The Fan That Wouldn't Be Turned Off
One July heat wave, a cow named Pearl parked herself in front of the big box fan and defended it against the whole herd.
Summers in Erath County do not mess around. When the thermometer climbs past a hundred, I turn on every fan and sprinkler in the barn, and the cows arrange themselves under the breeze like folks at a church picnic. It is a calm and orderly affair, usually.
In the second week of July, Pearl found the big fan. It was a four-foot box model I had set up by the holding pen as a backup. She walked up, lowered her head until her forelock lifted in the draft, and closed her eyes. I thought it was sweet. Then she would not move.
I do not mean she stood there for an hour. I mean Pearl stayed in front of that fan from sunrise Tuesday until I turned the thing off on Friday afternoon. She ate her feed from a bucket I set next to her. She drank from a tub I rolled over on a hand truck. When another cow approached, Pearl gave her a look that would have stopped a freight train, and the interloper went elsewhere.
The folks at Texas A&M AgriLife Extension have good advice about airflow and shade for dairy cattle in the summer, and I read all of it. None of it covered what to do when one cow claims the breeze for herself. I ended up buying three more fans and putting them in a row, labeled with masking tape: Pearl's, Pearl's Backup and Everybody Else. She accepted the arrangement with great dignity.
The strange part is that her milk numbers that week were the best on the farm. A happy cow, I always say, is a cow with a fan and a grudge. I tell this one at every field day, and it never fails. The folks over at farm.FM asked if they could print the labels, and I said sure, but Pearl would want credit.
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