It is cold at the farm, and tonight is supposed to be even colder.  With highs of 0 and lows of -24 its hard to get equipment running to do the basic chores of feeding cows etc.  We've been working on our goals so that we can finalize our 2010 farm plans.  I think we know what we are going to do this coming year, but it will be nice to have a draft of our family farm goals in writing that we can run our plans against.  One of the goals in essence is to continue to improve the farm environment.  We were talking this morning about the condition of the farm when we bought it and how much we've improved it.  There was a tremendous amount of erosion and over grazing on the farm which led to deep ruts, major soil runoff, and weeds that we still struggle with today.  When we planted alfalfa, put in 3 wetlands, and started rotational grazing, we tried to attack the roots of what we saw as problems.  Now we need to move it farther and really strive for better.  That's part of the goal setting - to define more.

Christmas Blizzard

The snow has finally stopped, but the wind hasn't.  The tractor and snow blower have been working over time the past week.  We were without power Christmas eve, most of Christmas day and the morning of the day after Christmas.  I had dropped a bale to the cows Christmas eve which was good because without power I couldn't keep the tractor plugged in and warm enough to start to clear the snow with the blower.  Once the storm died down and electric was back on they were ready for another bale so after clearing the lane we cleared a path to and through the paddock.  Then dropped them a bale.  The snow is so deep that the round bales are covered nearly to the tops.  I'm glad we spent the time to move all of the bales that we need up to the yard.  It's a lot easier this year to keep the area around the house clear than it was last year to keep digging out the the bales every time the wind blows.  This week I'll start equipment maintenance.  It should keep me busy for the next couple of months with some breaks in between.  The family is also putting our farm goals down on paper starting this week so that we can ensure that our farm enterprises are in step with our goals.  The goals will also allow us to make sure that our short term planning that we're also starting, will be in step as well.  More to follow on the planning and the goals.

White Christmas

We don't need to worry about a white Christmas at Mulberry Grove Family Farm.  This time of year we are blessed with snow, and more snow is what we are about to get too.  We are running low on chicken feed so we had to run to get some more feed before Christmas and another bout of bad winter weather.  The bad weather was supposed to start yesterday but didn't so we made a break for it first thing in the morning.  We only use certified chemical free chicken feed, so we have to run about 60 miles for it.  Since we split our fuel costs with one of our friends who also uses the feed, 60 miles isn't too bad for good feed.  But as we traveled we started to run into freezing drizzle and icy roads.  Once we got over a ton of feed in the pickup we had more traction, but driving on ice is still nerve racking.  We dropped off half the feed at our friends and made it back to the farm in time for lunch.  After lunch we'll unload the feed and move it to the barn for the chickens and then we'll hunker down until the snow storm is over sometime right after Christmas.   The farm is beautiful this time of year with everything dressed in snow, but doing chores in it can be a challenge.  Our lane is about 1/4 miles long, so just keeping the lane passable can be a challenge as well.  One of our customers came by for eggs yesterday evening - just before I cleared the lane - and got stuck right in front of the house.  Some minor shoveling (done by the son in law or our customer) and a little pushing and they were free.  We really enjoy seeing our customers out at the farm.  Hopefully they didn't mind the full country experience...

Food Inc

We watched the movie Food Inc recently and we highly recommend it. Here is a link to the trailer. If as a food consumer you’ve ever wondered about food production or modern agriculture, or if you’re a farmer and have heard agriculture representatives and pundits decry the food elitists’ view of modern US ag, then this movie will fill in the gaps for either side. To be fair, this movie has its flaws. Not all agriculture is strictly “industrial” agriculture. To a large extent beef, and to a much, much smaller extent pork can be found being raised on small farms and smaller feedlots or hog houses and even hoop facilities and in old barns and in pens. Also as a “whole foods” producer we at Mulberry Grove Family Farm do not believe that capitalism and business are the root of all evil, nor do we think that organic will save the world (conservation and environmentally sound and biodiverse ecosystems probably will, but more on that some other time). We really enjoyed the last couple of segments of the movie that featured Polyface Farms in Virginia (for obvious reasons we hope you do too). Finally, the recommendations that are given at the end of the film we do feel were unnecessary and do smack of elitism. We believe that the consumer needs to know more about their food and the businesses that provide that food/product, but once that information is given, we feel the consumer is smart enough to choose what’s right for them and to push their representatives in local, state, and national government to make any changes that they see as necessary. We appreciated that the movie provided information that is otherwise not easily accessible. So check out the movie, see for yourself, and make up your own mind. Then, please, let us know what you thought about it. We’d love to hear from you.

After a lot of time spent in the skid loader we finally have the bales I think we'll need for feed for the winter moved from around the farm to around the house, which is where the winter area for the cows is located.  Running bales with the skid loader is not the most rewarding or exciting job, but it's not that bad either.  Sharon would disagree, she ran the skid loader to move the corral and hated it.

I was getting dressed this morning and looked out the window to watch the cows and steers feeding.  I noticed an odd movement so I watched longer.  Then I noticed the motion was that of a calf hitting a cows udder to get the cow to drop its milk!  I grabbed my binoculars to get a closer look at the ear tag number and sure enough cow 55 was standing there for her calf to try to nurse.  The calves had been moved off to Phil's for six weeks for weaning.  A month and a half later and now we have a steer who wants to try again!?!  All I can hope for is that the cow is dry and the steer will give up.  It's too cold for a cow to be trying to provide milk and keep her weight on at the same time.  We'll have to keep an eye on this new development.

Winter weather has come to Mulberry Grove Family Farm and it has hit hard and fast.  November was mild and relatively precipitation free which allowed most everyone in our area to wrap-up their field work and winter prep.  I'm still working on my winter prep because I was working for others getting their field work done.  Little did we know that the weather switch would be thrown from mild to harsh over night.  I've been working on moving hay and corn stalk bales from around the farm to around the paddock so that the cows have a wind break and also to make sure that the bales are close enough to the paddock that I don't have to dig to the bales every time I need to take one to the cows.  We've been getting snow for the past 2 days in the form of a blizzard and I'm only about halfway done moving the bales.  We have a nice drift that's running down the lane by the house that's about 3' high.  It should only take me a couple of hours to clear that with the skid loader since my tractor won't start.  Another winter prep item on the list that was to get done before bad weather hits!  On a more somber note, we lost a calf last night.  Sara found the calf laying with the other cows in the paddock.  The calf had been walked on.  She was one of the sickly twins that had survived her bout with a bad fever right after birth and had to also survive bad mothering from a first time mama.  We're not sure exactly what happened to the calf yesterday but when George and I came back from deer hunting on the back of the farm yesterday evening Sharon and Sara were trying to get the calf out of the paddock.  We brought the calf into the barn, cleaned her up, dried and warmed her, but the outcome was not positive.  Sara had become so attached to this little calf we called "Baby".  Sara's chore was to bottle feed the calf everyday and the calf would run to Sara when ever she called Baby!  Some tears were shed by Sharon and Sara but these are the lessons that we hope will give our kids added strength in later years.  The boys helped me with the final details of the calf.  This too we hope gives them added strength.

We woke to snow yesterday when Sara and I took the heifer calves to the Sheldon Livestock sale barn.  Everything went pretty well.  Didn't get the high $ for the calves but they did okay.  Somebody ended up with some very good replacement calves for a very good price.  It's a very different perspective to see them in the sale ring compared to out in the field.  They look so much smaller inside when you're sitting up in the seats.  Our twin calves sold by the head, which meant that they were too small to sell by the lb, and the others averaged a little over 300lbs each.
Once our calves had sold we stayed to see what some of the other small replacements went for, then we headed for the door and picked up our check.
We then headed further west to pickup Sara's milk goats.  Sara was happy to see her goats, but it was a quick load into the trailer and headed east back home.  Sara's goats are now in their winter area up by the barn and near the house.  Sharon and Sara had piled the raspberry pruning in their winter area this fall, so the goats have been very happy to fight the thorny branches to get to the old dried up leaves.  They are even eating the branches!
Today will be a day of moving bales around the cattle winter paddock up by the house so that the hay and corn stalk are close enough for easy access when the snow gets deep.  It was in the mid teens today when we got up so it is a wake-up call to get things finalized for winter's heavy snow and cold.

