No Easy Bovine Births for Beasy
Published: Friday, October 9, 2026
Landon Beasy, a 10-year 4-H'er from Goshen, had an adventurous August, to say the least.
After selling his dairy feeder calf at the Elkhart County 4-H auction on July 31, Beasy attended the rodeo and came home late that night to find that a first-time beef heifer had given birth to twins.
Twin calves aren't all that rare, but the fact that they were born without human assistance was. Beasy said the chance that a first-time heifer will give birth to a healthy set of twins, unassisted, is just 37%. Considering that he wasn't home when the births happened, he is very thankful.
But as the month of August began, more drama would unfold for the 2026 Fairfield High School graduate and 2026 Exceptional 4-H'er award finalist. Beasy, who served as District 2 FFA treasurer during the past year, still had two more pregnant heifers that were due at any time, and one of them had a small pelvis.
That heifer, named Cookies and Cream, started going into labor on the evening of Aug. 5. Beasy was on a shopping trip with his mother, so he came home right away and put the animal in a maternity pen. He reached inside to feel the calf but soon realized there was a complication.
"The head had tucked itself back some, so we had to try and figure out how to get the front legs forward and get this head twisted so we could try and pull it," Beasy said. "So, we ended up getting it situated some. Emily Blough (a local veterinarian) ended up coming out and helping us. We got chains hooked onto it. We actually used one of the hand winches you use sometimes to pull vehicles up onto trailers. We hooked that up as a come-along to it, because our first goal was to try and pull it. What we figured out was, we couldn't get his head to clear her pelvis."
Beasy and the veterinarian pulled repeatedly with no luck. Blough, who drove her personal vehicle, went back home to get her veterinary truck. After returning, Blough started to perform a C-section, assisted by Beasy.
However, Cookies and Cream had just eaten and had a full belly. To get to the uterus, they had to push aside the cow's large rumen. The digestion process was well underway, and the rumen was filling up with gas.
Blough decided to make an incision in the rumen to relieve some of the pressure.
"So, since she had eaten recently, there was more feed material in there than we realized," Beasy said. "So, some gas came out, but then it just started spraying out like feed material and clogged the needle."
At this point, the cow was lying down, but they needed her to stand. She didn't want to get up, so Beasy's father, Doug, opened the barn door to trick the cow into thinking she could escape.
"Well, sure enough, she stood up and went running out the door with her rumen dragging on the ground behind her," Beasy said. "So, I'm trying to grab the rumen to make sure it doesn't rip itself on the ground."
Eventually they corralled Cookies and Cream and were able to continue the surgery. Blough decided to make an incision into the rumen and empty it.
"So, we made an incision and we just dumped everything that was on the inside," Beasy said. "Now, mind you, full grown adult cattle like her can fill a 55-gallon drum with what their rumen contains."
They dumped the rumen, resulting in a big, sloppy mess on the ground.
With the rumen now empty, Blough and Beasy were able to find the uterus. Blough cut the uterus and pulled out the calf. By this time, it was 11:30 p.m.
"We honestly didn't really think much about the calf," Beasy said. "We kind of just pulled it out and laid it to the side."
Beasy's mother, Angela, was there and noticed that the calf, a bull, was breathing.
"It's alive," she exclaimed. "And we're like, 'That thing is still alive?'"
They decided to name the black-colored calf Miracle. Angela rubbed the newborn calf with a towel, hoping to stimulate the lungs.
"It wasn't breathing like it normally should, because it didn't have the pressure of coming out of the birth canal," Beasy said.
Meanwhile, Blough and Beasy were trying to stitch up the mother cow.
At Fairfield High School, Beasy spent part of his senior year working with Blough in a work-based internship. So, this wasn't the first time he had seen a cow opened up or had participated in a surgery.
"I had never had a C-section on a cow, but we did a C-section on a goat and we did an LDA, which is a twisted stomach on a dairy cow," he said.
Blough said this was the first time she had ever dumped the contents of a rumen. It's a rare thing, as most cow owners ultimately elect to euthanize the cow and save the calf.
