By MEGGIE I. FOSTER
Assistant Editor RUSHVILLE, Ind. — The Fry family in southern Rush County has been milking Holstein dairy cows for nearly 60 years, and in all those years they have never had triplet baby calves born on their farm.
However on the late morning of Sat. July 14 that trend changed when cow number two calved with two bulls and one baby heifer.
“I got a call from my daughter Saturday morning and she said ‘You’re not going to believe this …’ and then she told me we had a cow that calved with triplets, we couldn’t believe it,” said Suzanne Fry, 59, who owns and operates the 160-cow dairy with her husband Paul, 62, and one of their daughters, Stephanie Tressler, 31 and her husband Brad, 32.
“My husband has been dairying since 1962 and this is the first set of triplets he has ever had,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of twins born on the farm, probably about five sets a year. So of course, looking at how big she was, we figured she was going to have twins.”
Much to the Frys’ surprise, cow number two, a five-year-old on her third calving, had three calves, a first for the farm and according to the Frys, a probable first for Rush County.
“We’ve talked to a few people in the area and we think it may be the first set of triplets born in Rush County as well,” said Fry, adding that Rush County is home to approximately 10 dairies.
According to Mike Schutz, a professor of animal science at Purdue University, triplets are “pretty rare, but not as much as you might think.”
“The incidence of triplets in dairy cattle is somewhere around 1 in 10,000 births,” said Schutz, adding that the occurrence of triplets is roughly the same as the occurrence of twins. “About 1 to 2 percent of calves are twins, so if you consider the embryo splits again for triplets, you can square that and it’d be around 1 in 10,000.”
Although triplets may be a rare and interesting sight on any dairy farm, it’s not always a positive occurrence, especially when a bull is born along with a female. In the Fry’s case, this is exactly what happened. According to Susann, because the bulls were born as part of triplet, the baby heifer is sterile, meaning she cannot be used for breeding purposes.
“Yep, she is a freemartin, meaning she is sterile,” said Fry, regretfully adding that the heifer will be culled as a result. “We just can’t afford to keep her. It’s too bad three heifers weren’t born instead, because we’d love to keep them.”
In addition to the freemartin heifer, the bulls will depart the farm by route of Steve Cull of Clarksburg, Ind. who buys all of the Fry’s baby bulls.
“He usually picks them up three days after they’re born, but we’ve kept these a little longer then usual so the media could come out to see them,” explained Fry.
Fry said that the calves are all extremely healthy and the mother is doing just fine, even as a result of having three calves as opposed to the usual one.
“She’s a good cow,” nodded Fry. “She licked them all off when they were born, she did all that.”
However, when the cow started to calve in the early morning, Brad Tressler, husband to the Fry’s daughter, Stephanie, noticed the cow was struggling and helped to “pull the calves when he started to see multiple sets of legs.”
“They just kept coming,” laughed Fry.
Usually, when a cow calves with, even twins, “it tends to make them (cow) really thin and they tend to get sick, but not this cow, she has done a great job,” grinned Fry.
In addition to milking cows, the Fry family also farms approximately 750 acres in Rush County.
This farm news was published in the Aug. 1, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