The heifer calves are going to the sale barn tomorrow.  I went over to Phil's to pick them up tonight.  It was dark by the time I got over to his place, so we had to sort the steers from the heifers with a flashlight as we brought them into the trailer.  I split the trailer and put the heifers in the front and the steers in the back.  One of the heifer calves is a kicker but luckily she was one of the first calves into the trailer.  The rest went without too much trouble.  The steers were loaded last and were let out into the pasture with the cows and the bull when I got them home.  The inside trailer door was opened up and the heifer calves were given the full trailer for the night.  Tomorrow morning Sara and I will take the heifers to Sheldon Livestock first thing in the morning and then we'll go to Rock Valley to pickup her milk goats.  Sara's goats were in Rock Valley to be bred and since Sheldon is on the way we'll make it all in one trip and kill 2 birds with one stone.  I spent today chisel plowing for a neighbor.  No problems with the field work.  Probably the last day of that for the year.  This was the last field to be done and he took over from me when I left to sort the calves.  It was enjoyable and I look forward to helping with harvest and field work next fall.

Its been wet weather this week and have even had a few snow showers and snow flurries today, so since no field work can be done we moved the chickens into their winter home in the barn. They will be living in their deep and I do mean deep bedding. Sharon had a truck deliver the wood shaving bedding last week and it is feet deep throughout the barn. When we moved the chickens into the barn we pulled the chicken mobile down to the barn and "guided" them in. It didn't take too long and we noticed that there were some chickens out. We thought maybe they were getting out of their outside areas that are a combination of woven-wire, cattle panel, and chicken wire, but as we were eating lunch I noticed some chickens up on the inside walls. Closer inspection revealed that they were jumping from their perches to the walls, then walking around on the walls and flying down. So we scrounged around the farm and found more chicken wire and some lattice and strategically mounted the wire and lattice so that they can't easily make it from purchase to the tops of the walls. I have to admit that we tried cutting the wing feathers on one of the chickens. We noticed 2 things. 1. You can't tell that you have clipped the wings when looking at the chicken so it would be nearly impossible to catch and clip all of the chickens without some serious sorting. 2. A clipped chicken can't flight at all and most egg laying chickens can fly really well. Once clipped they can't even make a 12" flight up. So after the first chicken we didn't do any others and instead added the wire and lattice. I guess we learned a little something anyway...

Beef Delivery

The locker called and said the beef was done on Friday so today is delivery day. We'll be leaving shortly to go pickup the beef. It's supposed to rain today, and for the next few days, so we want to take Sharon's mini-van to pickup the beef. I had to look online at the cargo capacity to make sure that the van can carry that kind of weight. It will be tight, but we'll be just under.

Yesterday was spent running a grain cart for a neighbor. The objective of running a grain cart is to catch the combine as it's making a pass to allow it to dump its corn into the cart while the combine is still moving and combining. The alternative is to stop the combine at each end of the field to dump and this takes time. Since every little bit that spills is money, and the augers that move the corn from combine to cart and cart to truck or wagon move such a large volume of grain so quickly, it's a little nerve racking making sure that no mistakes are made which would put a pile of corn on the ground real quick. But it has been enjoyable and, knock on wood, we've had no major mistakes yet. Today is the last day and the neighbor's corn should be in the bin. Tomorrow it's back to working on the barn to get the chickens moved in.

Field Work

I've been working for a neighbor for the past couple of days. I've been disking some of his fields. I've been using his tractor and disk. Pretty nice running a tractor made in the past decade. My tractor was made the same year I was born, so the technology changes are pretty dramatic not to mention the comfort. It is a lot different to be able to listen to a radio or talk on the cell phone without having to shut the tractor down or wear sound suppressors and an iPod to listen to music. Everything has been running pretty good. Today a wheel on one of the disk wings had a bearing come apart. I took the tractor back over the neighbors shop and popped the bearings and races out. If its put back together tonight I'll disk some more tomorrow.

A neighbor is letting me bale corn stalks about 4 miles up the road. This will be a huge help in keeping feed costs low for the cows this winter. I was able to bale 54 bales and had only 2 bad bales. I'm baling using sisal twine on the corn stalks with my JD round baler which is more tricky than using the net wrap that my baler can also use. The sisal twine wrap can be fed directly to the cows without having to cut the wrap off, and corn is terrible with net wrap IMO. Unlike net wrapping alfalfa, when you cut the wrap on a bale of corn stalk the corn stalk falls apart as soon as you cut it like it is under pressure. It's a total pain to use net wrap on corn stalk if you're the one that has to feed the bale to the cows and cut the wrap. The net wrap bales look great but the time it takes to cut the wrap off and get the wrap out of the bale ring isn't worth it IMO. From a baling operation standpoint, the net wrap is much faster and easier to operate which makes baling much more efficient. On the other hand if I run with too high a ground speed when using twine, the twine arms get fouled with corn stover and the twine wrapping process breaks down which creates a bad bale and downtime. This was an issue with the oat straw. After the oat straw pain caused by too much ground speed and RPS as well as a missing twine guide, I checked the baler book and have taken the suggested settings on the baler to improve the efficiency. I slowed the ground speed slightly and dropped the RPMs. This really helped yesterday when we had a 30mph wind from the south. When I would bale north with a tail wind, high ground speed and high RPM everything was pushed forward in the baler and ended up on the twine arms - hence one of the bad bales. Today I baled about a dozen bales and never missed a beat. I greased and fueled the skidloaders and took my skidloader over to pickup the bales. We got one load of bales on the trailer and it started a rain/mist. On the way out of the field one of the wheels sunk in the ground by one of the new windmills that is on the farm where I'm baling. I had to unload the 3 top bales and hook the truck to the skidloader. George drove while I pulled the truck and trailer with a chain. Once out I reloaded and took the load of bales home. We unloaded the bales and had to call it quits because of rain and darkness. We'll try to get the bales home again tomorrow.

Beeves Finished for 2009

The last two beeves were taken to the locker this week. I waited while the butcher killed and hung the beeves to get the live weights. The beeves looked great and were right at about 1200lbs. We all agreed that 1300 is ideal and 1500 is the max, so we were just shy of the sweet spot on weight. Our goal with the beeves is to have them on grass most of their lives and corn finished at the end to add the flavor and marbling that we Americans have grown to love. The butcher commented that he could see that our beeves were on grass before they were fed out and didn't spend most of their lives in a feed lot. That makes us feel great that we are meeting our goal and it's visible to someone who is an expert in beef. We continue to push toward the goals we set for our beef by selecting a bull and cows that are statistically more prone (EPD) to produce beeves that are a higher grade of beef for our customers.

Getting to Know Our Beef - Lunch

We had a really fun lunch today. We cooked steaks for lunch and used the opportunity to get better acquainted with our beef. We cooked several T-bone steaks and a sirloin steak. Each steak was cooked to different doneness. We cooked the T-bones from well to medium rare and the sirloin we cooked to medium. Each family member took a cut of each steak and judged it on tenderness, juiciness, and flavor. It wasn't scientific, and not everyone participated in the same process, but I think we were able to come to a consensus. We all agreed that medium rare was the most tender, juicy, and most flavorful. Some (the girls) couldn't look at that much "red meat" on the medium rare steak, but everyone liked it once they got it past their eyes. The toughest we all agreed was the well steak which was expected since the medium rare was picked as best. The sirloin which was cooked medium was picked in a tie with the medium rare T-bone. I had a medium rare sirloin the other night and it was even better than the medium rare T-bone, so I think that if it had been medium rare, it would have been the winner. Since we really felt that there was a significant difference between well and medium rare, we'll be posting tips on getting steaks to your desired doneness on our resources page. Hopefully you'll find a tip to help you make your next steak as tender as possible.

