Homesteading: You Can Lead A Heifer To Water But...

Star contemplating drinking from the pond.

The poly line is up & Star (our Jersey heifer) now has several acres of pasture along with the pond for her enjoyment. She yelled at us for several days wanting her bottle, but we were finally done with bottle feeding. What we didn't expect was to be yelled at for water. She has an entire quarter acre body of water to drink from not to mention there are several streams that feed into the pond. Why wont she drink from the pond? It doesn't make a lick of sense to us. When she was out & about causing mischief (see: Our First Dairy Cow) she found the little bucket of water in the goat barn and drank it dry. The water in the goats bucket was pond water!

Seriously how funny is this? The pond is right behind her but she is stuffing her head into a bucket for the same water!

We offered her a bucket of water from the pond. We would dip the entire bucket into the pond while she watched then haul the heavy thing out, water everywhere. She would dive in, greedily gulping it down until the bucket was empty. We were so frustrated. This isn't realistic. Cattle consume copious amounts of water. We couldn't fill a five gallon bucket multiple times a day for her when she had all that water before her. We tried filling the bucket & keeping it as close to the pond as possible hoping to encourage her to drink from the pond. We even splashed at the water. No dice. She sniffed at it, but that's it. It seemed that for Star water to drink only comes in a bucket.

Timber! There goes half the water in the bucket!

A bucket that she knocked over ninety five percent of the time, spilling out the contents.  What's a farmer to do? We know so little about raising cattle. We got the bright idea to ask our neighbor if he could put his big ol' beef cattle on our property in hopes that when Star saw them drinking from the pond she would get the idea. Our neighbor agreed & we dropped the gate between our properties. Star was deliriously happy to have all these new buddies.  She kicked up her back legs & danced around in joy. The beef cattle (Black Angus) didn't even bat an eye... tail? They welcomed her as if she was always one of them (we humans could learn a thing or two from these bovines).  Imagine the sight of our little brown Jersey girl, not even six months old cavorting about with big mature pregnant solid black cows. Much to our relief, she quickly figured out that the pond was a great source of water. Problem solved. Whew!

Look Ma! I'm drinking water from the pond!

Up next, How Chickens Have Sex...

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