruby carried her calf through the winter and into spring. In the meantime we planned our first out-of-state family vacation to South Dakota. Planning around baseball, softball and swimming lessons, we had the last week of June open, much too close for comfort to Ruby's due date. June came and Ruby looked great. Ralph ultrasounded her and was positive of the due date of early July. We went on the open road and left our animals in the good hands of my parents and a young vet student who updated us occasionally on the trip.  

We enjoyed our long drive out to South Dakota and the unique landscape but after a week we were anxious to get back to Wisconsin. Looking forward to having our children see Ruby's calf being born was next on our summer list. Growing up on a dairy farm, I saw calves being born all the time, but for my kids it would be their first time. Our older two kids, who are 10 and 11, were especially excited, so we returned from South Dakota but a few weeks later the boys were headed off to 4-H camp. When they left for the weekend, we told them Ruby would hopefully wait until they got back to have her baby. Unfortunately, it was the night before they returned from camp that our new addition to the farm was born.

On that rainy afternoon Ralph walked out to Ruby in the middle of the pasture, put a halter on her and tried pulling her across the pasture and into the barn where she could have her baby in a nice dry bed of straw, but she wasn't into that plan and wasn't about to move. 

I threw on my coat and boats and walked slowly as the rain poured and the lighting flashed through the sky. He was ready to start pulling and yelled explaining that we needed to get the calf out now because the placenta had separated and if we wait any longer, we'd have a dead calf. He worked on it for a few minutes pulling but nothing was happening. Yelling to me to run back to his truck to get his lariat, I took off through the pasture, got to the truck, found the lariat and raced through the rain back to Ruby and Ralph where a beautiful big bull calf was lying on the ground. 

"What the heck!" I yelled at Ralph a little miffed that he pulled the calf when I was gone for a few seconds. I wanted to be there when the calf came out and he laughed and said, "As soon as you ran off, Ruby gave a good push and the calf came out. It's a bull calf."

We stood there soaked to the bone looking over the healthy big beautiful bull calf. The first calf, of hopefully many, that would born out here on our little piece of farm life.

Big Red pictured a few days after being born.

The kids came home the next day and raced out to the pasture to check out the calf that Ralph and I had come to calling "Big Red." He was a big, big calf and the name just seemed to stick. Meanwhile, over the next few weeks, we watched Big Red grow and helped the kids get ready for the county fair where they'd show their hogs, beef calves and one red angus steer. They did fabulous with their animals. Wyatt showed his steer, Remington, also from Grandma and Grandpa's farm, and got a red ribbon, which we were pleased with. We entered the steer in the carcass show following the fair and Wyatt won grand champion. That really got him hooked. Since then he has set his goal on training Big Red to take him to the fair next summer.

Wyatt's nightly routine includes his chores of feeding and watering Ruby and Big Red after coming home from school. When I'm not sure where he is and it's supper time, all I have to do is look out the kitchen window and I'll find Wyatt sitting in the green pasture with that big red calf inching closer to him.

It's been fun watching the kids get so excited about our calf. Who knows maybe next year Ruby will give us a little, "Rhubarb Pie."

R.C.P.