July 20, 2010

Our calf, T-Bone, seems to really like his new father-figure. We put Porter in with him and Sugar on Saturday. Any fears I had about how this would work out have been dispelled. Porter didn't try to nurse and he's been calm and pleasant both to us and to his pasture-mates (the two rams plus Sugar and T-Bone). He's interested in breeding and regularly checks Sugar for heat.

He did knock the sliding door partially off the track and moved the hay feeder into the creek. We've learned that if he pushes against something and it moves, he will keep pushing. The hay box is now screwed to the fence and when I get the door back on track it will be temporarily bolted fast to the barn underneath. One of the rams is limping so he may have gotten in the bull's way but Porter hasn't shown any overt aggression to them. He probably needs a hoof trim.

The garden is doing very poorly. Our soil doesn't drain quickly and the foot of rain we received in June stunted it to the point it hasn't recovered well. The corn is doing well but not much else. Just before it dries out enough to cultivate we get more rain so the weeds are pretty bad too. I'm hoping the scattered thunderstorms moving through this evening miss us so I can get the tiller in there later this week. It's almost time to plant the fall planting of root crops and lettuce. Hopefully they will do better.

I cleaned out the winter bedding pack from the cow barn last weekend before moving Porter in and will clean out the sheep barn in a couple weeks. I plan to remove a post and change my 4-foot door into an 8-foot door so I can maneuver the tractor in and out. It still involves a lot of hand forking but the loader bucket (with the teeth adapter I made) loosens it up and makes it easier to fork. Then I fill the bucket and dump it outside into a large compost heap.

The lambs are growing well as is the calf. We only get about 1/2 a gallon of milk per day and he takes the rest.

July 10, 2010

Here are some pics. I wish someone would develop a good Blogger app for the Droid. I'm attaching them to this email but I can't do any editing.

June 12, 2010

I started "rotational mowing" today. The animals tend to overgraze the pasture nearest the barn and leave the further area undergrazed. Today I mowed those nearer areas and tomorrow I will put up temporary fence to keep them off the mowed area until it regrows. The pic was taken after I used the jeep to pull the tractor out of the mud.

Porter is staying outside for the next three or four weeks until we move him in with Sugar for breeding. His little stall is a mess. We strung hose up the hill so he would have water up there and we'll take the little bit of grain he gets twice a day up to him.

Maybe I can get more pics tomorrow.

June 5, 2010

We had more heavy rain last night and today so our creek flooded again. This one is looking upstream where we get runoff from the fields and woods above us. I had a temporary fence here blocking the sheep from going under the fence. It's now gone. The bull is in this pasture now, though, and he's too tall to walk under that bottom wire.

In this one,you can just see the top of the culvert in the background. All of the debris washed up here. The temporary fence that was buried last night is in this shot.

This is closer up. The top end of the culvert is just visible.

This is looking out at the downstream side of the farm. The large wooden fence posts are my neighbor's. The creek overflowed the bank here and ran across his driveway and pasture out to the road.

Ironically, I'm waiting for the water truck to come and fill our swimming pool. Too bad I didn't have a way to channel all of the gutters on our house and outbuildings into the pool. It would be overflowing.

Broiler chicks moved to pasture

May 17, 2010

Last night at 8:30 I went out to close in the hens and found our bull
with his head stuck in the crotch of a maple tree in the pasture. I
tried to push his head up and out to no avail so I had to get the
pruning saw to cut off one side of the crotch. It was only about 4" in
diameter so I sawed through it in a couple minutes. When he was free,
he thought it would be fun to play. I had to give him a whack on the
nose with the wooden handle of the saw to settle him down.

Sugar's been giving us some problems. Now that she's nursing a calf
she doesn't think she needs to let down for us. After a few days of
hardness in the upper part of her udder, though, she finally let down
for me this afternoon. We got 3 gallons plus 2 this morning plus
whatever the calf ate. That's pretty damn impressive for a Jersey in
her 11th month of lactation, in my opinion. This is all good because
I hope to make about 30 pounds of butter in the next 7 weeks or so.
This is the best time of year to make butter because the fast-growing
grass makes for a good balance of omega-3 to omega-6 in the fat. 30
pounds should get us through the year.

Sent from my mobile device

May 6, 2010

In my last post, I said I would tell the story of our new calf's arrival here at Liberty Farm. I didn't know it at the time, but T-Bone's arrival was not the real story. It turns out that Sugar was quite ill. The reasoning behind it is mostly educated conjecture so if any dairy folks are reading your comments are welcome. Anyway, here's the story.

About three weeks ago, Sugar forsook hay completely for fresh green grass. Subsequently, her milk production went from 3.5 gallons a day up to 5 gallons. Great! (we thought). About a week ago she started scouring (i.e. got diarrhea). This wasn't the typical loose manure that cows get when eating grass but pure liquid. We knew something was really wrong last weekend when she refused grain and her milk production dropped like a rock.

Here's where the conjecture comes in. The grass this time of year is high in moisture content and low in mineral content. It is also quite high in nitrogen (protein). The protein caused the spike in milk but the wet, mineral-deficient grass wasn't fibrous enough to maintain good rumen function (hence the scouring and lack of appetite for grain).

Our solution has been to keep her confined in the barn eating dry hay. She has been in there since Sunday afternoon and her appetite has returned with a vengeance. When we first brought her in we supplemented her with molasses and apple cider vinegar. I've been giving her probiotics every other day. Tuesday she was finally her usual self at the grain pan and she tried to eat the plastic tube that the probiotics come in. Her manure is still not the "cow pie" we like to see but it's definitely three dimensional. I'm confident that she will have developed a good fiber mat in her rumen by this weekend and plan to let her out on grass. If she stops eating hay altogether, though, we will confine her for part of the day.

As for milk, we really don't know what's going on because of the calf nursing. By the way, she has thoroughly adopted him and I suspect that she may be refusing to let down for us. We're getting very little milk for the house but the calf is fat and sassy. Once things are back to normal we'll begin separating the calf at night and milking in the morning. There are some training methods for cows that refuse to let down but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.