麻豆传媒AV

Originally from the Battlefords, there was no way of seeing a future where eventually I would be feeding a bull liquified shit through a beer-bong type instrument. This instrument had a large funnel that led to a hose and into a bull's mouth, held by the farm manager Gabriel, while I had in my hands a five-gallon pail filled with a sloshing mixture of water and deep brown fecal matter, that stunk to high heaven.

This was all part of my adventures as an organic farmer for two months at Walking J Farm in Arizona, 20 miles from the Mexican border, near Amado.

To grasp the absurdity of why we were performing this task, it's important to know cows are ruminants and have four compartments of a single stomach. By using these four compartments - the rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum - ruminants digest their food through a series of fermentations, where they regurgitate fermented ingesta, known as cud, and then swallow it again so the plant matter is broken down further in the process, through bacterial actions.

I was informed by Jim, the owner, cows do not actually absorb the nutrients from the plant matter but absorb the microorganisms that feed on the plants; therefore, bacteria needs to be introduced into the process, especially to a sick bull that had stopped eating and had an empty stomach.

So we had to feed it a pail full of manure because the manure contained bacteria from other cows.

The bull was sick because someone had lost a two-foot piece of one-inch PVC pipe down its throat and, somewhere inside the oesophagus of that registered and expensive bull, around $2,500 US, that pipe sat for days. The pipe was swallowed while the animal was being relieved of gas and bloating, which can kill.

Finally late night surgery had to be performed by the headlights of an old veterinarian's truck in an isolated corral. We would cut a giant hole into the side of the bull.

In the end, maggots would infect the area and we would have to squeeze them out, like zits as Gabriel would say, and wash them away with handfuls of clean water, disinfect the wound and give antibiotic shots, but that would come later. First things first.

The bull coughed repeatedly and snot splattered from its nostrils, where the nose clamp, attached around the top bar of the squeeze, pulled up on his face. The 80-year-old veterinarian, Lyle, used his flashlight to take a peek down the bull's throat, attempting to spy the pipe and gather his bearings concerning its location, but the pipe was down deep and he couldn't spot or grab at it.

Lyle turned to us. He didn't say much and reminded me of a shorter version of Tommy Lee Jones in the movie No Country for Old Men. "I don't know," he simply said, with a toothpick in his mouth that he absently chewed on through about three hours of surgery.

Jim told me Lyle was a dying breed. No one did farm visits anymore. Mostly you had to take your animals in but Lyle showed up when the sun was down and didn't leave until the job was done. He worked methodically and didn't say more than a few words the entire time.

They don't make 'em like they used to, I thought to myself while he worked. Not one single complaint and hands that seemed swollen from work.

The sun was down, it was cold - for some - and the farm manager, from the death heat of California, beside me shivered and pulled his jean jacket collar close to his chin, commenting, "It's really cold tonight," while repositioning his cowboy hat. It was the middle of February.

His hat reminded me of one worn by the prospector in the cartoon movie Toy Story, and it was not a strange coincidence because Gabriel often pushed his brim up flat against his head and did a whistling impression saying things like, "There's gold in these hills." It was a spot-on impersonation, to say the least, but he wasn't being funny now.

Another dead animal was a major concern. There had been at least four in the last two months and that meant lost revenue and more stress for the small, but expanding, operation.

Gabriel and I stood where we were, holding stainless steel trays of sterilized surgical instruments, while the old-timer vet cut open the bull's side to gain access to its second stomach compartment, the rumen, because it was the largest, through a hole he made called a fistula. By cutting into the second chamber, the vet hoped he would be able to reach back into the first chamber, the reticulum, and grab at the pipe.

But the pipe was nowhere to be found and so the hole was sewn open and left that way for two weeks, which is normal practice for a fistula and safe for the cow.

Throughout the next few weeks, Gabriel and I were tasked with the responsibility of feeding the bull through a tube and with a funnel, but it was a mere couple of days after the surgery that Jim and Lyle came up with a way to extract the pipe out and through the hole in its side.

The extraction was done by running a hose, smaller than the one-inch pipe, through the centre of the PVC and then sewing a rag onto the end of the smaller rubber hose. By attaching the rag on the end of the hose, when the rag tried to run through the middle of the PVC and into the stomach it would catch and drag the pipe along with it.

Together with Jim and Gabriel, I assisted in feeding the hose into the mouth, through a large metal pipe so he couldn't bite down and cut the hose, and into the stomach. Jim quickly sewed the rag on and the hose was pulled from the open mouth and through the stomach hole. The rag caught, and with a bit of self-celebration and sighs of relief, we looked at the gooped-up pipe we had just removed by pulling it out of the oesophagus, through two stomach compartments and out of the hole. If that pipe had remained where it was, there was high potential for the animal to die.

It was around a week later when we found those maggots holed up in the area between the skin of the stomach and the outside hide. The farm manager's first reaction was to haul ass back to the farm and inform the owner of his disgusting find, but we were told maggots were not harmful in that circumstance because they only fed on the dead flesh. That meant the healing process was moving along.

We ended up squeezing them out, wiping away the area using a disinfectant and then spraying the hole with a solution to keep away flies and other nuisance organisms. We also sealed up the disinfectant by rubbing Vaseline on the open skin. When I left the farm back to Saskatchewan, sometime near the end of March, the bull was alive, the hole had been sewn shut and he had started to eat on his own; a job well done by all.

The rest of my internship wasn't as intense, except for when a fresh batch of delivered cows busted through the electric fence and we had to round them up. Instead my time was structured around daily responsibilities like feeding animals and harvesting produce in the one and a half acre garden.