Bessie.....a suitable foster Mom?

We may be taking in a foster calf.   We need to wean Ruby, whose teeth are getting a big dangerous for the health of Bessie's....um.....teats.  Blood on my hand during the milking the other day freaked me out until I realized it wasn't coming from me, and then I realized why poor Bess had been trying to kick my hand away.  Ruby's teeth are leaving neat little cut-marks on a very sensitive part of Bessie's anatomy! Anyway, the original thought was to wean Ruby, who is now 7 months old and NOT needing to nurse anymore, and put a new calf on Bessie to drink up all that fattening milk.  The new calf would probably have been a day old male dairy breed, because there isn't much use for them and they go for about $100 each.  We would buy one from a client of our vet, when there was a calf available.  He would be raised for beef, nothing else.  We'd have to name him Burger or Steak, or Jeremy's favorite French word to pronounce wrong:  Filet Mignon ("Fill It Mig Nun") The thought of those affectionate brown calf eyes getting to my heartstrings has me second-guessing whether we'd be emotionally stable in a year or so after loading a one-and-a-half-year old steer into a trailer and getting him back as freezer beef. Still, we need to wean Ruby, for Bessie's well-being, and there's all that milk that would dry up or need to be hand-milked, or.....could be put towards raising another calf. Honestly, the once-a-day milking is a wonderful concept, and I'm not too eager to give that up.  Putting another calf on Bessie would keep that morning milking going, but I wouldn't have to add the evening milking again.  Ugh!!! Another consideration:  One milk customer isn't able to keep ordering from us because of scheduling conflicts, so we're also going to have 2 gallons of extra milk a week. Strange, but the very next day after I got this news, I was talking to a farmer in South Barrington who has beef cattle, pigs, chickens, and (fairly recently) dairy cows.  A calf was born a few weeks back, and he would be willing to let us try to foster it and pay us a daily fee for doing it.  It would help him to keep most of his cows' milk going to his customers, it would help us to have a little extra cash-flow to cover some of the hay expenses, and it would help Bessie to have a much younger calf benefiting from her milk.  It would be good for the boys because they've both agreed to help to earn some of that money.  It would help us in the grocery department if we could work out a deal for some beef, pork, or even pork fat (to make lard) instead of being paid the full amount (yet to be decided).  It would actually help Ruby, too, if she graduated to hay and water and left the baby food behind, but she wouldn't agree with that!   The foster calf would stay for 3 or 4 months, and then be picked up to return to the farmer's beef herd (a dairy bull calf would be "banded" at that age, become a steer because he would then be missing the part of his anatomy that technically made him a "bull", and be raised with the beef herd to fill the growing demand for grass-raised beef in the Barrington area).   Some adjusting of things out in our cow-area would need to be done before this can happen, and stall/stanchion arrangements reinforced, with an area set up for Benny (the calf).  Makes the most sense to give Benny the stall that Ruby has been in, but that puts Ruby outside.  Still thinking through the logistics of how and where each cow will bed down at night.   So, the only question that remains (besides whether I'm crazy to even consider this in the middle of winter!) is whether Bessie (stubborn, Queenly Bessie-girl) would deign to let another cow's calf nurse from her poop-encrusted udder while Ruby wails in the background! The farmer and I will talk once more on Thursday, and if all seems to indicate a "Go", Benny will probably arrive this Saturday.  He is a Guernsey---rust-colored and white, I think, and probably about 100 pounds. Laura http://dykstrasfarm.blogspot.com/