Crop Harvest and Pheasant Season

I spent the week pheasant hunting in our area of Iowa. As is the tradition here at Mulberry Grove Family Farm, friends and family come to Dickinson County to pheasant hunt the week of the opener. It was the most lean year for the opening week ever. Some of it was because of the hard winter, but most of it is that the crops in the area are still in. In a normal year many farmers are completing their field work (disking or other work that is done after the harvest) by the first week of November. This year the fields are still filled with crops and combines were only running when the dew was off the plant and or when the grain dryers were empty. I'd say that in the southern part of the county where I am the crops are about 60% out, but up in the northern part of the county 85% or more of the crops are still in. Some of those that are accepting corn such as the ethanol plant have increased the moisture content they are willing to accept so that they can keep up with their need for corn, while the elevator is saying that they are heavily docking farmers who are bringing wet product, to encourage them to dry it at home. I think we'll see an extremely slow harvest this year still yet to come. Then it will be who will get caught with crops in the field at the first snow.

Beeves

The beeves are just about finished. We took our first steer (beef) into the locker for processing and got it back last week. We sold 1/4 and kept 3/4. Our freezers are officially full. Its nice to look in the freezer going into the winter and see one filled with chicken, one filled with beef and one filled with pork and venison. I think we have our protein covered for this winter! We will be taking the next two beeves into the locker in two weeks. These should be excellent quality. They've been slowly eating the corn over the last few months. It definitely takes longer to grow a steer without inoculates and antibiotics but we really appreciate knowing that the meat is both high a quality and without medications and hormones. Tomorrow I'll move the corral from out of the pasture and into the paddock so that the steers can get used to being in the corral. That way when it's time to go I can close the door on the corral and load them up.

I moved the cows and the bull out to part of the outside of the pasture. There is still a lot of green grass under the standing blue stem. Normally I leave the outside of the pasture to blue stem, but I'd like to see how putting the cattle on in the fall causes the grasses to react. This will be the first time that I've tried this. Only part of the outside is being opened to them, about 1/4 of the outside, so the control will be the remainder. I noticed that the cow's utters are really full. I'm sure that it's uncomfortable to be that full, and they do seem agitated by the lack of their calves and I'm sure being full of milk. They haven't been making too much noise since we moved them from their calves, but then its been raining and blowing so much since we made the change that it would take a lot of noise to get above the roar of the weather.

Fall Cattle Work

Yesterday we separated all of the cows from the calves, vaccinated and castrated a couple of calves that didn't get banded. The vet earned his money having to assist in moving the cattle into and out of the shoot. We also ear tagged a few of the calves and one cow that didn't get tagged last year. It is very physical work and requires getting into the corral with the cows and encouraging them to get into the shoot. I moved the calves into the trailer and moved them over to Phil's place for weaning. Once weaned we'll bring them back, although I'm on the fence about holding back any heifers this year. It would be a lot easier to sell all of the heifers and to keep the bull for one more year, than to sell a bull this time of year. I guess I'll have to keep thinking this over to come up with a decision.

Chores

Anybody who thinks that its nice to have the house to themselves for a week doesn't hasn't tried to do chores on this farm by themselves! With Sharon and the kids visiting friends and relatives back east, I'm here doing chores over the next week by myself. When we're all on the farm, the chores are divided up and everyone has at least one chore to do in the morning and again in the evening or just after sunset. My normal chores are the cattle, feeding the cows, calves and fat steers. Doing one or two chores can be done fairly quickly when you have everything you need and go strait at it and have your rhythm. When it comes to doing all of the chores it takes a long time. Some of the time is spent going between chores. Some of the time is spent transitioning between the different tools for the different chores. You don't think much about having to get the egg basket when you're just get eggs, or having the water can to fill the chickens water if you have to get eggs and give water, but when you move between chores you have to gather the tools for one chore and drop off tools for the others just completed. Just moving between bottle feeding a calf where you have to mix the milk replacer in the house and put that in a the bottle to feed them and then you have to move to do chicken chores which means getting a basket, water etc and dropping off the bottle and go to another part of the farm feed, water and collect eggs, and then back to the back of the farm to the cows with the skid loader to move a round bale out to the pasture and back and forth it goes. The other thing that takes time is the inefficiency of doing something you don't do regularly. So today when I had set the egg basket on an egg box where the chickens lay their eggs, and I closed the lid and knocked half of the eggs out of the basket, that wasn't only a learning experience but a costly one! Once I was finished with chores this morning I had eggs just to make myself feel better. How many more days until everyone is home, I really miss them already?

I took a steer to the locker to be processed the other day. The steer had cut his face and rather than risk an infection I just took him to the locker a little early. He weighed about 1100lbs on the hoof when I took him in, so he was a little light. I think we'll keep this one and possibly sell 1/4 or 1/8th off of it. I took him to a locker down in Sibley, IA called Jakes. They look like they really know what they're doing and the butcher has great customer service. We still have to run the numbers to see what the inputs were so that we can set a price on the beeves pre-processing. We still have 2 more that need to go in, but they're scheduled for about the first or 2nd week of November. I setup the corral to run the steers into to sort the one out that I took to the locker, and left the corral in place to feed the other 2 in so that they get comfortable with the corral. Next time I shouldn't have to worry so much about pushing them through. Hopefully they'll just walk right in and onto the trailer. Today I'll work with George and Sara to move the corral out to the pasture. I'd like to wean all of the calves this week and run them through the corral to tag, castrate, worm and vaccinate the heifers. We'll have to see how the weather holds. We got some snow this weekend and they're calling for snow tonight and tomorrow and rain/snow for the rest of the week. It would be nice to work the cattle in warm weather, but sometimes the timing just doesn't work.

We finished the weekend's chicken processing with only one major issue. We struggled to get started and keep up both Friday and Saturday because we couldn't keep our scalder up to temp. We had lots of help and Nancy kept us going on the scalder, but on Saturday it caused us to come to an almost complete stop. It turned out that the element had failed. Sharon ended up running up to town about 20 miles away to buy another LP turkey fryer to scald in on Saturday morning which caused us to fall pretty far behind, but without it we would have been in even more trouble. We kept up pretty well on Saturday even though we didn't have any help. I'm always surprised by the number of chickens that our 4 kids, Sharon and I can process. I called the scalder retailer this morning and they'll be sending a new element to replace the one that failed. We still have one more light day of processing, mainly to put up our own chickens for the winter. Pasture raised chickens take a HUGE amount of work, but we know that they are really worth it. Since raising our own chickens I can taste the difference and also taste the chlorine in store bought chickens. So I decided to do some research into the chlorine use in chicken processing, and no, I didn't go to anti-mass production sites either. I used information that is for the chicken processors and from the USDA. If you want to know about NaOCl use in poultry processing read on.
In the mass production processing of chicken, chlorine bleach (NaOCl) (at a much higher concentration than consumer store bought bleach) is the most used chemical in mass production poultry processing. Here's how chlorine works - chlorine oxidizes and is used up when it contacts organic material (blood, fecal matter, fat, etc.). It is believed to break cell processes and oxygen use in cells and organisms. So chlorine is used in almost all stages of mass processing chickens. Mass production processors continually face the challenge of choosing between too much chlorine and too little throughout their processes. Too much chlorine and the processor wastes money. Too little and the huge amount of organic load doesn't get treated. As organic loads increase in the production of chickens more chlorine is needed to keep up with the amount of chlorine being used up. If you've ever seen pictures of chiller tanks that mass production chickens "soak/pass" through, you'll understand why processors need to use so much chlorine. But of course there is a down side to chlorine in chicken processing besides the taste of chlorine in your chicken right? Right! If the processors add enough chlorine to the process to stay ahead of the organic load there is what is called free available chlorine (FAC). FAC is able to be absorbed into foods. It is especially easily absorbed into unsaturated fat. Chickens are very high in unsaturated fat. Also absorbed into the food is Trihalomethane which is a byproduct of chlorine's contact with organic material. And guess what, chlorine incorporated into food animals and trihalomethane are known carcinogens. So do we use chlorine bleach? Yes, but only as a disinfectant for our equipment BEFORE and AFTER we process our chickens. Our chickens never soak in a chlorine solution as they do in mass production. You will never taste bleach in our chickens but you can be sure our tools and equipment are clean. So the next time you eat a store bought chicken, see if you can taste or smell that bleach, and when you enjoy one of ours you'll have one more reason to love ours.

