Thanks, bulls

It’s the time of the year when we don’t need bulls any more, because the cows have been bred.

We bought 16 bulls this year to breed about 300 cows and 100 heifers. This is the way we breed them: we buy them from a few different farms to get a good mix in the gene pool. (We never breed them from our farm’s bulls, because they’d be reproducing with distant family members. And we all know what happened to the royal families that did that.)

Then, we put them in the pasture with the cattle. The bulls then breed all the heifers and cows as soon as possible. Sometimes the bulls are so busy doing their job, that they don’t take time to eat and get really skinny. Last year Kris was worried when he saw a bull splayed out in the pasture, head down and all stretched out. He went to check him and he was fine . . . just exhausted. They’re very dedicated workers.

Cows gestate for nine months, so we put the bulls in with them on July 30, so they’ll start having calves about May 1. Obviously, they don’t all get pregnant the first month they’re with the bulls, but they usually get pregnant within the first few months.

This isn’t the way all farms do it. Lots of them use artificial insemination. But for our low-cost, low-maintenance herd, it works for us to let nature run its course.

After they’ve done their job, we sell them. Other people buy them to breed their cattle or to eat.

Sometimes we get the same price when we sell the bull as we paid for the bull in the first place. Pretty good deal for us. And not a bad temp job for the bull.

Cart it up

Kris’ grandpa built two golf courses. His family still owns and runs one of them. When Kris was growing up, he worked on it most summers. He’s golfed his whole life, really.

So when he started talking about a calf cart, I didn’t know this – it looks like a really tough golf cart.



That’s because that’s what it is. It has diamond plate in the back, it goes fast, it looks durable.

He got it to help him feed the calves in the new barn. Instead of making numerous trips by foot to get milk and feed for the calves, you can drive up and down the aisle and take everything with you. It just makes the whole process speedier.

I think if I pulled that monster up to the course, it just might improve my golf game, too.

Signed, sealed, and delivered ... to the wrong place

I love eating cereal. I’ll eat it for any meal, any snack. It’s been this way for years. Now that we have kids, we have even more cereal in the house. Once a friend was over and opened our cupboard and said, “I counted. You have nine boxes of cereal in there. You have four gallons of milk in the fridge. Do you eat anything else?” Yes, I do. I eat a healthy, balanced diet. But if there were vegetable cereal, I’d give it a shot.

So today our feed company, which delivers to us, called to tell us that they had emptied someone else’s feed into our bin. (We add their mix to the feed we’ve grown and harvested - corn silage, haylage and corn snaplage.)

The problem was that we didn’t want to feed them someone else’s feed, because changing their rations could potentially make them give less milk. When you change feed rations at all, it takes them a little while to get used to it, and changing it to this different feed and then back to the regular when it was emptied – like within five days – might bother them. Plus, the feed mix is balanced based on the composition of our silage. (We had it tested before we ordered the mix.)

They came again and put our right feed in a bin we don’t normally use. We were wondering how they were going to get the wrong feed out of the bin, because it goes directly into our mixer. They said there’s such thing as a vacuum truck. It’s going to come and suck out all the wrong feed.

I asked Kris what’s in our feed ration, and he said it’s a mix of soybean meal, minerals, and a little sugar.

“The sugar is actually ground up Froot Loops,” Kris said. “You can see them, and it smells like them.”

Wait a second. Our cows are eating cereal too? This is a cross-species favorite?

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Cereal just goes so well with milk.

Pits

Every day they scrape manure into a manure pit. But then you need to get the manure out, right? Or it would be one unpleasant farm. No one would come and visit us.

So we pump the manure out of the pits. It’s run off of a tractor. You hook up the manure pump to the PTO shaft of the tractor, and the impeller - which looks like a giant fan - sucks up the manure and pushes it through the pipe into a diagonal pipe that takes it into the spreader. Let me know if I’m killing you with my super-technical terms.

