News

I thought I'd start this post by sharing a joke from one of the students who went on the farm tour:

Q: Why did the farmer feed his cows money?

A: Because he wanted rich milk.

Good one, right.

Another student had a couple more questions about the cows that I thought I'd take a moment to answer. He/she wanted to know how much the cows weigh. The ones we have had to sell within this year weighed between 1050 and 1900 pounds. He/she asked what they eat. Our cows eat hay, corn, corn silage (which is the whole corn plant) and supplement. We have a nutritionist who makes sure our cows get everything they need to stay healthy and produce healthy milk. Where do the cows sleep, he/she asked. The cows that are milking sleep in the barn on sand bedding. The cows that are not milking usually sleep in buildings on straw or corn stalks or out on pasture. Calves that have not been weaned yet sleep in hutches, which are like little houses. I have a picture of some new ones we just got further down in this post. His/her final question was how many times do you milk them? We milk our cows twice a day, but some other farms milk three times a day.

This post is called "news" not so much because there is a lot going on here beyond the normal, but because we have been blessed with some updates in our operation this summer. The first of these is a round baler and wrapper, pictured below. The quality of our feed affects our entire year, so these are an effort to improve that. The wrapper is very cool. You set a bale on it and it spins and wraps all by itself. I like sitting and watching it work.

They poured a feed area where we can load the feed wagon without wasting so much feed. Eventually we would like to add a roof so any leftover feed would stay dry in wet weather.

We purchased some new calf hutches to keep the calves comfortable. They have built in water and feed buckets and bottle holder. The vent in the back helps keep them cool in the heat, but closes to help keep them warm in the cold.

Finally, we got a couple new kittens. Their names are Quarter and Cody. They are black and white just like most of our cows. A great fit for our farm.