Fall Chickens

The first day of the last batch of chickens is now in the books. The last person to pick up chickens is here and that will end the last of today's customers. We got off to a rough and slow start. We changed the way the customers pickup chickens and had them staggered throughout the day. That wouldn't have been so bad, but the scalder had to be supplied with additional hot water which I stole from the bag shrinking water. This meant that finished chickens couldn't be bagged and labeled until they had enough water heated to the correct temperature to replace what I had taken. Next time we'll have to have another propane heater to heat supplemental water for the scalder. We had additional help from friends who process chickens themselves for their customers and another who wanted to learn how to process chickens. It's hard work and takes a lot of time and commitment to grow and process chickens, especially pasture raised chickens. But when it's all done you know you have sold and kept great chicken to enjoy when the weather is cold outside and the warmth of a chicken in the oven brings a deep warmth of comfort to home. Or my favorite, barbecued chicken on the grill. We have 2 more days of processing. One tomorrow for customers, and the remaining ones for ourselves some time next week.

Twins

We are still bottle feeding our twin heifers. They have survived the initial infection and fever and seem to be doing well, but they are still not as active as other calves their age. These calves should be running around the pasture and following their mother, but these two spend most of their time laying in the pasture waiting for us to come down with a bottle. Once in a while they'll wander up the main gate, but that is rare. It will be nice when these two are weaned and are eating hay and grass with the rest of them. Until then, we feed them by bottle twice a day.

We still have broiler chickens that are to be processed and sold next weekend. These are the last batch of broilers for the year. Sharon is going down twice a day, once in the morning and once in the late afternoon to move them across the pasture and to make sure that food and water is full and all is well and also goes down throughout the day to check on "her" birds. Yesterday I had been cleaning up the hay mower that my neighbor had lent me and I had a pile of alfalfa leaves that had been on the back of the mower. So I gathered up the leaves and put them in a bucket to take down to the broilers. I took the bucket of leaves down and spread them in the broiler pens for the birds to eat. In one of the pens I noticed a chicken that had a spot of blood on it. We carry radios on the farm so I called up to Sharon and let her know. She was coming down to check on the chickens and would be right down. I went back up to the yard to work on the mower. It wasn't long and I heard on the radio a frantic Sharon saying that there is a predator in one of the pens and it's eating a chicken alive! George rushed to the house for a shotgun and I wasn't far behind him for a rifle. We ended up dispatching the predator while still in the pen, still eating on the chicken! Turns out it was a mink. Even with all of the commotion the mink just kept on chewing on the chicken to the end. When we looked up information on mink we found that this mink didn't act the way a mink should. It was much further away from water than usual, was out during the day, and it had only been working on the one chicken rather than killing many chickens. There's always something new and exciting on the farm, even if it's sometimes stressful.

Neighbor's Mower

I took the last cutting of alfalfa yesterday evening. My neighbor Russ let me do a "try before I buy" on his cutter conditioner. A cutter conditioner cuts and conditions. By conditioning it means that two rollers smash the plant as it exits the mower. This splits the stems and allows for a quicker drying time which was a major issue this year. The mower is a hydra swing type. Hydra swing means that it moves from side to side behind the tractor by hydraulics which allows you to cross the field rather than doing decreasing circles around the field. The mower moves from side to side by a lever. When you reach the end of the field you have to lift the mower with the standard tractor hydraulics and then move the lever to the side which starts the mower moving to the other side as you turn. It is more of a complicated move than I thought. If you turn too sharply you hit the tire with the mower arm, and when you come around if you aren't lined up right you miss some of the alfalfa as the mower gets lined up. Russ also let me use his tractor. I liked them both. Just as I was about finished the field however the mower stopped running like I had picked up a rock or something. I checked the mower but I can't find anything... Sooo I have to call him and tell him that his mower is down and I can't figure out why! I'm sure he won't be happy, and I'm not too happy about having to call him and give him the bad news. Oh well, guess it's time to pickup the phone and give him a call.

Farm Tour

Sara and I saddled the horses and toured every corner of the farm today after church. We looked at all the alfalfa fields. The new alfalfa field looks really good with only a little bit of regrowth from the oats. The field that has had only 2 cuttings taken off of it looks fair. It has an average height of about 7 or 8 inches with highs of over 12" and lows as low as 3" and sparse. I'm assuming that I'll cut it in the next 7 days if the weather looks good just because it is getting late and alfalfa doesn't dry in cool weather. The lower field that we call the food plot, was surveyed for its fence. The fence looks pretty good in most spots. The west side fence is the worst, but the east side is bad and is longer. I'd like to graze the cows down there just before they go up to the winter paddock but I don't want to take a chance that the cows get out into the neighbors corn, so I'm a little timid about putting them behind a single strand of electric while the corn is still up. We were really amazed at the growth of the willow trees down in the lower wetland. They have grown into large flowing trees in just a few years. The upper wetland has quite a few nice poplar trees starting on the dike. I think that these will have to be cut down since tall trees and prairie wetlands are not really compatible from a native wildlife ecosystem standpoint. Tall trees are not a natural plant on the open prairie potholes and are vantage points for the hawks and other birds of prey to perch. They would be perfectly positioned to allow birds of prey to pick-off the waterfowl and their chicks that would use the wetlands. I often wonder how amazing the landscape must have been before all of the potholes were drained from this area for crop fields. Where the wetlands have been restored, it is an amazing complex ecosystem that can't be appreciated without venturing out into them. With our wetlands on our farm and by hunting many off of our farm in the fall and winter, we have the opportunity to really get close to the wildlife all the way down to the bugs and plants that live there. We're very pleased to have restored wetlands and native prairies on our farm and it's part of our farming philosophy to be conservationists and stewards of the land not just users of the land. The wildlife that these areas produce, feed and shelter is amazing. The bounty reaches all of the way to our table in the form of healthy and truly organic food that is rich and distinct in local flavor. We harvest deer, rabbit and pheasant with the occasional duck and partridge on our farm. Many of our neighbors have also set aside parts of their farms for wildlife and it has paid dividends in the abundant wildlife that lives in our part of the county. The geese that feed in our alfalfa field rest on the 70 acre wetland/pond that my neighbor restored set aside. And the hen pheasant that is leading a brood of chicks from my neighbor's set aside into my CRP shrub borders and into the prairie grasses that borders my pastures has literally miles of cover thanks to the farmers who care enough to take ground out of production for the sake of wildlife and nature. We are truly blessed in Dickinson County Iowa to have some of the most conservation minded farmers and active wildlife management resources like Iowa DNR and USFW.

Second Twin

The second twin (#28) does have a fever. A REALLY high fever. Her temp is 105. That's very high. I gave her a shot of Nuflur on Friday and then called the vet for more antibiotic. #28 is really the most active and seems the most well of the two. They're both still drinking from the bottle and nursing so they're still progressing or at least hanging on. Cool mornings really seam to give them the most energy. George was down doing chicken chores this morning and the twins thought he had bottles, so they ran after him. Then they ran to their mother and latched on when he didn't have anything for them. That is a great sign, but as the heat of the day - heat today was in the 70's - they tend to just lay around. We're still hopeful.

