Today I'm talking with Leah at Clear Creek Ranch Mom .

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listening to A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. I'm your host, Mary Lewis. At Green Bush Twins and Company, we believe in the power of creativity, imagination, and art to bring people together. Our mission is to inspire connection across all ages, encouraging understanding, individuality, and a true sense of belonging. We're building more than a brand. We're growing a mindful community rooted in kindness, intention, and shared purpose.

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At our core, it's about real people sharing real stories, ideas, and products that make everyday life more meaningful. If you believe in living with purpose and supporting brands that care, you'll feel right at home with Greenbush Twins. That tiny Homestead podcast is sponsored by Greenbush Twins and Company. Today I'm talking with Leah Peterson from Clear Creek Ranch Mom in Nebraska. And she also happens to be my fabulous co-host on Grit and Grace in the Heartland Women in Agriculture. Good, um, well afternoon. It's noon now.

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It's high noon. It is high noon. What's for lunch besides I have a birthday cake in my kitchen, but not much else going on yet. I don't know. I might nuke a couple waffles and put some real maple syrup on them. That sounds delightful. It kind of does. So Leah's been on the show, like, I think it's been five times now. And then she became my co-host on the other podcast.

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Leah posted a photo on her Facebook page of a cowhide from a calf and was talking about why they have that. And I thought that it would be interesting for my listeners to know what was going on with that. So Leah, do you want to tell me about that? I can. I always say that raising livestock teaches little people so many life lessons that are applicable.

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you know, in all parts of your life and will be for all time. And so as a child, um my first memories, some of the harder memories from calving season was honestly learning about the miracle of adoption right through my own eyes, watching it in the cowherd.

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It's a practice as old as time. It's evolved and changed over time and many people are still advocates for this method of helping a cow adopt a new baby and other people have moved on to try different things. But we're still kind of old school here and we subscribed to what we call the no fail method. It is hard. It's kind of yucky. um But it works. And so when we have a cow,

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who has lost her calf for whatever reason and she's in milk. We can take another calf, say a twin for instance, or a calf whose mama doesn't have enough milk, and we call it grafting, grafting a calf onto the mama. And it's very interesting when you look at different breeding programs, different breeds, there are different traits that rise to the surface as being most usual for that particular breed. When I was with

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Derek Josie out at TDF Honest, he raises pure red Jersey cows for milk. And those ones do not have the maternal trait of desiring to have a baby. They have their baby and happily will let you take it and he won't even ball for it. There's nothing wrong with that. That's how the Jersey cows live. Our beef cattle want to raise a baby.

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I want to be careful in describing that though, because it's not, I don't want you to think, I don't want listeners to think that it's some emotional bond. It is a physiological response. It's biologically the way they are bred and how they live. And that is that those hormones that kick in when they have given birth and they start producing milk, they desire to have a baby. And so when we have a baby in need,

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What we will do is we will skin the hide off of the deceased baby. So she's lost her baby, it was stillborn, it died, whatever the reasons might be. We will skin that hide off of her baby and we'll make what we call a calf coat and we will adhere that calf coat on to her presumptively to be adopted baby. Do you tie it on to them?

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Yeah, so you can use a variety of methods. We use sometimes some glue to help hold it on and then we use baling twine and tie it so that it kind of starts at the back of the neck and goes down their back, truly like a superhero cape, I guess you could call it, and tied it on. And then you can do some other things. You can apply some scents to mask the smell because again,

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The emotional connection between a mama and a calf is not what you think it is. They identify their calves by sound, which is truly amazing. They can find their baby in a group of 500 by their sound. I think there is probably a measure of recognition. Hard to say how complicated that is because I'm like, all little black baby calves, for instance, look the same to me. um And I can't remember if cows see in color or not, but it's definitely by scent.

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And so if you can mask their original smell and make it smell like their baby, they are way more likely to uh accept it straight away. Now, depending on the cow, depending on the breed, I have seen it go like snap of a finger, this is my baby now, and I have seen times where it'll take 48 hours, but I've never seen it not work.

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You love what you do because you just told a very hard story and your voice sounded so satisfied telling it. It is. It's something I'm passionate about because it helps elevate more understanding about ranchers and not just ranchers because I know this method can be used with uh other animals.

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and trying to help them adopt babies that aren't theirs. SAKE, it happened all on its own or with a little help from humans. It happens a lot. I'm passionate about it. And it's so satisfying because while you see videos and photos of little girls and boys feeding bottles to baby calves, yes, it can be done. Yes, it's a good chore. Yes, it's rewarding.

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but there is nobody that feeds a baby calf like the cow herself. It's just the way nature intended it to be. In beef cattle, not talking about veal calves and those in dairies and whatnot, but for beef cattle, it is the best outcome. And it's so satisfying when after a day together, being confined together that you can turn them out. And we call it traveling pairs. You see them travel together as one.

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back into the wild, so to speak, and feel so relieved and satisfied that you have helped them mother up and that baby is going to be cared for until it's weaned. I love it. See, this is why I wanted you to tell the story because I knew you'd tell it in a way that everybody would get it. um So what happens to that calf hide once the calf is grafted? Well, usually it's sort of, it's

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just like any piece of leather, right? It withers eventually and they'll shed it. Sometimes we'll cut it off. It's very smelly, you can imagine, a couple days and uh it'll wither away and eventually then the scavengers will pick it up and disappear with it. Okay, cool. Thank you for telling the story. I always feel weird asking you this stuff because I am a novice. Like I am, I know nothing.

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about any of this. And I'm so curious and I'm like, Lea knows the answer. I'm going to ask her. And it's so fascinating because again, it depends on the maternal traits in different cattle breeds and what your breeding programs are. But I'm out watching our first calf heifers, right? These are their first babies. And in their first year being mothers, these heifers are like, I don't know, they're energetic teenagers and they're all about everyone's baby. They'll let anybody's baby.

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nurse and so we call them the little robbers. These babies are out there bebopping around. They don't care who's utter they're going to. It's that second year when she has her second calf that she generally, again, depending on the breed, is more interested in just having her baby nurse and kick away at somebody else t...

In The Thick Of It with Clear Creek Ranch Mom