Christmas on the farm

It's almost Christmas!

- When a teacher was reading a book about Jesus lying in hay, my son yelled 'STRAW!'  Why straw?  Because you bed down cattle with straw.  It's wheat ... it's soft, yellow, and common bedding material. 

Hay is another word for alfalfa or grass, which cattle eat.  I told my son that technically Jesus was lying in a manger, which is a feeder where the cattle eat, so it very well could have been hay.  He said, "No, in the picture it was YELLOW." 

- Kris - and everyone else here - of course work on the holidays.  The cows stop for no one!  I well remember waiting until my dad got home from the barn to open presents on Christmas morning.  We do the same thing now ... Kris gets up at 3:00 a.m. to get an early start ... but so far every year, so have the boys!  

- Milk prices are so bad this year, and they're projected to go even lower at the beginning of the year.  There's not one day that goes by that we don't think about this.  Dairy farming is a cyclical business, but we're getting half of what we were getting for milk last year.  So what to do?  Everyone, double your milk, butter, and cheese consumption!  Think eggnog at every party. 

- I had no book to read so I searched my shelves and found an old one.  I opened it up and was delighted to see ... my great grandpa Floyd Anderson had signed his name in it in 1896!  Age 14.  He was the third generation to farm here and lived in my house.  The book is a 'Brief History of the United States.'  I was so excited and told my whole family.  We're not sure why I have it or where it came from ... but then I decided the next day I should check all of my books. 

Lo and behold, I opened up another unfamiliar one and ... it was signed by my grandma's brother! Arnold Lamb!  He didn't date it but the book was published in 1911.  I don't know where it came from, I don't know how I ended up with it - it was a lovely Christmas surprise.  I'm going to check more books today.

- Everything on the farm is headed into the holidays.  We have special schedules, everyone's working different times, and mostly, everyone is working together to make sure that it all runs smoothly - but people don't miss out on anything important.  We're a family farm, for sure.

- Tomorrow we're moving the heifers to the barn closest to our house.  Everyone's coming home for the holidays!

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Double digits

It was a record day yesterday.  Ten calves were born!  Kris saw one of them, because he had to pull the first backward calf of the season. 

Calves are born like this:  front hooves out, head following.  But some calves come out backward.

They almost always have to be pulled when they're backward, because like a breech birth, it's just not supposed to happen that way. 

After Kris got home after his 16 hour day, he was telling me about the calf.  I said, "Didn't you have a backward calf yesterday, or did I already talk to you today?"

He said, "My days are all running together."

If farming were like this every day, people wouldn't be able to farm for their whole lives.  Thankfully we have the winter to forget about how busy it is when it's calving season and harvest all at the same time.

After Kris sat down last night, it started to storm.  He joked, "Maybe it's heat lightning."  We had 60 acres of hay cut (ready to be chopped, but you have to let it dry), and the pile of feed was uncovered.  No one wants that rained on. 

I told him he should get back out there and cover the pile (haha).  It's a really physically demanding job, it takes many people, and there was no way he was going to go do it at 10 p.m.  Not if he planned on getting up in the morning again, anyway. 

Current stats:  39 heifer calves.  72 calves total.  (We sell the bull calves.)  39 of the heifers have had calves, which is good, because they usually get pregnant faster than the cows.  On the flip side, they have more trouble birthing, since it's their first.

Here's to a good Wednesday, which will be much like Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday!

No complaints here though - when Kris worked for Caterpillar he never wanted to talk about work.  He'd come home and he'd say, "I just talked about work all day.  Let's talk about something else."  I was always interested, but he wanted to focus on non-work topics when he wasn't there.

But when your work is your own business, of course you talk about it.  It's our work and life.  As for work-life balance?  It's all the same.  Though he is getting plenty of exercise.  It takes a lot of strength to pull a calf.