It gets you the way a three-minute short shouldn't: you sit down for a gag about cows and stand up weirdly moved that somebody out there is up at 4 a.m. in a Hokkaido winter so you can have milk. This is Hiromu Arakawa before Fullmetal Alchemist, drawing herself as a bespectacled cow and reporting from seven years of manure, bears, and squirrels that absolutely had it out for her. "If they have no water, then let them drink milk" is not a joke, it's a policy statement. These two OVAs came bundled with volume 8.1, which means they were made for the people who already bought the book, not for an algorithm, and they carry the same clipped, deadpan, no-heavy-themes rhythm as the 2023 shorts. Comfort watching where the comfort is earned in labor. Farmers are cool. She keeps proving it.

Hyakushou Kizoku returns with two OVA episodes tied to its second season, packaged with volume 8.1 of the manga and also included with the season's DVD release. The franchise turns Hiromu Arakawa's own years on a Hokkaido farm into comedy: seven years of tending cattle and vegetable crops, working from dawn to dusk with no days off, long before she drew Fullmetal Alchemist. These specials sit alongside that comedic, slice-of-life account of hard rural labor and the laughs that came with it.