(Host) For farmers with livestock, death is part of the job. Most of the time it's planned. Cows are sent away on the beef truck, pigs become sausage. But it's the unplanned kind of animal mortality that many farmers say can be difficult to deal with.

VPR's Meghan Vigeant visited a few Vermont farmers to find out how they deal with animal deaths on their farms.

[chicks peeping]

(Vigeant) Tim Sanford and Suzanne Long run the small but busy Luna Blue Farm in South Royalton. They grow mostly vegetables, raising cows, pigs, and chickens. One morning they woke up and didn't hear the usual rooster crow...

(Sanford) "Things sound a little quieter than younormally hear, like the clucking or peeping of chicks."

(Long) "We think it was probably a weasel. It was quite horrible to open up the cage in the morning and just see dead bodies with only a few live birds left sort of among their dead buddies. Yeah, it was very traumatic."

(Vigeant) The solution? Dogs.

(Long) "Where's the fox?"

[barking, Long and Sanford laugh]

(Vigeant) After that incident, Long and Sanford decided to fight natural predators with a natural protector. Mara, their faithful collie, seems to be doing a good job keeping the weasels and foxes out of the chicken pen. While dogs can help farmers with predators, birth is one of the riskiest moments in an animal's lifetime. Stephanie Decker learned this lesson at her school's farm at Green Mountain College in Poultney. During lambing season, one of the ewes, Star, struggled with a difficult birth, and needed the help of a vet.

(Decker) "He did a terminal C-section, opened her up. he pulled out the lambs and there was two of them. Her whole body was just everywhere. And these two lambs, that I remember him swinging them back and forth, and back and forth and back n' forth, tyin' to get their blood going. They died, and Star died. That was like one of my first experiences on that farm, and farming in general, and it was crazy to me. And we learned that night it was pretty much the second cut hay we were feeding them and we weren't giving them enough grain. That's one of those situations where the students learn from their mistakes."

(Vigeant) Even after a rough start, Decker is stillfarming. This summer she interns at an organic farm in Orwell. And just up the road from Decker is Morningside farm.

[tractor sounds/kids playing]

(Wilson) "Being a farmer you're very in touch with the circle of life. and..."

(Vigeant) Patti Wilson and her husband Brian raise organic dairy cows.

(Wilson) "Maybe you come to accept death more as a part of that process. Not that you become immune to it, but you accept it."

(Vigeant) Patti Wilson says they've learned from every death and sickness. It was an infection that prompted the Wilsons to start a new farming practice.

(Wilson) "And we had a real killer. We ended uplosing six calves that were out of great cows. But we ended up getting this vaccine made. And in the end it was the right thing to do and it has just been wonderful for us.

(Vigeant) The Wilsons' insurance only covers the big losses like when they lost three cows in a lighting storm, and this loss wasn't covered. But money isn't the first thing the Wilson's think of when they lose an animal.

(Wilson) "They're my kids too. You know, there's a lot of love there. They have a name, they're special. But we also understand that that's part of it. We try to do everything within our control, within our 15, 18 hours days we work. N' I come in this house and it may be 10 o'clock at night, but I say, "you know Patti, it's right out there. Things are ri..." You know ,we don'tgo to bed till it's right. The day that we can't isthe day we don't do this business anymore, so."

[kids and tractor back up]

(Vigeant) I'm Meghan Vigeant for VPR news.