Trials of Joy

Sometimes little joys carry their own trials. Our last set of twins may be in trouble. One of them has a fever for sure and the other may but I'll have to check once I finish writing this. One of the twins - ear tag # 27 - is running a temp of 103. 101 - 101.5 is okay. Anything higher is a fever. We talked to the vet and he said he thought that it may have been that they didn't get the colostrum from the heifer because the calves were born to a heifer which generally produces a smaller amount of colostrum, and then adding on that they were twins. Without colostrum, as with any animal that breast feeds, there is only a limited amount of time to get the colostrum to he baby that contains the antibodies that give newborns their immunity boost. We're giving #27 antibiotics but the vet doesn't have much confidence that it will pull through. As long as the twins are taking bottles, and they are, we're still holding out hope. We've never really gotten the opportunity to work that closely with the calves other than bucket feeding Holsteins for a couple of years. The Angus calves are very bonded with their mothers and don't want to get too close to the great predator (us humans). It's still a joy to care for a small calf, even if the outcome won't be recovery for the calf. It reminds us as with everything in life, that we are stewards and we try our best with the abilities we're give and technologies at hand, but the outcome ultimately isn't really up to us.

New Family Member?

Sharon and I take a little different approach to animal husbandry. She is a much more nurturing type and I'm much more of a wait and see type. We have had a couple sets of twins in the past couple of weeks. The first set of twin heifers were dropped by a very experienced cow who has an udder like a milk cow. Huge udder = lots of milk. The second set of twin heifers that we had on Sunday was by a heifer who is very gentle and has a large udder but doesn't have much experience with calves yet. One of the twins has been less than active and hasn't been running to its mama for milk which isn't unusual for the first day or 2 of a calf's life. Newborn calves seem to have a built in instinct to find a nice place to lay down and soak up the sun and to stay away from hoof traffic. Because we have high tensile electric at different heights and electric string fences throughout the pasture, calves are able to go under the fences to where the cows can't go. So it's not unusual to find calves outside of the pasture in the tall grasses that surround our pastures or tucked in with our broiler pens. I'll admit that it's unusual to have a calf that seems to spend all of its time away from the cow even for the first couple of days. The two new twins are ear tag # 27 and 28. #27 is always with the cow but #28 seems to always be where we left her. So Sharon's nurturing style has won the day and we're now bottle feeding #28 goats milk. I think that this calf will cut into our goat's milk that we use for the table as it's milk requirements grow. This heifer is going to get a name - the first of our cattle to get an actual name rather than being called by a tag # or some other obvious physical attribute. I think we're about to see one of the cattle go from one of dad's calves to a new member of the family!

Calving Season

This year we started calving season with 10 black Angus females and 1 black Angus bull out in the pasture. Some of the females were cows and some were heifers. As of June we had 8 calves born without any complications. All but 2 females had dropped calves. I thought that we had a pretty successful calving season. One female that didn't drop a calf was an old cow. She's probably 13 years old and is one of the first cows that we bought when we first moved out to the farm. The other that didn't drop a calf was a heifer that we had purchased last year. We thought that the old cow had reached the age where she wasn't going to produce consistently any more and needed to be sent to town while the new heifer may have miscarried and we didn't find the evidence of it. We were wrong. The old cow had twins about 3 weeks ago and the young heifer had twins yesterday morning. That means that not only did every one of our females have calves but we ended the year with 2 extra! And to make it even better the twins were all heifers. Wow. That makes our calving season not only a blessing but our cup runs over. We had 8 heifers and 4 bull calves born this year. For next year we'll have 18 females producing for us. I think that we'll only run about 2o cow/calf pairs on our farm so if all goes well this winter we'll be selling cattle next year. I know I've said it before, and I'll continue to be amazed by the reality of it - even with all of the hard work and effort that we put into all of the different farm products/projects - we don't control what ultimately succeeds and what fails.

3rd Cutting - The Charm?

I cut half of the half that is to be cut of alfalfa today. Huh? I'm not going to cut any hay off of the new alfalfa hay since I don't want to risk any winter kill. That leave only about 50 acres of alfalfa hay to cut. Usually we only get 3 cuttings off of our place, although this year we are pulling out the remaining old half of the alfalfa to renovate the field so I may try to take one more off late this fall. It takes about 28 days for alfalfa to mature after cutting so that would put me at the end of September. Usually pretty cool, but then this year has been unusually cool anyway so it will be par for the course if I can get a cutting. I still have another 25 acres or so to cut but it won't be ready for another week. I walked it today and while there are some flowers on it, the majority hasn't even budded yet, so I have time. The hay I cut today will take a long time to dry since the weather is so cool. I'll try to rake it into windrows tomorrow sometime. I'm supposed to go over to Tim's to help him bale some of his grass hay. It is really nice stuff. If it dries down right it should make a horse person very happy.

Tomato Blight

I went out to pick produce yesterday morning and was shocked to realize that we had been hit by the late tomato/potato blight. 90+% of our tomatoes are dead! Just when we started to get ripe tomatoes we were shocked into the realization that our tomato crop has ended. Last night I researched causes and cures. Tomato/potato blight is the same fungus that caused the great potato famine. From an non-chemical fungicide standpoint, there is little that is proven to work, and once your plants are brown there is nothing that will work. We're in the brown phase. The blight is transferred from plants that have the blight by producing blight spores, and since many of the store bought plants come from many of the same places, blight usually starts with them and strikes across the country. As you know from earlier blog posts, we grew our plants from seeds that we started this winter BUT we also purchased about 30 plants from area stores. That is likely where the blight came from since the other way to get blight is from leftover plant material that has blight spores on it and we planted in an area away from any previous vegetables. I can't tell you the feeling of looking at hundreds of brown plants that were beautiful green plants that we had invested so much time, effort and anticipation into. So now what?
Well we are supposed to destroy the plants that have the blight to keep it from spreading to other farms. During my research I read that it is possible to get the blight from compost containing old blight infected plant material so I guess composting is out. Since we cant compost them I guess we'll have to pull the plants, pile them up and put a torch to them.
Lessons for next year are to raise all of our own tomatoe plants, ensure that they have only the highest blight resistance, and to keep potatoes far away from the tomatoes. Commercial produce growers can and do bathe their plants in fungicide throughout the growing season and although we are commercial, I don't think our customers would like tomatoes from Mulberry Grove Family Farm that were bathed in fungicide.
Well, growing farm products without the conveniences of industrial agriculture can be more difficult and require us to be smarter, more diverse and learn from our mistakes, but we know that our customers appreciate the difference.

Silver Queen Sweet Corn

Believe it or not the sweet corn is finally ready. We have two plantings, the other should be about 2 - 3 weeks behind this one. The second planting looks even better than the first. We had to try the first batch picked last night and as Sharon said, "it tastes like the corn of our youth". There's something about silver queen sweet corn. It isn't as sweet as some of the (sh2) super sweet hybrids that are planted today, but the small fine kernels and the classic sweet corn taste we think is a perfect balance. We'll have to see if our customer's like it or if they have become more accustom to the (sh2) sweet corn. We'll pick some to sell at farmers market tomorrow and we have customer who wants to u-pick so we should be able to get some feedback right away.

Rain Day

Whew. We've been so busy that now that we're finally getting thunderstorms this morning it's actually a relief to sit still. The straw is baled up and under cover and the last of the second cutting of alfalfa is done. Learned a lot from this cutting of alfalfa. Actually I learn something new every cutting. With the alfalfa being so old, the stems are very thick and take forever to dry. Sometimes longer. If I had a mower conditioner I'd probably be able to speed he process and bring the quality up. I'm hoping that the 3rd and final cutting is high quality and fills the building. Then I can wait out the low market price... I hope. I moved all but 7 bales of straw out of the building and put a tarp over it to make room for the last cutting of alfalfa. I'm being optimistic that the alfalfa will be high enough quality to offset moving the straw out. I put the straw on pallets and put them under a tarp to keep the quality as high as possible while still being outside. We'll know later this fall or winter if it paid off.

