Happy birth days: the expansion of our Highland Beef herd

The maternity ward of the Torridon Fold hospital is buzzing with pride and excitement as all of this year’s Highland calves are alive and healthy. After such a bad time last year, when we lost three of the little ones, this is great news that they all pulled through. I have endeavoured to provide total care as the NHS would call it. Apparently last year a lack of vitamin E that caused problems with calves so I bought in advance and intended to administer it to the cows pre-birth. Great, until one of the girls decided to calve early. Or so I thought. It appears that the local bull had managed to get straight on the job with out any formal introductions and we were 10 days out on our forecast. The first calf was a bit touch and go for 48 hours and with a brief period in intensive care, he managed to pull through. We gave him a vitamin E injection and he soon perked up. The remaining four mothers were given their injections hoping that it would pass onto the calves so that they were prepared when born.

It must have worked as the other births were all natural and successful, except for one where we had to get the girl in the crush and pull the calf out as she was labouring for too long.

The next worry was whether they would all suckle well. You have never seen four grown men stare at teets for so long, looking for a sign that they had been suckled. It was painstaking work and I am sure Charlie seemed to get the most pleasure! A couple of the calves had to be educated on the subject, and with some gentle husbandry, the wee’uns soon caught on and have not looked back since.

This year we decided to hold off on tagging them. Also with three new boys we had to handle the castration but we left it too long and have decided to leave the boys “whole” for six months, hopefully encouraging them to grow faster as well.

Catching two week-old calves is no laughing matter. They have incredible strength and no amount of tackle training can prepare you for the chase. Eventually caught, tagged and released into the big field, the boys and girls have been having great fun charging around and playing with each other.

At this point, it is important to stress that the cows are reared for their meat and although they look like teddy bears at the moment they will eventually end up at The Torridon restaurants. We do not give them names, although guests keep making suggestions as to what to call them.

I am just glad that they all survived birth and I promise that this time next year, we will have built the new cow byre to be able to look after them even better.