Our farm share owners have favorite cows, based on the taste of their milk. Daisy was a consistent favorite when we were milking her last summer. We dried her up months ago, and she has been working on making another calf for the last 38 weeks or so.
In the video below, I described what I look for as signs that calving is immanent. However, it took her about 10 days to actually calve. I misjudged how "melted" those tendons were at the time I made the video. They really melted last Friday, and a little bull calf was born.
The one laying down is Daisy's bull calf. The little "herfey" (Hereford + Jersey) calf standing by is Belle's calf. Belle snuck off in the woods and had her calf, which was apparently offspring from an "affair" she had prior to arriving here.
Cows are just one of the vast majority of mammals that make vitamin C (ascorbate) continuously. Daisy is spending extra energy these days to make far more ascorbate than she usually does, because she is experiencing the stress of labor, and ascorbate neutralizes the negative effects of stress (oxidative stress).
Ascorbate is a critical health and healing agent, feeding the changes required to soften up the hip structure so the hips can open and the baby can swim out. It is an important agent for keeping the baby strong through the process. It is important for recovery. Mammals generally convert glucose to ascorbate all day continuously in widely variable amounts, not wasting energy to make it, but making enough to address the oxidative stress they are experiencing.
Even though large (gram-level), frequent daily amounts of vitamin C make labor an easy process for mammals, and babies stronger and healthier, we humans, mammals that don't make any vitamin C, are generally not told about how important it is. That's silly, right? On our orthomolecular farm, we teach our farm community that by matching the levels that other mammals make, taking multiple doses of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) all day, you can be a different class of mammal. In 1981, Irwin Stone called that class of mammal "homo-sapiens ascorbicus, a biochemically corrected robust human mutant." We love being vitamin C mutants! Learn more about methods of megadosing vitamin C on my other blog: https://www.hfpma.online/blog/categories/vitamin-c.
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