When God Gives Rain on Oat Hay - Make Oats and Straw

We've been so busy around the farm it is rediculous. We had expected to bale oat hay on 50 acres but when the rains hit at the time that the hay needed to be cut, we missed that window of opportunity. All was not lost. Oat hay is oat plants that are cut before the oats have matured. We let the oats mature and when it was ready we checked around to see who could swath our oats and combine them. One of our neighbors Dave was able to swath and another Wendell could combine. Swathing is cutting the plant down and laying them into windrows. Combining is the picking up of the cut down plant and passing them through the combine to remove the oat from rest of the plant. Everything went pretty well. During combining my brother and I pulled some gravity wagons full of oats out to a grain elevator about 20 miles away, but at the rate we could travel we couldn't keep up with the combine. When our neighbor who was combining had to leave for vacation to Alaska, he called in one of his neighbors Tim to take over. Tim also has a tractor-trailer and could haul the oats for us. We had some loads turned away because the moisture was too high, so some of the oats had to go into a bin for drying. It took two days to swath and about 4 days to combine. There was some heavy storms during combining caused some mad dashes to get all of the gravity wagons into buildings to keep them from getting wet. These wagons aren't small. Loaded the wagons weigh around thirteen thousand pounds. Since most people don't pull large loads its hard to know what that means. Your midsized car probably only weighs around thirty-five hundred pounds. So moving these full wagons is no easy task. Anyway, once we got the oats done we were left with straw. Yes, there is a difference between hay and straw. Straw is usually used for animal bedding and hay is animal feed. When you see politicians stumping in farm country with those golden colored bales around - that's straw. Hay is usually green even in bales. The straw left behind from our oat crop is literally tons. We have been small squaring it and putting it into large round bales. My brother has been doing a lot of work on the straw small squares. Good thing he's family! I hope to get all of the straw up by Saturday.

Produce

Our produce has really been coming in strong but with the fair we've been pretty busy trying to get things picked and working around the fair. Now that the fair is over we can get back to the business at hand. String beans, squash, cucumbers and peppers are all being actively picked. I really enjoy picking the produce and Sharon enjoys pulling weeds. I'm not sure how someone can enjoy pulling weeds, but why knock something like that! She'll pull weeds for hours on end. Since we don't use herbicides Sharon has plenty of opportunity to do something she enjoys... I think we have more produce than we have figured out how to currently market. The roadside stand folks really want corn and tomatoes which are really not in season yet in NW Iowa. A few people have corn but most don't and since we only sell what comes off of the farm we won't bring it in from other states we have a limited draw of product. Maybe we'll have to change that but we'll need to try some other marketing first.

A Week At The Fair

This past week was the Dickinson County 4H and FFA Fair. If you've ever had animals at your local or state fair you know that the same feeding and care done on the farm needs to be done at the fair. That means that chores were done at home and then done at the fair morning and night. Sometimes we split the chores and one of us stayed home to do chores and farm work while everyone else went to the fair. It makes for long days especially when you're off of your routine. The fair's a very interesting event for parents, kids and spectators. You get to see kids who have done a lot of their own work with their livestock and non-livestock projects, and others whose parents live vicariously through their kids, doing everything for them short of accepting the ribbon. The last event of the fair is the livestock sale. Area businesses and individuals bid on the animals that were shown at the fair and the money above the market price goes to the kids as premium money. Some kids, like my son George, are happy to trade the chores for the cash that comes with the sale. Other kids see an animal that they have cared for since they fed it from a bottle going on the block and ultimately end up in the food supply. It's sad to see kids cry when they have to part with their steer, heifer, sheep or pig. Okay, so I didn't see anybody cry over a pig but surely someone must have been sad to part with their swine. Maybe not but you never know.

Chicken Processing

We spent 2 days this week and 2 days last week processing chickens. We processed about 275 chickens. They were beautiful healthy chickens that looked wonderful dressed. The average chicken weighed about 5 lbs dressed and were as plump and meaty as expected. The processing went very well with help from both my brother and some of the boernsen family members. Our biggest challenge was freezer space to cool the chickens after they were processed. We ended up putting chickens in every freezer space available which became a logistical challenge for Sharon. We'll work on looking for a good used freezer to fill the gap. We've been trying to keep our customers from arriving for pick-up during the processing because we assume that most of our chicken customers would not want to see their chickens go from pasture to package. But had to asked some of our farmer and close friend customers to come by and pick-up during our processing just to make room for all of the birds needing space in the freezers to cool. It's great to have customers that grew up on a farm come by and tell us how they remember when they were young and or growing up on a farm processing chickens. No fancy pluckers or scalders for them! Just good old fashioned hand work and a pot of boiling water. We hope that our chickens live up to the high expectations of people who have experienced eating a fresh chicken raised at home in farmyards of their youth and those customers that have only had store bought chickens as well. We did have a customer call us to say that she had already eaten some of our chicken and she said that she hadn't tasted a chick so good since her days on her farm! Wow! That is awesome! That really means a lot to us and we really appreciated that encouragement. For us at Mulberry Grove Family Farm I think its fresh chicken barbecued on the grill tonight. I can't wait. Now if only the sweet corn and tomatoes were ready we would have a complete summer barbecue...

Produce

I'm getting really excited about the vegetables. Every time I go out to look at the vegetable beds I see more progress. Today we have a yellow summer squash that is at least 4" long and the bush beans have beautiful pink and purple flowers. The cucumbers are covered with yellow flowers that really set off their dark green leaves. It's amazing to see the colors and plants that started as little apparently inert seeds. The honey bees that are on our farm, owned by Boernsen Bees, are doing their part in making sure that all of the vegetable flowers are pollinated. Anybody who thinks that the world has evolved through random processes has never lived on a farm and watched the amazing interaction and complexity that works together. But I digress. The biodegradable corn-based plastic down each bed just seems to really turbo charged the growing process. The weeds along the sides of the plastic could become a real nucense when the time comes to pick, and they can really only be taken care of by hand and hoe. That is a lot of hoeing and with so much going on it is tough to get out there to hoe, but it will be good exercise for our farm crew (family labor). Next year we'll put down a cover crop like a rye that can be cut to create a good layer of mulch to keep the bare ground free from weeds. The most prolific and most hated weed is the cockle-burr. We really don't want to see that weed take control. I can only imagine them on our knees when picking! The alfalfa between the beds has worked pretty well too. George cut the alfalfa between the rows that border any vine plants. The worry there is that we have melons that are running into the alfalfa and alfalfa kind of lives in its roots, so the more you cut it the more it comes back. That means that at some point we will be searching for melons and cucumbers in the alfalfa between the beds. That issue is still a ways off, so for now we'll just try to keep the alfalfa cut back as much as possible before the vines travel too far.

Chicken Processing Test Run

We had a test run of our chicken processing process yesterday. We had a goal of determining how many chickens we think we can process in X amount of time and also to practice our processing skills. We needed to determine the amount of time it takes to process our chickens so that we can set a schedule for on-farm customer pick-ups of their fresh chickens. We found that while our skill at turning a whole chicken into a cut-up chicken became fairly efficient, the longest part of our processing was the process of what I'll call "cleaning" the bird. I use the word cleaning so as not to give a less than appealing image to a wonderfully healthy and nutritious, naturally pasture raised chicken. With our family working together we should be able to process at least 50 chickens in a day with Sharon, me and the kids working each step of the process. Our process, while not as efficient as others we have seen, will ensure a superior product in meat quality as well as appearance. Our worry is that hay will be ready to be baled at about the same time that we need to processes the chickens. We're excited about getting these wonderful birds to our customers. We think that they will be very pleased with them.

Lost Hay

Yesterday we spent some time wiring my brother's tractor to run my round baler. We ran the power to the wrong side of the tractor and found that we weren't getting enough voltage, so we re-ran the wires and finally got enough power to run the computer monitor for the baler. Then we got out to his "hay". He has about 11 acres of alfalfa and he had cut his hay just before the rain started which was about 2 weeks before I cut over on my place. It rained so much that his hay eventually was no good to even bale. It wouldn't dry down and it eventually molded. He also had an enormous amount of corn stover. So we baled the "hay" to get it off of the field and let the alfalfa grow again. We spent some time testing the baler's functions at the same time since the bales were not going for sale or feed. Now Tim and my son George are experts on running the baler. I also know what I need to talk to the John Deere dealer about in regard to my baler.

