BROKEN BOW, Neb. — There's a sprawling feedlot south of Broken Bow where more than 90,000 cattle are fattened for slaughter at any one time.
Dr. Jack Longfellow's 63-year-old body hurts every time he drives by.
“I've fertility tested more than 47,000 bulls, so when I pass that feedlot and I think that I've semen-tested about half as many cattle as are in there, my knees just start aching,'' he said.
Then he laughs — and winces.
“I still do it. I love to do that. I love all types of veterinary medicine,'' he said.
Veterinary medicine runs in the family. Longfellow's wife is a veterinarian. So are two sons and their wives. A brother and his father-in-law also were vets.
One of Longfellow's favorite stories is of helping a down-and-out farmer with an ailing steer in a hog yard during the 1980s farm crisis. The vet put the steer to sleep and slit its throat while the farmer went for a tractor to hoist the carcass for bleeding and butchering.
Well, without any pens, them dadgum hogs smelled the blood and run over. Looked like a herd of razorbacks coming at him. They went wild. ... Jack starts kicking at them while they're grunting and going nuts over that blood from the steer and nearly knocking Jack over.
The farmer's attempt to find a working tractor was a comedy of errors.
Jack began to whimper now. More hogs everywhere. They were coming over the horizon and then diving under what fences there were in the yard. Sows, boar hogs — herd of biblical proportions.
Finally, the farmer got the oil out of the old tractor and into the new one. He lifted the loader, and the steer started rising up. It got pretty high, but the feller didn't have enough oil to top off, so the loader only gone up so far. Still had to kick the hogs away. But at least the steer was high enough to work on.
Born and raised in Lenox, Iowa, Longfellow came to Broken Bow in 1973, where he and his wife, Diane, own Grassland Veterinary Hospital, the oldest large-animal haul-in clinic in Nebraska.
“This is my home. I've lived here longer than anyplace. There's something about these little rolling hills and the people,'' Longfellow said. “When I came here, I'd step on that sand and get it on the rubber floor mat of my pickup and the grit underneath my shoes just drove me nuts. It took about two years to get over that. I don't even notice that sandy grit feeling now.''
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