Hello friends, it's been awhile!

long time, no post....you know, summertime, we live on a farm - gets kind of busy! excuses, excuses, but here we go

Yesterday's sunrise was oddly beautiful. It doesn't break light these days until nearly 8am, and the sky went straight to bright blue between the spotted clouds - it looked almost like a giraffe's spots, only in feathery white and blue. The sky to the south was dark and promised rain, and it looked COLD.

It seemed a good idea to wake my nearly 3 year old daughter so she could have breakfast and we could do chores in time before it might rain. She and my nearly 1 year old son go along and we feed our goats, our livestock guardian dogs, my horse, and our little bottle calves. Our boy rides in the stroller, and our daughter's big enough now that she walks alongside and gets to help feed the goats and pour the feed to the dog.

My father-in-law was outside also, he starts his chores in the dark because he's not afraid of a little cold (my excuse is it's difficult to keep the kids warm, so we wait until the sun shines a bit!) and he told me it had been drizzling rain south of us, but it wasn't going to come as far north as us. Too bad...we could really use the rain! Our county and several counties around us are experiencing EXTREME drought.

This has been an unusual farming year, the lilacs bloomed in April this year instead of the first week of May like usual. And the pattern continued, it was warmer than usual almost every month - July like temperatures in June, July, and August, September was as hot as August, October more like September. With the heat and lack of rainfall, the crops were ready to run in September, and we were finished by the first week of October. This was a first for our farm to my knowledge - which meant we got a lot of warm fall days this year to catch up on other work.

If we would have just gotten significantly more rainfall, crop yields would have been great. Drought and high yields just don't go together, though. But it could have been much worse, while our yields were down significantly in corn, they were about the same in soybeans, and the prices are looking great, which really helps!

Already this year's calves have been weaned, the corn and beans are in the bin, we've moved that goats around, the silo is filled, a new field has been cleared for hay and planted, wheat has been planted.....surely I'm missing some things. I'll try to post more frequently to catch things as they happen, and maybe I'll post some short re-caps over the winter.

Blizzard-like Conditions. . .

. . .but the animals still need to be fed!

Wow! It is so cold, windy, and snowing hard outside!

My father-in-law is the one who feeds the cattle in the mornings - scoops silage into the wagons with a shovel, drives it down to the cow herd, feeds the calves in the barns hauling buckets of feed and big sacks of silage and bales of hay, beds them with straw, fastens the hose to the hydrant to water them. Then when the first cow herd is finished eating silage, takes the wagons to fill them again for the second cow herd. Then he'll walk down the hill to check to make sure the cows have access to water - but if it's frozen he'll have to chop a hole in the ice. This takes on a good-weather day almost 3 hours.

Does any of that sound like fun in those weather conditions I described?? Not only that, but with at least 4 inches of snow already on the ground, and patchy ice hidden underneath!

Thank you, Danny, for your committment to feeding not only the cattle on our farm, but in turn when the time comes, feeding the people who will ultimately eat the beef. Thank you to all farmers - your dedication to doing the right thing regardless of your own personal comfort is admirable, and rare.

Great Article!

Please take the time to go read this article - it really sums up a lot of what goes through my mind when it comes to the commonly held viewpoint of "modern" agriculture....only much more articulately than I could phrase it!

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/july/the-omnivore2019s-delusion-against-the-agri-intellectuals/?searchterm=blake%20hurst

What's that I hear?

Yes, the sound of spring coming!

Yesterday we first heard the sound of the Spring Peepers! The high pitched song of the frogs first coming out is a sure sign of spring coming!

The buds are beginning to form on the trees, looking out across the fields at the woods you can see a tinge of red where the new leaves are beginning to form. Yet another signpost of spring!

And certainly you can't have spring without Robins! The robins have arrived, hopping about the lawn looking for their next meal. The lovely brown, red-breasted birds are a cheerful reminder that warmer weather is just now coming upon us.

Our daffodils are beginning to poke through the frosty ground, and soon the crocus will bloom.

Anticipation of new birth, as well, calves and baby kids will soon be born and frolicking about the newly greening pastures.

Oh, what a wonderful, hopeful time of year spring is!

Praise God for giving us the fresh breath of spring air after the cold wind and freeze of winter! What an almighty and loving God we serve!

Snow and Ice and Chores

This week we have been given several inches of snow, followed by sleet and ice, followed by EVEN MORE SNOW!

This makes for nasty cold weather that is very hard to walk in.

If anyone ever wonders whether the farmers who raise livestock truly love their animals and want what's best for them, the proof is when even nasty weather like this never stops us from going out and checking on them, feeding them, and making sure they have thawed water to drink.

This is NOT an easy chore - walking along, your feet drag through the snow, punch through the layer of ice, then on down a few more inches into even deeper snow! Especially hauling feed buckets and hay and water buckets.

The critters keep warm, God has blessed them with several layers of warm hair insulating the snow and ice to keep them comfortable. We give them a little extra hay to help generate the body heat, and the Lord takes care of the rest.

More cold, More dogs?!?

So last night Matt made sure to do the chores before dark so it'd be a tiny bit warmer. He came back and said we might want to move Cookie (my favorite goat.....the only "named" goat....I'll probably post on her more later after she has her kids!) since her udder looked significantly bigger than it had looked.

We've had the goats since May 2007, and Cookie kidded once when the temperatures were so cold we think that the kids froze by the time we found them in the morning. Since then we've put the goats in the old farrowing house ('FH' - leftover from when they had pigs) that is kept above freezing for storing chemicals in the winter. We thought Cookie and #8 would kid before mid-December, so we had them both in the FH for a while, and only #8 kidded. So after the kid was 2 weeks old and we decided if Cookie hadn't kidded by then, she wasn't going to kid until mid-March, we put them back outside. Well, she's had lots of udder and vulva changes, and I know anything born outside in this weather basically had a death sentence, so to be safe we put her inside the FH last night. She seemed very happy to go! She knew it was warm in there! I don't know how she would kid now...the buck was removed, unless it was one of the older little buck kids that bred her. I'm glad she's safe now.

Also, I got a call from the people at www.igpr.org where we got our LGD from, needing someone to foster up to 7 dogs! We agreed to foster 2 working groups out of the three, so we'll be having lots of big whites running around here by the weekend! The goats should be VERY safe!! Hope Brody gets along with them.

Single Digit Temperatures!

It was less than 5 degrees at chore time this morning, so needless to say I hurried!

The goats and horses were shivering quite a bit, but Brody the LGD was fine! He had a few drops of ice on his fur where he'd drooled, but the cold didn't phase him!

I fed a little extra hay, and had to de-ice one bucket. It is nice having an automatic waterer that is made not to freeze!