Whew! First Cutting Alfalfa In The Books

As you can see from the posts, the alfalfa has been cut for what seemed like an eternity. It rained off and on and kept me going to the field thinking today is the day that I'll finally be able to get the hay up, only to have it rain or get too humid to dry it down enough to bale. I talked to a neighbor yesterday. He and his father came buy to talk about our oat hay. Anyway we both thought that we were going to bale on Tuesday at about 2PM. But at 12 noon it rained. Guess everyone in our area had the same problems. It feels good to have it finally up and out of the way. I think we got about 32 tons off of the field. Since this hay was rained on I'll use this hay to feed to my cows over the winter. It's not that I couldn't sell it, it came off the field nice and dry and the leaves stayed on it really well, but I'd rather use the hay for myself and only sell the best hay. We did figure out that you can only put 11 round bales on my trailer without straps. I rounded the corner of the field onto the gravel road and half of the trailer load went into the ditch. We only have to pull round bales out of the ditch once to know that I don't want to have to do that again.

Still Trying To Do Hay

We were able to get some grass hay up this weekend. We had cousins visiting - one from Maryland and one from Colorado. They arrived on Saturday afternoon and once they had unloaded their luggage at my brothers they came down to the hayfield we were working. They missed doing square bales, but I did get them in the tractor to try rolling a round bale. It is a lot of fun to get someone behind the wheel of a tractor for the first time and to run a round baler down the field. We windrow our hay narrow enough that we have to switch back and forth across the windrow to make an even bale. If you have never run a tractor, or you haven't run one in years, it can be a challenge to coordinate all of the activities required to make a nice bale. They made some very nice bales and we didn't run anything over we didn't want to, so it was a success.
My son Tom who is 10 and I raked alfalfa hay this morning. This morning was one of those mornings that had heavy dew on the ground, blue sky above and made the hay smell so sweet. It was a joy to share that opportunity with my son. He did a great job too. Now if it will only dry I can get it off the field and can get on to other jobs like cutting the oats and working on the well.

Back in Business

After breaking the front end of the tractor, what should have been a simple fix turned into a multi-day extended repair. The part that broke - a tie rod - comes in 3 parts. There is an inner ball joint, an outer ball joint and the rod that "ties" it all together. Since I only popped the outer ball joint I ordered an outer and it arrived the next day. When I went to get the old outer out, it wouldn't budge. Even after heating and using the biggest wrenches I have available. So I ordered the inner. Unfortunately I assumed that the inner would also come with the rod. My mistake. When the inner came the next day with only the inner I decided to try again to get the ball joints loose from the rod. After several hours of frustrating pounding, heating, and multiple vise acrobatics I had to give up and order the other part. That arrived the next day and I was able to get the part back on and have the tractor running in about 10 minutes. Of course I ended up paying for shipping 3 times. It was a knuckle head tax! Once the tractor was back running I turned the alfalfa hay over yesterday evening to get it to dry down some more. It was a beautiful evening. You may be able to see the rainbow in the background of the picture.
Today is supposed to be sunny so the hay should dry down quite a bit. Won't be dry enough to bale but it will dry enough that I may be able to bale tomorrow afternoon if it doesn't rain.

Today I'll be baling grass hay on a place northwest of here. I've been hauling rake, hay rack, baler and tractor this morning. We'll rake shortly and it should be ready to bale this afternoon.

Hay and Chores

This week has started a heavy hay week. We have 3 fields down across the county. One field of alfalfa at my brothers at the far north end of the county, another about midway up the county of grass, and a 28 acre field of alfalfa here. Of course the rain has started again so it looks like we won't get the hay up until the end of the week. I started cutting yesterday and got a couple of passes around the field when a tie rod end popped off of my tractor. The tie rod hooks the steering to the wheels. I couldn't quite understand why I was sliding so much til I looked down and saw one wheel steering left and the other right. I called my brother Tim and asked him if he wanted to cut some hay. I went up with my truck and a trailer and picked up his tractor. Tim finished cutting the hay well after dark. It had to come down, rain or no rain. The alfalfa was pretty close to full bloom so it was time. Next we will be cutting oat hay. We have about 50 acres of oats that are a nurse crop to the alfalfa. The nurse crop is crowding out the weeds allowing the alfalfa to grow to a size that will then keep the weeds crowded out on its own. One exciting event this morning during chores was notable. We were moving the cows across the pasture as part of our rotational grazing and one of the steers that is in their own part of the pasture decided it wanted to be in the company of the cows bad enough that it jumped the string fence. It wasn't able to jump the next string that would have allowed it in with the cows, but since we've never had any of our cattle jump the string fence it was notable. We ended up moving the steers and bull back into the paddock and we'll start the process of feeding the steers toward finishing them. The bull will be along for the ride with the steers until he's ready to go back out into the pasture with the cows later in the summer.

Calving - Avert Your Eyes If You're Squeamish!

The cows are really dropping calves now! We have really been blessed with a great calving season. We have all heifers except for one bull calf. Heifers mean we are growing our herd for the long term rather than getting bull calves that would be for short term sale. We got to watch 2 cows have calves at practically the same time. It is amazing but may not be something for the squeamish to see.

Things Break But The Farm Work Still Moves On

Like any other business things break. When they break on the farm most of the time it is up to us to fix them. Things have been extremely busy, and when things break it just adds to the excitement and pace. This past week we had a leak the main well line that we use to water our animals and our vegetables. For a while we just couldn't figure out what was going on with our well. We finally broke down and decided to call the well man. While talking to him on the phone we found the leak. The water line that is down about six feet had rubbed on the well liner and caused a leak that constantly ran the well and kept the well low enough that any major water use dropped the well water below the well pickup that caused the well to run out of water. While this was on going hay needed to be baled and chicken pens needed to be built. As the hay was being baled I had barely made a bale when the drive chain on the tractor that connects the engine to the transmission broke. So as a classic multitasking challenge I rented a backhoe and dug the water line up while waiting for the hay to dry. Then when the hay was dry enough and started to bale the chain broke on the tractor and that had to be fixed so we had to get some parts that could fix the chain. The chain repair was a study in persistence and frustration. Getting a simple pin into a chain seems so simple, until the chain is in the middle of the tractor, under the cab and requiring exact alignment and placement, covered in grease, with almost no space. I ended up using a bench grinder to make things fit. It is kind of like using a sledge hammer to make thing fit. Sometimes it's requirement but you only use it as a last resort. In the end the tractor was fixed and I was able to scrub all of the grease off of me, the water line was patched, the hay was baled, and we're still building pens.

Efficiencies

Our farm is made up of many different farm products. We grow hay, vegetables, chickens, eggs, cattle both meat and cow calf with the overall objective of having their life cycles work together. Because we have so many operations going on at one time we are constantly busy moving or preparing to move one or more of the products to the next stage of its life cycle. Like an assembly line or any other mode of production, the more you specialize on a single product or just a few similar products you can scale to larger efficiencies and limit your resources and processes to those specifically designed for your given product or products. This in general is the corn and bean farmer. There are specific tasks that need to be done, and one person using ever larger and technically specialized equipment can produce many times the amount that once took many people to produce. Well that's not us! We want our product's life cycles to efficiently interact in a symbiotic relationship to the benefit of the animal and plant products. Right now we run from one activity to the next moving chickens, making pens or harvesting hay. It makes for long days and requires jumping from one task to the next leaving things half done so that you can complete another before "it's too late". There was a small window of time to get some hay cut and baled and at the same time chicks were ready to be moved to the pasture which meant building chicken huts. They both needed to be worked at the same time so it made for long days and lots of jumping between tasks, with the normal chores needing to be done in the process. Today it's raining so we can concentrate on our planning and recuperate from the long, long work days.

