I thought I was safe, in fact it didn’t cross my mind that I wouldn’t be, the calf was dead after all. Dad had just brought the cow and her stillborn calf into the cow yard. I had just turned eight and we were in our first year on the farm. This was the first dead calf that I’d seen so I was curious. I just went for a closer look. Suddenly the mother cow butted me back to the railing fence. She took a couple of steps back and was about to go again when “BANG”, my dad’s whip cracked between us. She stopped and I slid through the fence.
Not many years later the raising of calves became my responsibility, I’d already had practice on chooks.
From late primary school, right through high school my mornings usually started with Dad waking me up, going out to get the cows in from the night paddock and, as I got older, getting the milking started. Then maybe a quick bowl of cereal before going back to feed chooks and calves.
Mum and Dad made a deal with me just after we moved to the farm that I could look after the chooks and that I would get a penny an egg for my troubles. The first day they laid 12 eggs so I got a shilling. After that they never laid that many, more like two or three. This is what happens when you’re at school and your dad is at home all day. Strangely enough we always seemed to have plenty of eggs.
We always had one rooster that ran with the hens and a set of cages with young roosters being fattened up for the pot. Sometimes I would “accidentally” let a couple of those roosters out just to watch them fight. What a spectacle. The colours on their feathers were often amazing.
Teaching a calf to drink from a bucket involves straddling the calf and getting it to suck your fingers before pushing its head down to the milk. This can be very frustrating, especially during hormonal teenage years, as the calf will drink quite well as you ease your fingers out and then it will butt, as they do to get the mother to let her milk down. This results in getting covered in milk and a real struggle to hold back your anger. I had a pair of jeans that I would wear for feeding calves and they would get a wash maybe once a week, in the meantime they would stand up by themselves in the corner of my bedroom. After a few feeds the calf realises that the milk is in the bucket, not the fingers so all is good.
Once calves could drink properly in the calf shed they graduated to the calf paddock where we had a set of bails that allowed us to feed probably eight calves at a time. I would challenge myself to carry all eight buckets laden with a powdered milk mix at one time.
AI used to mean Artificial Insemination. We would have this done to a few of our best cows every year and, if one had a bull calf we would raise it. I always gave those bull calves extra milk because I wanted to raise a magnificent animal.
My payment for raising calves was that I would own one. When she grew up her milk would go to the farm finances but if she was sold I would get the money. During the tough times in the seventies some of those cows made a loss.
At home during my first uni summer break Debbie and I stayed home while the rest of the family had a holiday. Uni hadn’t been good for my fitness, so I did a four mile block run every day.
On one run I remembered that I had a cow and calf to get in before milking. Normally this is pretty easy as the calf follows the cow in, but not this one. That calf would not be herded. It was maybe ten days old which is probably as fast as it gets in its life.
I chased that calf for what seemed like hours, on already tired legs. I finally caught the bloody thing at the far end of the paddock, a good 150 metres from the cow yard. The only option I had was to carry it, which I did in stages. Stagger maybe twenty metres, put the calf down and sit on it, repeat until I got to the cow yard.
Then I had to milk the cows...
John Holschier
June 2026
Not many years later the raising of calves became my responsibility, I’d already had practice on chooks.
From late primary school, right through high school my mornings usually started with Dad waking me up, going out to get the cows in from the night paddock and, as I got older, getting the milking started. Then maybe a quick bowl of cereal before going back to feed chooks and calves.
Mum and Dad made a deal with me just after we moved to the farm that I could look after the chooks and that I would get a penny an egg for my troubles. The first day they laid 12 eggs so I got a shilling. After that they never laid that many, more like two or three. This is what happens when you’re at school and your dad is at home all day. Strangely enough we always seemed to have plenty of eggs.
We always had one rooster that ran with the hens and a set of cages with young roosters being fattened up for the pot. Sometimes I would “accidentally” let a couple of those roosters out just to watch them fight. What a spectacle. The colours on their feathers were often amazing.
Teaching a calf to drink from a bucket involves straddling the calf and getting it to suck your fingers before pushing its head down to the milk. This can be very frustrating, especially during hormonal teenage years, as the calf will drink quite well as you ease your fingers out and then it will butt, as they do to get the mother to let her milk down. This results in getting covered in milk and a real struggle to hold back your anger. I had a pair of jeans that I would wear for feeding calves and they would get a wash maybe once a week, in the meantime they would stand up by themselves in the corner of my bedroom. After a few feeds the calf realises that the milk is in the bucket, not the fingers so all is good.
Once calves could drink properly in the calf shed they graduated to the calf paddock where we had a set of bails that allowed us to feed probably eight calves at a time. I would challenge myself to carry all eight buckets laden with a powdered milk mix at one time.
AI used to mean Artificial Insemination. We would have this done to a few of our best cows every year and, if one had a bull calf we would raise it. I always gave those bull calves extra milk because I wanted to raise a magnificent animal.
My payment for raising calves was that I would own one. When she grew up her milk would go to the farm finances but if she was sold I would get the money. During the tough times in the seventies some of those cows made a loss.
At home during my first uni summer break Debbie and I stayed home while the rest of the family had a holiday. Uni hadn’t been good for my fitness, so I did a four mile block run every day.
On one run I remembered that I had a cow and calf to get in before milking. Normally this is pretty easy as the calf follows the cow in, but not this one. That calf would not be herded. It was maybe ten days old which is probably as fast as it gets in its life.
I chased that calf for what seemed like hours, on already tired legs. I finally caught the bloody thing at the far end of the paddock, a good 150 metres from the cow yard. The only option I had was to carry it, which I did in stages. Stagger maybe twenty metres, put the calf down and sit on it, repeat until I got to the cow yard.
Then I had to milk the cows...
John Holschier
June 2026
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