June 17, 2009

Today I was reading on Keeping A Family Cow about the relaxation of the pelvic ligaments being one of the final signs of impending calving. When this happens the tailhead becomes floppy and the tail lays to one side. What do you think I saw when I got home? LOL, probably misinterpretation on my part. What was that I said last week about Thursday calving being ideal? Oh well, we're ready when she is.

We've decided that if we can't get Sugar bred by the end of August, we're going to milk through for another year and attempt breeding in July 2010 for an April 2011 freshening. With the quality of our grass, there's no way I'm going to try to dry up a cow in April for another June freshening. I'm glad she was dry when we got her.

I know I've been blogging almost exclusively about cow stuff here. That's only because she is new to us and is consuming most of our attention. The rest of farm life goes on however. The lambs are growing like weeds. We have one bottle lamb due to rejection by his mother. She was fine for the first few days, Deo gratias, so he got plenty of colostrum but then she suddenly stopped letting him nurse. We suspect that he tried to nurse from another ewe and she peed on his head which made him smell like another lamb to his mother. If the ewe does this again next year, she'll be sausage. 'Nuff said.

Hens are now laying nearly a dozen little eggs a day so we're finally building up a small stockpile to sell. It's been so long, though, that we're eating them almost as fast as they lay them.

The grass is maturing so I'll be doing some mowing this weekend and periodically over the next few weeks. The mature grass is great in the energy department but lower in protein than young grass. The growing lambs need protein now and energy later when they're laying on some fat. They're still getting plenty on milk, though, so that's not an issue. The ewes primarily need energy but they don't like the mature grass so it's king of a balancing act with them. Sugar needs both protein and energy so we give her a smorgasbord and don't limit her too much. I will always err on the side of too much grass rather than not enough. Maximizing production is the way of the factory farm. Here we seek to optimize production.