If you’ve ever driven past a pasture in early spring and spotted a wobbly-legged calf taking its first steps, you’ve caught a glimpse of one of my favorite and most exhausting times of year. Spring calving season on a South Dakota cattle farm is equal parts magic and mud, sleepless nights and pure joy. It’s the time of year when everything else takes a back seat, the coffee pot runs on overtime, and you find yourself checking on cows at 2am in weather that has absolutely no business still being this cold in April. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But I’m also not going to pretend it’s easy. Here’s what calving season really looks like from the inside.
What Is Spring Calving Season?
Spring Calving season is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the time of year when all of your pregnant cows give birth. On our place, calving season runs from March through May, which in South Dakota means you are essentially playing weather roulette for three solid months. One day it’s warm enough to think spring might actually be coming. The next day there’s six inches of snow on the ground and a brand new calf trying to figure out its legs in a blizzard. Welcome to the Northern Plains.
A cow’s pregnancy runs about nine months, just like a human’s. That means the breeding that happens the previous summer determines exactly when your calving season hits. We breed naturally, which means our bull does what bulls do, and roughly nine months later we have calves. Simple in concept. Slightly more complicated in practice when you’re managing a herd of over 100 cows.
That’s right – over 100 calves in a single season. Which means for the better part of three months, calving season isn’t a background event on our farm. It IS the farm. Everything else gets scheduled around it, planned around it, and sometimes just abandoned because of it. The cows don’t care about your to-do list, and they have absolutely no respect for your sleep schedule either. But when you’re watching a brand new calf take its first wobbly steps on a crisp March morning, somehow none of that matters.
How Do You Know a Cow Is About to Calve?
Cows can’t text you when they’re in labor (though honestly, that would be incredibly helpful). So instead, you learn to read them. Once you go through spring calving season a few times, you start to notice the signs before things really get going, and catching them early can make all the difference.
The first thing we watch for is the udder bagging up. When a cow’s udder starts filling with milk and getting tight and full, that’s her body getting ready. It doesn’t mean a calf is coming in the next hour, but it means you start paying closer attention. Next comes the behavior. A cow that’s about to calve will often separate herself from the rest of the herd, like she’s looking for a quiet corner to handle her business in peace. You’ll also notice restlessness. She’s up, she’s down, she can’t quite get comfortable. Sound familiar? Any mom reading this knows exactly what that feels like.
By the time you’re seeing mucus discharge or the water sac showing, you’re close. That’s when you stop whatever you’re doing and you watch.
During calving season we’re out checking on the girls throughout the day, and then at least once or twice during the night. Is it glamorous? No. Is that midnight walk to the pasture in the cold worth it when you get there just in time to see a calf hit the ground? Every single time.
What Does a Day Actually Look Like During Calving Season?
There is no such thing as a typical day during calving season. What time you get up depends entirely on what happened the night before. If the midnight check was uneventful, you might get a reasonable night of sleep. If someone decided 3am was a great time to have a complicated birth, well. You work with what you get.
What I can tell you is how most mornings start. My husband rolls out of bed and goes straight to the cows. No coffee, no breakfast, no easing into the day. The cows are his first thought every single morning from March through May, and he’s out the door before most people have hit their second snooze button. Me? I make my coffee, take a bran (my bio-hacking solution for my brain), and grab some breakfast. Then I wait. I listen for the sound of him coming back in, and more importantly I listen for the tone of what he says when he does. A casual “all good” means I can drink that coffee in peace. Anything else means I’m pulling my boots on.
That’s the rhythm of it. Checking, watching, waiting, responding. You move through the day in a loop. Check the cows, handle whatever needs handling, go do the hundred other things that don’t stop just because it’s calving season, then check the cows again. Repeat until dark. Check once or twice through the night. Start over.
Right at the tail end of calving season, things shift on our farm. That’s when planting season starts creeping in and my husband starts spending more time in the field. So I take over the daytime checks while he’s out there. And on top of that, I’m now cooking from scratch and delivering hot lunches out to the field too – all gluten free since I have celiac disease and a wheat allergy, which means nothing comes out of a box or a can. Want to see a favorite gluten free recipe in our house? Check it out here! It’s my family’s favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe.
I’m checking cows, I’m cooking, I’m delivering, and yes, sometimes I’m answering questions from my online students while I’m parked at the end of a field waiting for the tractor to come around. Is it a lot? Absolutely. Is it the life I know and love? Without question.
When Things Don’t Go According to Plan
As much as we’d love for every calf to arrive perfectly, on a warm sunny morning, with a cow who knows exactly what she’s doing – that is not always the reality. Farming means you show up for the good stuff and the hard stuff equally, and calving season will hand you both.
Sometimes a calf gets into a bad position and needs help coming out. That’s called pulling a calf, and it is exactly what it sounds like. It’s physical, it’s urgent, and there is zero time to be squeamish. You do what needs to be done because there are two lives on the line and they’re both counting on you.