"But thankfully we didn't do that," Beasy said.
He and Blough worked feverishly to close all the stitches. They started with the uterus and pushed it back in its spot. The next step was to stitch up the rumen.
"That was about the point where, to hold it up so she (Blough) could see, I basically had to bear-hug the rumen and hold it against me," Beasy said. "I just had rumen contents and blood covering my shirt, my pants and my everything. It was just all over me by now. Emily was covered from cutting things; we were a mess."
The two got it all done. They pushed the rumen back in place and began sewing the muscles together and then the connective tissue.
"You have to hook all that together and then finally you can put in a suture to close the skin up," Beasy said.
Blough gave the cow some medications and pain pills. They cleaned her up as best they could and put iodine over the incision to prevent bacteria from growing. Blough also prescribed antibiotics.
By the time Blough left the farm, it was 2:30 a.m. the next day. She and Beasy endured a seven-hour ordeal.
Miracle is doing great. He is the product of a Simmental bull and a crossbred heifer.
Beasy said the cow survived in fine shape. A month later, she looked "great," with only a scar line where incision was. At first, they gave her tiny amounts of food. They didn't want to put too much weight on the stitches.
"She's out of the woods now," Beasy said. "She's out with the group. She's good."
Beasy and his father aren't sure if the cow can have another calf. However, they don't plan to wait and see, especially with cow's small body size.
"It's one of those things," he said. "Sometimes you get one that doesn't quite work out, and you've just got to figure out the best thing to do with it."
About a week and a half later, Beasy's other pregnant cow—also a first-time heifer—went into labor at 2 a.m. He reached in and found two feet but no head. The calf, a heifer, was backwards. He and Doug put chains on its feet and pulled. The calf came out with no problems. However, the tendons on her rear legs were contracted and wouldn't loosen. She couldn't stand.
"Thankfully we got it worked out in that first day, but I had to sit down there with her and just keep carefully putting pressure on her back feet against the tendons—enough pressure that I could stretch them but making sure I didn't put a ton (of weight) so I didn't tear something," Beasy said. "So, I basically had to give her therapy."
He took bale of straw so she could rest her belly on the bale but not have her full weight on her feet. Also, the calf couldn't nurse, so they had to milk the mother for the first couple days until the heifer could stand on her own. Just a few weeks before heading off to college, Beasy was bottle-feeding the calf and doing intense therapy every day.
"It was quite a bit of work," he said.
Now the mother and calf are back with the herd.
"The day before August started, we had the twins, which thankfully were natural so there wasn't much with that," he said. "But then I started out August with the C-section. About a week and a half later, we had the heifer with a contracted tendon. About a week after that, on the front porch here, our dog had a growth on his foot, so we (Blough and Beasy) sedated the dog and removed a growth from his paw on the front porch of our house."
Four days after the procedure on the dog, Beasy took a Hereford calf to Blough's clinic to fix a hernia.
"Then that Thursday, I had the start of orientation for college," he said. "So, it's a lot to take in. Honestly, I don't even know how to say it other than I am blessed by God. Even if it was a struggle to do some of it, it all turned out. All I can say about August, though, is honestly, I just feel blessed. I mean, a lot of people would say this sucks. I mean, it turned out okay, but everything that could go wrong, went wrong."
For the C-section, Beasy could have lost both the calf and mom.
"But we have both," he said with a smile.
With the twins, one is male and one is female. That means the female is infertile. Even so, the chances of twins being born unassisted are minimal, especially for a first-time heifer.
"We could complain as much as we want that we have a freemartin and she might not be breedable, but you know what? We have two healthy calves."
Beasy is now a freshman at Goshen College. He still lives at home, but his time is consumed by baseball practice and his studies. He is majoring in molecular biology and biochemistry. After finishing his bachelor's degree, he plans to earn a master's in chemical forensics and veterinary forensics. That degree will enable him to investigate cases of animal abuse and disease outbreaks.
Doug is very proud of his son and how he persevered through some very difficult circumstances in August.
"For most kids at his age, he's done more than they'll ever do," he said.
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