Farm Folks Switch

[Blanche Bunnell]

Ithink if someone only has one or two little calves that need to be on milk, real whole milk or replacer are both fine.

As others above have already mentioned, try to stick to the same, changes may cause scours.

The few years that we picked up bottle calves we always used milk replacer from TSC, and we always had some bags of electrolytes handy just in case.

We always had 3 or 4 calves so the milk replacer was more convenient, cheaper, easier to store, and I felt more comfortable that it was formulated to address their needs.

We introduced pellets in very small quantity after a couple weeks, just a handful each day for another week or so to get his stomach used to digesting them. Then more quantity of pellets and some hay to chew. After his first week home from the Vet, he improved and grew nicely. Our large bag of milk replacer lasted over a month and he was eating hay and some pellets nicely by the time it ran out.

With our second bottle calf, we went to a high quality dairy farm this time, where they took good care of the calves. Calf cost a bit more, but it had colostrum, was drinking milk replacer well, was bright eyed, energetic, navel cord had been treated. The folks asked if we had been by cattle, had cattle, before we could go to the barn. Taking disease prevention seriously!! Good sign to me! The barn was a dedicated calf barn, held about 100 new calves in individual stalls. We were told which calves were for sale so daughter could pick which she wanted. That calf was cared for the same as first calf, never had any problems. Worth the extra purchase cost to save on the Vet fees. This farm treats the calves as a crop, worth investing time and good care into, for making money on later. They do not sell many bottle calves, just to 4-H kids because they are big 4-H supporters. .

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say here that I shared the same vague grasp about Carver's accomplishments, despite the fact that my high school is named after the guy. To me, he was the peanut dude.

And yet. In 1941, Time dubbed him the "black Leonardo." He was a close friend of Henry Ford, a fellow eccentric and inventor. He was the first nonpresident to have a monument established at his birthplace by the National Park Service. Two decades after his death, the opera singer Marian Anderson christened a nuclear submarine that bore his name.

Linda McMurry, author of the biography George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol, writes that Carver was ubiquitous in his time, and one of the dozen or so most famous people in America. "In the last four years of his life, his name was attached to almost everything even remotely connected with blacks, such as a 'colored theatre' in Norfolk, a swimming pool in Indianapolis, a settlement house in Pittsburgh, a 'professional building' for Negroes in Cincinnati, and a Women's Christian Temperance Union chapter in Atlanta," she writes. "Eventually it became practically impossible to enter a black community anywhere in America without being reminded of the existence of a man named George Washington Carver."

So how is it that Carver, who was once one of the most famous men in America, black or white, has become a guy so few of us really know? Just how did he become such an integral part of the Black History Month pantheon?

When I started digging around, I found that there's a whole world of Carver fans, people who see the farm scientist as a paragon of grace. But even some of them admitted that Carver's scientific legacy was probably overstated.

Few of Carver's inventions and ideas ever found wide use, because he had a grudging relationship with documentation and was suspicious that his work might be stolen before he could patent it. As such, he didn't pass on that much in the way of research. It's one of the many ironies of his lasting fame. Even in his day, there were people who wondered if Carver was being lavished with attention that should have been given to some of his contemporaries, like the Howard University biologist Ernest Everett Just.

But on another, later occasion, Carver, in his late 70s, showed up at a hotel in New York City he had reserved only to be told that there were no available rooms. He waited for hours to have his reservation honored, and local figures in the press and the publishing world got word that Carver was being denied lodging. They leaned on the hotel and demanded that Carver be served. A white editor and friend of Carver's reserved a room, and was promptly accommodated. But when he tried to give his room to Carver, they were again denied and told that there were no available rooms. The incident became national news, and it was a reminder that Carver's fame didn't insulate him from racism.

"His success both instilled black pride and soothed segregationist consciences, and also gave hope to those left out of the American dream while justifying the position of the successful," McMurry wrote.

