Tutaki Valley farmer Simon Blakemore was justifiably incredulous when his Angus cow delivered three live triplets.
The occurrence is so rare that there are very few statistics. The chances of producing triplets are about one in 100,000, but usually one or more do not survive.
His vet has told him the chances of three live triplets being born unaided is up around one in two million.
It was definitely a first for Simon who saw the cow with one calf last week and realised she was either trying to have another calf or had a prolapse, so he called the vet.
It would have meant getting her and the calf to the yards about a kilometre away, so he was quite relieved when he saw a second calf.
“I saw another calf and I thought, great, job done.”
The first calf was born before 9am, and by 2pm, Simon had moved the cow away from the herd to another paddock and she was relaxed with her two calves settled on balage. So, he headed to Nelson for the afternoon.
“I went out to check them at 6pm and there was a third one. She kept them together and any time you went near them she would get them together and they would waddle off after her like ducklings,” he says.
“They’re quite good-sized calves. One was slightly smaller but still a good-sized calf. I had to carry one up a bank and I was puffing. They would be in the 30 to 35kg range.”
Simon went and got colostrum from a neighbouring dairy farm to feed the calves in case they were not getting enough to get them going. However, they were not interested, which meant they were getting enough from their mum.
The cow looked after the calves for a few days herself and when another cow lost her calf, Simon mothered one of the calves onto her. This enables her to raise a calf, and it also puts less pressure on the mother.
“I mothered the calf on to another cow and it worked straight away, and I let her out after two nights.”
Two of the triplets are bull calves and the other is a heifer, which Simon says can often be a ‘freemartin’ in triplets, which means she may be infertile.
“I’ll probably get her checked to see if she can breed and keep her just for fun.”
The mother is part of a commercial beef herd and mated to an Angus bull. Simon estimates she is about six years old and would have had singles until this year.
Even though he did not need to get a vet in the end, the rarity of the birth was too much of a temptation for a local vet who wanted to see the result. Simon says the vet told him that the length of time to deliver the triplets would have given the cow a good rest between each birth.
