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It sounded like a good idea at the time.
Middle-schooler Cruz Boyd saw an invitation in his 4H newsletter to write an essay and win a cow. It sounded easy enough, and with help from family he wrote about his 4H experience, his blue ribbon rooster and hen, and his time at Maple Avenue Middle School.
“Hey, I could win a cow,” the rising 7th Grader recalled. “Let's just try it. And then I won.”
Since April, he’s had a cow.
His life with the cow sounds just as simple as the win.
First her name is Ridgedale Have No Fear Fiesta, a registered Holstein (the name is part of the official registration process).
She lives on the idyllic KLondon Farmhouse property, a 17-acre tract of lush green vegetation and quality, well-kept barns, sort of sandwiched between the railroad tracks and Pitney Meadows Community Farm on the west side of Saratoga Springs.
(If the KLondon name is familiar to you, you might know it as the farm-to-table home of chef Kevin London, of Farmhouse Food at Glenham.)
It’s a place where a donkey brays and a rooster crows.
But the win was not so out-of-the-ordinary, either. This wasn’t the boy’s first rodeo, as it were.
With his 4H club out of Galway, he has been working with pigs. He was working at R Farm and Garden in Greenfield where he kept the award-winning rooster since he could not keep the noisy bird at home. In 2023 at the Saratoga County fair he took home the blue ribbon for the rooster and a hen. Last year at the county fair, he stuck around the cow barns and had a great time.
It turns out that young cows need a lot of guidance — and it’s Cruz’s job to train her.
“She’s been really easy, though. She’s smart,” he said.
“We had to train her on the halter, which took literally a day. It was amazing,” he said. “Then we had the train her to drink milk out of a bucket. That took one eating because she's so fat that she realizes immediately, ‘This is food.’”
He’ll train her about the electric fence, next.
“She's not gonna like that,” he said.
He visits the cow three times a day.
In the morning “I give her her grain for the day and her hay and make sure she has water,” he said. He’ll return around noon and 3 p.m.
“I take her out, and I like, walk her around and stuff, and play with her,” he said. “And I keep her area up once or twice a day.”
The cow on occasion has troubled him, such as when she would refuse to eat.
Understanding his fear, Cruz’s mother Kaitlynn Boyd helped explain Cruz’s concern.
“It’s like keeping a newborn alive for a little bit,” Kaitlynn said. “You’ve got to figure out their quirks.”
Cruz spent a week earlier this month in Washington D.C. at special veterinarian program for middle schoolers, where he learned about veterinary medicine and even performed some simple procedures, his grandfather Gordon Boyd said.
While he was gone, his family, including Kaitlynn and Gordon, had to handle Fiesta, who had clearly grown to trust her boy.
“She was like, ‘Where’s Cruz?’” Gordon said.
“[Fiesta was] very moody and stubborn,” Kaitlynn said, but added later: “It’s fun. Definitely a learning experience. I’d rather come and do cow chores rather than be in the neighborhood. It’s nice over here.”
As part of the 4H requirements for raising the heifer, Cruz will return to the county fair next week and enter Fiesta into the various contests. The fair opens July 22.
Next year in May he will breed her with a Holstein bull, using semen that will produce only females.
“Then we have to give that heifer back to 4H for the next person to win,” he said.
Although he has raised award-winning animals, is in the 4H and has just returned from his DC veterinarian trip, Cruz said he has no plans to be a farmer, or a veterinarian.
If not that, then what is next for the boy and his cow?
“I’m hooked,” he said, but only as a fun side hustle. “I want seven more already.”
He plans to milk Fiesta for as long as she’ll bear milk, 10 or 12 years, and then let her retire in comfort.
For the next couple of weeks, he will be prepping for the fair, which means watching over Fiesta and giving her regular baths to keep her coat as milky white as possible.