Carver was born a slave and was raised by his family's white masters. He was accepted into one college, but was turned away when he showed up for classes and the school's officials realized he was black. He would eventually become the first black student and the first black faculty member at what is now Iowa State University and went on to become a well-respected botanist.

The relationship between Washington and Carver was a complicated one, in large part because the botanist was kind of a diva. He was beloved by his students, but he wasn't a good administrator and he actively avoided the more mundane aspects of teaching. He regularly threatened to resign from Tuskegee, even though Washington extended him all kinds of privileges other faculty members didn't enjoy, and regularly touted the young scientist's intellect.

"Washington's attitude was really, 'We don't give you a lot of orders, but when we give them to you, you have to do it,' " Burchard said. "Carver had a tremendous amount of respect for [Washington], but it was a little like a little kid who had a great dad who never said 'I love you.' "

When Washington died, Carver was distraught. But his own profile began to rise quickly. His research had given him contacts in the federal government, which gave him more clout. He was named a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. (McMurry writes that it was never exactly clear who selected him for that honor.)

That fellowship boosted his reputation, and each new honor and award begat more honors still. And despite his image as a paragon of humility, Carver ran with it. He actively cultivated his newfound fame. He spent as much time at speaking engagements on other campuses as he did at Tuskegee.

When World War I began and there were shortages of crops and food, Carver's research into alternative uses for sweet potatoes gained a lot of attention from Washington, although they didn't amount to much by the time the war ended.

"Despite later claims that he almost singlehandedly transformed the peanut from an inconsequential crop to a multimillion dollar enterprise, a sizable, well-organized, and increasingly powerful peanut business existed even before Carver became its symbol," the biographer McMurry wrote. "Indeed, if the sweet potato industry had been as well organized Carver might have never become the Peanut Man."

In 1921, he went to D.C. on the association's behalf to lobby for a tariff on foreign peanuts. He was supposed to give a brief talk in which he showed off some alternative peanut food products, some of which he ate while he addressed the lawmakers. (One congressman snarkily asked if Carver would like some watermelon to go along with his food, but Carver didn't take the bait, telling him that watermelon was fine, but it was a dessert food.)

The same charm Carver used to win over his Tuskegee students dazzled members of Congress so much that they kept extending his allotted speaking time. ("Your time is unlimited," the rapt committee chairperson told him. It's all the more impressive considering Carver's squeaky and unimposing voice.) When he was done with his presentation, onlookers broke out into applause. The tariff was eventually passed. That incident, improbably, turned Carver into a major national celebrity.

The press began to lay it on thick with the mythmaking (Carver turns down lucrative job offer from Thomas Edison!) and Carver didn't try terribly hard to correct the record on a lot of their exaggerations about him. "The exotic qualities of his life were highlighted and often distorted, and what emerged was an image of Carver singlehandedly remaking the South," McMurry wrote.

I wondered aloud to a friend, Jelani Cobb, a historian at the University of Connecticut and a contributor to the New Yorker, whether Carver's historical import had been overstated. Why does Carver, whose work has little obvious contemporary resonance, matter so much?

It's pretty hard to argue with that. Here's Carver's backdrop: the interim between the end of slavery and the civil rights movement, a stagnant time for black rights. It was during this span that Jim Crow crystallized, when the Plessy decision came down, when Wilmington, N.C., saw the only successful political coup in American history, when the terrorist Ku Klux Klan had serious mainstream influence and the federal anti-lynching legislation meant to rein the Klan in was a nonstarter in Congress.

After Carver died in 1943, he was compared to his mentor, Booker T. Washington, says Williams. It was not meant favorably. Carver was seen as an accommodationist. And his disinterest in political activism didn't age very well.

It's important to consider, again, that he wasn't alive for most of the moments that became the signposts of the civil rights movement. He died years before the integration of the military, a decade before the first sit-ins and boycotts and marches. As the civil rights movement increasingly came to define black American life, he became harder to neatly posit in the trajectory of black social progress, even as his name continued to adorn schools and libraries and kids dutifully wrote book reports about him.

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