Lane

We're having an excavation company (T.H. Miller) work on our lanes from the barn to the pasture.

We originally fenced in the lane, and the regular dirt worked fine for a few years, but now it's bumpy and gets messy in the rain. With their bulldozer and compactor they can do it quickly and well.

We'll have to add gravel over the years, but with the cows' cooperation, hopefully it'll last a long time.



The compactor rolls and vibrates over the dirt.



Part of the neat and clean lane.



The cows, sniffing it out as they walk down it for the first time. Can you feel their excitement?!

Chopped

All our alfalfa is chopped and put up for the year.

(That's how you say it. 'Put up'. Even if I need to ask about details sometimes, I am fluent in the lingo.)

Since we moved here, we added more cement to the pad to make more room to pile feed on it. Our alfalfa harvest this year covers the entire area of the original cement pad. We still have corn to harvest! So the corn will fill up the rest of the pad.

So, here's a comparison of the first load of alfalfa vs. four cuttings' worth of alfalfa.





And it'll be all gone by next spring, when the cattle go back out on pasture.

I like to imagine my family's food that we're going to eat this winter, all piled up like this. Cows are big animals. But when I'm unloading groceries, I really feel like our family's food pile would be the same size.

Garden

I wrote about my own (very) little farming project on the Farm Fresh Food site. You can read it here, under 'Garden Results Are In'.

Holes

Everything went well with the chopping until about the last half load. Kris said the chopper started losing functionality - first, the spout wouldn't move. He thought it was something electronic and kept going. Then suddenly he couldn't control the speed. No fault codes went off on the display, so Kris got out to look for something obvious.

He said he could immediately smell hydraulic fluid. He went under the chopper and hydraulic fluid was spraying everywhere. He turned off the chopper and they started looking for where it was leaking from. Luckily, they found a hose that had a big hole - big enough to stick his finger into. He said it was about as obvious as you could get. It was low on the machine, it was a short hose, and it wasn't really big, which is good, because no one carries hose that big locally.

Tomorrow they'll go into town to get a new hose. If they don't have one, they'll drive to the dealer. Kris said that it was actually better than if it happened tomorrow morning - at least they have a plan to get it fixed, rather than have it happen right away and scramble around with people waiting.

And an injury today - not on our farm, but one of our employees! Dave was at home working with a post hole driver and badly injured his hand. He said when he told the doctor what he did for a living, he told him to not milk cows for 10 days, since it's hard to milk when you have to keep your wound clean and dry.

So, two open holes making the day a little bit more difficult.

Fourth time around

Today we started cutting the alfalfa for the fourth time this year.

Due to the weather, we didn't do a fourth cutting last year. It was just too dry to make it worth it.

But with the weather this year, the fourth cutting looks like it's going to be good. To remind you, alfalfa grows back after you cut it, like grass. (But it's a legume, Kris just told me. Did not know that. Seems like that fun fact would've come up at some point. Now hope to get that right in a trivia game somewhere down the road.)

It certainly seems like fall now. It's cold in the morning, the leaves are starting to fall, and the birds are flocking. We're still doing all the same summer activities - swimming, climbing trees, playing softball - but you can't ignore that it feels different.

Cutting alfalfa the fourth time should be a lot like cutting it the first time. When we cover the pile this time, it'll be the FINAL final covering. And for the guys, that will definitely feel different.

(Kris just told me it won't feel different during the covering. Just afterward. Really doubt this will have any trivia use later.)

Old barn

No calves are in the old barn now. It's mostly filled with big round bales. The haymow is even empty, and Kris is thinking of taking out the floor of it to make room for more round bales.

But the calf that was bloating is still continuing to bloat, so we moved her to a pen in the old barn. That way, they can stop feeding her grain and only feed her hay in an attempt to solve her digestive problems.

My mom was at my house watching my kids and said she heard crowing from the direction of the barn. She took the kids over there to find the source. She said they found a great big rooster and three chickens strutting around on the top of the round bales like they owned the place. She said they weren't at all concerned about being watched. She said, "They just moved in when the cattle moved out!"

They're our neighbors' chickens - they have free range and have been in our yard before. They're certainly not hurting anything, but I do worry about them crossing the road and am required to make jokes about the subject.

Kris said that even though we emptied the barn of animals, the old barn just won't let go. We moved a calf back, we've got chickens - I really hope tomorrow a goat just appears. It might be a children's book come to life!

What do you do?

Sometimes a cow dies. It's rare and unfortunate, but it happens. We had a cow go down this week, meaning she was lying down and couldn't get up. Kris treated her for three days, but she couldn't get up. (We had another cow go down, but she got up and was fine after treatment. It just depends.)

It's illegal to sell a cow that can't walk to the slaughterhouse. So how do you dispose of a cow carcass?

Some people compost their dead animals. We call a removal company. They're called RIP Farms. For a fee, they come and take the animal away the same day.

When a friend visited recently, she said she had never given one thought to how milk got to her table. I bet even fewer have thought about what you do when a cow's milking days are over. Unless everyone else grew up knowing about RIP Farms-type places and I was just in the dark?!

It's always a sad sight to see the RIP Farms truck. I hope we don't need them to visit again for a long time.



Rainbow on the irrigation