Mike thinks there’s something wrong with either the bearing or the universal joint on the main shaft that runs the pump. It started vibrating a lot. (Every machine’s sign that something is about to explode. This is also where the normal ‘kick it’ method comes into play. Oh, that’s just me? It worked once. Not on a manure pump.)

They took it out and are working on it. Since it sits in manure mostly all the time, you can expect it needs occasional maintenance.

But when it is working properly, they then drive the spreader to a field and spread the manure on it. Why on our fields? Because every farm needs to do something with the manure that cattle generate, and it’s the best fertilizer ever.

So the next time you pass a spreader on the road, take a deep breath. As they love writing on foods in the grocery store, it’s ALL NATURAL.


The manure pump


The tractor, spreader, and pipe by the pit

Rain drain

We had a lot of rain yesterday – even thunder and lightning! As a result, today at the calf barn Kris had to drain the feeder.

They have J-bunks, which are troughs that are (surprise!) shaped like the letter ‘J’. They hold feed but they also catch water, so when it rains they fill up. There’s a little drain hole in the cement, but it can only be so big, or otherwise the feed would come out too.

So Kris today took a wire and cleaned out the hole. He waited until it got jammed up again, a few times, and cleaned it out until all the water had run out.

There’s feed in the trough, since they eat pretty much around the clock, and they would eventually eat and drink everything in there, mushy or not. But they don’t prefer wet feed – they like nice, fresh, dry feed. So we think. They haven’t voiced (or mooed) that or anything.

Kris said that as he was standing there he was glad the calves are doing so well. Even in this up and down weather, which sometimes bothers them, he didn’t hear one cough.

The boys and I also watched Kris clean out our tub drain the other day. Even though I’m the only person in the house with long hair, it’s Kris’ job to untwist a wire hanger every so often and clean it. I encourage it . . . I wouldn’t want to deprive him of a practice session. I want him to be the best J-bunk drain cleaner he can be. I think he does too, even though he hasn’t voiced that or anything.

Planning

We seasonally calve, which means all calves are born within about three months. So to build a barn to raise calves, it has to be bigger than a normal dairy our size would build, since they’re all going to be babies at the same time. Imagine all the baby stuff you have for one baby … multiplied by 150 … spread all over your house …

So we want to build a barn that can convert from a calf barn into a transition barn, which means it’ll work for both new calves and older calves their first year of life.

The barn will have custom made gates. The calves will have individual housing, then when they’re about eight weeks old, we’re going to group them into groups of four.

They’re alone in the beginning so you can pay close attention to their eating, they don’t have to compete for food, and hopefully if one gets sick they won’t all catch it. (This doesn’t work in preschool for kids, but we try.)

Their pens have two buckets in the front – one for feed, and one for milk and water. Once they get to the age they don’t drink milk anymore is when we’ll pull the panels out and turn it into a group pen. They eat out of a feeder after that.

We’re looking to build it this year. Currently, Kris raises calves in a barn that is over 100 years old. It used to be where my grandpa milked the cows. So it’s not exactly set up for raising calves.

But it is set up for pictures. We’ll miss the old calf barn … but I’m pretty sure the calves won’t.

Report

First, the weather report - it's warming up outside. I taught the boys 'March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb,' but since it's pretty lamb-y outside right now, I hope it doesn't go backward this year.

Second, the building report. Kris met with the company who's going to do the digging work and based on the location of the barn, we might not have to bring in any dirt to level it out. If we don't, it'd be a big cost saving. He's also getting an estimate on digging a new well. We just had one put in two years ago, but we need an additional one because the new barn will be too far away from it.

Third, what needs fixing this week? Just one tractor. We're still trying a few things before we take it in.

Fourth, I saw a sure sign of spring. Though robins are admittedly the best sign, I saw a dead skunk in our road. As soon as it warms up every year, the skunks come out and get hit by cars. Is there a sweeter smell than the scent of spring? ... It's no wonder that I kind of like the smell of skunk.