Step right up

Our friends Julie and Brent Koopmann - dairy farmers in Iowa - came to visit!  We know them through National Milk Producers Federation so we actually met in Florida, got to know each other in Arizona, visited them in Iowa ... and now put them to work in Michigan!  

I'm kidding, of course.  Brent just stepped right in to help because ... it's what he does too.  (I swear we are better hosts than that.)

Since the summer employees are back in school, Kris has been doing a lot of calf chores.  Above, they're feeding bottles, and below they're using our calf cart.  We have a golf cart with a tank on the back.  We fill it with the milk from our cows and feed it to the calves in their buckets via a hose.  

We love our license plate.  (The answer is yes.)

We also have finished chopping the corn - but we still aren't done.  We have no more space for silage, so we rented an adapter and a combine head.  That way, we can mount them on the chopper and get snaplage to put into bags.  Snaplage is what it's called when you grind up the cobs of corn into easily digestible food for the cattle.

And, we have a new red and white Holstein!  We had a red and white Holstein bull a few years ago, and every now and then one makes an appearance.  My kids might not be covering this in school yet, but at home they get little genetics lessons all the time!

If you want to know more, you can like my farm page on Facebook, follow @carlashelley on twitter, or get the posts sent to your email by filling out the form on the right. If you have any questions, please email carla.wardin@gmail.com!

Bag it

We had so much silage that we didn't have room on the concrete pad for a corn pile. We decided it'd be a good year to try out a bagger.

It works like this - Kris snaps the corn with a modified combine head on the chopper. It takes the cobs of corn and grinds them up, so that the cattle can easily digest it. (It's really soft and warm. We played in it a little bit.) After it's ground up it's called snaplage. It was called this long before Snapple.

The dump wagon unloads the snaplage on the ground. We use the skid steer to deposit it onto the conveyor, which moves the snaplage into the bagger.

It moves through an auger that pushes the snaplage into the bag. As the bag fills, the entire bagger machine moves slowly forward on its little wheels.

The bag looks like a giant slug, slowing growing in our barn yard. Full of yummy corn that the cattle will eat all winter long.

As I was watching this, Mike told me I should climb on the platform and look down into the machine. I did ... and saw why he wanted me to.

He said, "Doesn't it look like something from a James Bond movie?"

Yes. Feed storage that could double as a movie star.