Then there are the calves that arrive but come out cold and weak, especially in early spring when South Dakota has not gotten the memo that it’s supposed to warm up. When the babies need help getting warm, we have what we call a calf warmer. It’s a huge wooden box with airflow and a small heather. We pop them in there for a couple of hours to let them get warmed up before returning them to their mamas. There is nothing quite like the victory of a calf that wasn’t going to make it deciding that actually, it will.
Cows rejecting their calves is another one that tests your patience in a hurry. Some first-time mamas just don’t know what to do yet. Some cows lose a calf and won’t accept another. And sometimes the mamas don’t have enough milk, so we supplement the baby so it gets enough. Either way, you figure it out. Bottle feeding, convincing, coaxing, supplementing – whatever it takes.
And then there are the ones you lose. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. It never gets easier. You do everything right and sometimes it still doesn’t go the way you prayed it would. That’s the part of farming that doesn’t make it onto pretty social media posts, but it’s real, and anyone who farms knows exactly the feeling I’m talking about. You grieve it, you learn from it if there’s something to learn, and then you go check on the rest of the herd. Because they still need you.
What Happens After the Calf Is Born?
The moment a calf hits the ground, the clock starts. The first priority is making sure it breathes, gets up, and finds its mama’s milk. That first milk, called colostrum, is everything. It’s packed with antibodies that give the calf the immune boost it needs to survive those first critical days. A calf that doesn’t get colostrum early is a calf that’s already fighting uphill.
Once mama and baby have had time to bond – and we read every situation differently, because sometimes you need to step in right away and sometimes the best thing you can do is stand back and let nature work – we get the calf tagged and recorded. Every calf gets a number. That number tells us who its mama is, when it was born, and how it’s doing as the season goes on. It’s not glamorous recordkeeping, but it matters.
Most of our calves don’t get names. They get numbers, they get good grass, and they get a solid start on life. The ones that do get names are special cases – the bottle babies. Those are the calves whose mamas either rejected them, couldn’t produce enough milk, or in the case of twins, simply couldn’t support two calves at once. When a calf needs a bottle, it needs YOU, multiple times a day, every single day. You get attached. It’s basically unavoidable. Those ones get names.
Through the summer, the calves grow fast. They go from wobbly and wide-eyed to bold and curious in what feels like about ten minutes. By fall, they’re ready to sell, and every year it’s the same feeling – bittersweet. You’re proud of what you raised. You know it’s the whole point of the operation. And you’re still a little sad to see them go, especially the ones with names. That’s just the honest truth of it.
What I Wish People Understood About Calving Season
If I had a dollar for every time someone saw a cute calf photo and said “aww, that must be so fun!” I could probably retire. And don’t get me wrong – it IS fun, in the way that any hard, meaningful work is fun. But calving season is not a petting zoo. It is a 24/7 commitment that runs for weeks, it is physically demanding, it is emotionally heavy, and it requires you to care deeply about animals that cannot tell you what’s wrong.
My husband and I were both raised on farms, which means we didn’t learn this stuff from a book. We learned it the way farm kids learn everything – by watching, doing, and occasionally making mistakes with someone experienced standing close enough to catch them. That foundation matters more than I can explain. Knowing what normal looks like is the only way you can spot when something is wrong.
And something my students ask about more than almost anything else is this: why would a cow need help calving? Why do you check on them in the middle of the night? Can’t they just do it themselves? The honest answer is that yes, most of the time they can. But cattle have been domesticated and bred for generations, and the same selective breeding that produces a big, healthy calf can sometimes make that calf harder to deliver. A cow in trouble at 2am doesn’t get to wait until morning. So you go. You check. You show up. Because that’s what you signed up for when you chose this life.
Farmers care about their animals. Deeply. That might surprise people who assume agriculture is purely transactional, but it isn’t. Not on our place, and not on most places I know. You can care about an animal and still make hard business decisions. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. They never have been.
Closing
Calving season is a huge part of our year and our income. It’s the thing that reminds you every single spring why you chose this life, even when you’re exhausted, even when things don’t go the way you hoped, and even when it’s April and there is absolutely no excuse for it to still be snowing. It is hard and it is beautiful and it is ours.
I grew up knowing this life, married into more of it, and somewhere along the way realized that most people have never seen any of it up close. That’s why I’m writing about it. Not because I think farming is better than any other life, but because it’s MY life, and it turns out a lot of people are genuinely curious about what happens on the other side of the fence. I hope this gave you a little glimpse.
There is so much more to share – the crops, the garden, the field lunches, the chaos of a South Dakota summer, and I can’t wait to take you along for all of it. And, if you are in the mood for a funny calf video straight from the farm, check this out here! One little baby was having a “poopy” kind of day! Ha!