First Cutting Alfalfa Pre-Bloom

On Monday the forecast was calling for rain so it looked like the alfalfa hay would have yet another week to grow but later in the day on Monday the forecast changed to two days of sun this week and cloudy until Friday when there was a chance of thunder storms. So I changed my plans and decided to cut half of my alfalfa. Here in our part of Iowa we can get at least 3 cuttings of alfalfa hay. Alfalfa is generally baled based on the bloom or flowers that you can see. Pre-bloom would be no flowers and then as the flowers appear you would go by percentage of bloom to estimate the time for harvest based on what you are trying to get from the alfalfa for nutrition vs fiber. The longer into bloom that you wait to harvest the less "nutrition" and the more fiber that is in the hay. So pre-bloom is genrally higher value but a lower yield, and into bloom and post bloom has more yield because the plant grows more stem and plant material but this offsets the nutrition in the leaves to do it. So dairy farmers like high nutrition and low fiber. Beef people like higher fiber and less nutrion. One would think that beef people would like the high nutrion, but it actually is too much for a beef can and can actually make them sick. When growing and harvesting the hay you have to harvest basted on your customers too. If you are selling to beef people you can harvest well into bloom because you get more yield and beef folks don't want all the nutrition anyway, but a dairyman will be very upset if his milk production goes down from feeding your hay. Milk is a direct result of the nutrition in the hay.

The first cutting of alfalfa usually has a larger stem and can be what is called stemmy, where there is a significant amount of stems to leaves. All of the nutrition is in the leaves so first cutting alfalfa is often considered of lower value. Since the alfalfa that I am cutting right now is a stand that has been around for quite a few years, it is already stemmy. To offset the stemmy nature of older alfalfa and of the first cutting I cut half of the hay pre-bloom. This should make the hay good for beef and horses, but not so stemmy that it gets woody. If you look at a bale that is first cutting post bloom you will have no doubt what the term woody means. It looks like you could use the hay to weave baskets.

So on Tuesday morning I cut the hay, yesterday morning I tedded (flipped it over and fluffed it up) and yesterday evening I raked it into windrows. So far so good. I'll check it for moisture once the coffee is done this morning. If the hay is 18 - 16% I'll bale. If it is higher then I'll wait for the moisture to drop. If it is less than 16% I'll wait until this evening for the dew to bring moisture back into the leaves to prevent them from shattering when I pick they hay up with the baler.

Chickens are Coming Along

It's Sharon today--who knew I would fuss so much over a bunch of chickens? Our broilers are in the brooder area in the barn. They are 2 weeks old now and are about ready to go out to the pasture. Chris and George have started building their pasture pens so they should be moving in a couple days. We had one looking a little lazy last night so I moved him to the hospital pen and am feeding him raw milk in the hopes that he is just in need of a little boost of nutrition. I watched him this morning after I put the milk in front of him. He drank quite a bit of it and then stood right up. It was like Popeye eating spinach! I hope he continues to improve. We are having problems with the well this week too--keeps running dry. That is a serious problem with all these animals as summer gets started. Calling Milford Well Service this morning and hoping for a simple fix.

Tagging Calves

We try to get the calves tagged as soon as they are on the ground, or close to it, but we've been so busy with all of the other farm activities that we missed a couple of the calves. One calf is from a heifer (now a cow) called "No Tag" because we never got an ear tag in her when she was born and we missed her when we put them through the corral last year. Why didn't we tag her when she went through the corral this year? Yeah, we thought of that too after we had them all through the corral. So this bull calf from No Tag didn't get tagged or banded to make it a steer, and another bull calf from my brother's heifer (now a cow that we call "Short Ears" because her ears have been cut back) wasn't tagged either. When we went out to look at the cows last night we saw that the bull calf from short ears was missing. We searched the usual places and still no calf. We then started checking the outside perimeter of the pasture and sure enough we found this bull calf laying outside of the fence. We gathered the bander and the ear tag and tried to sneak up on him. It was a snap. He never even tried to run. Once tagged and banded we led him back to his mother. Sharon suggested I use my belt as a halter and that was much better than holding onto this calf and letting it run with me clinging on.
This morning we saw that the last bull calf was missing along with the heifer calf that had already been tagged. We tried to sneak down and grab the untagged calf and I brought my lariat. That calf is fast and agile. He ran like the wind to the far east of the pasture. Then when we went all the way around to the east of the pasture he ran like a flash back to the west. This bull calf even made George look slow and sluggish. So this bull calf is still untagged and unbanded. Guess we'll try him another day and definitely in another way.

Vegetables Are In

It was a busy week. We pushed hard to get all of the vegetables in through the black plastic mulch. We spent a few days getting it done, but we're very satisfied to see them all in. We tried out the drip line to water the plants and found out that we didn't put the ends of the drip tape on correctly. It shot the ends off of the tape lines and we drained the well. We planted a second crop of sweet corn and bush beans too this week. We had one more calf. The calf is actually from a heifer that belongs to my brother that we run her with our herd. His heifer had a nice bull calf. Hay should be cut this coming week, there are chicken huts to be built, and I'll be moving the cows into the interior pasture to begin their rotational grazing, so this week should be as busy as the last.

Another Calf

We were so busy yesterday that we didn't check the cows most of the day. Sharon called up to the house in the evening to say that there was a new calf from #50 which was one of our newer heifers. She must have had the calf sometime during the day because the calf was dry. The new calf is a bull calf. I tried to band and tag the calf last night but the calf was up and running before I could get to him. I'll try to catch him sometime today when he's sleeping.

Vegetables

The tomatoes have started going into the beds. Looks like we have a few more Roma tomatoes that I expected to survive. I think we must have about 120 Roma's. I tried putting all of the tomatoes that require cages at the farthest southwest to try to protect them from the wind. We used a torch to put the holes in the plastic mulch that the plants will go into and George burned a hole in the drip tape. When we turned the water on we had a large leak. Luckily I have a few splices that I could make a repair with. Over the next couple of days we should have all of the vegetables that will go into the beds planted, then it will be on to another planting of sweet corn and beans.

Biodegradable Plastic Mulch

We put plastic mulch on our vegetable beds today. The plastic mulch we used is made of corn and is biodegradable. When we say mulch most people think of ground up plastic or something like pine mulch, however what we mean is that we put down a strip of plastic. It is like a giant roll of cellophane that is black and four feet wide. This black plastic is used to keep weeds from growing around the plants while they are small so that we don't have to use herbicides. The plastic also encourages the plants to grow because of the heat that is trapped under the plastic. We ran drip tape underneath the mulch to water the plants. The drip tape is attached to the same water line that waters our cattle and chickens out in the pasture. The drip tape has holes every 8" that let water out. Since the tape is under the plastic it has very little evaporation and uses very little water. We'll use the drip line only when the plants get very dry.

First Calf of 2009

Our first calf of 2009 arrived! We had my mother visiting from South Carolina, and my brother Tim's family from the northern part of Dickinson County down for a cookout. My brother and I decided to check on the cows after we ate and it was perfect timing. We counted the cows and were missing one. Tim spotted the heifer (now a cow) in one of the pasture valleys and sure enough, it had just dropped a calf. I called up to the house and everyone came down to see the new calf and bring the ear tags, the bander and other supplies. We ended up ear tagging but didn't need the bander - it was a heifer. So the first calf arrived unassisted. We checked on them this morning. We sat and enjoyed watching the calf and the cow. The calf is still on wobbly legs and the cow and calf hadn't moved much from last night. The calf kept wanting to go into high grass which at this point is outside of the electric fence. It was an early lesson on electric fences for the calf. We'll keep an eye on this new heifer, now know as 389 by her ear tag, to make sure she doesn't find her way outside of the fence. We have a lot of coyotes here and wouldn't want her getting on the other side of the fence where the cow couldn't defend her.

Separate the Boys from the Girls

We separated the cows (a female that has had a calf) and heifers (a female that hasn't had a calf) from the bull (a male that is "still in tact") and the steers (a male that has been fixed). We treated them all for mites and worms in the process. We lured them into a temporary corral with alfalfa and then had to lure, push, pull and manhandle them through and into the chute. It was a family effort. Lots of hard work but good to have it out of the way before the females start calving. You can't be shy about grabbing a cow by the tail and moving them where you want them to go, but its a balance between staying out of the way of a 1500lb animal and getting them to move to someplace that they would rather not go. Glad its done for the year.

Yes Its Raining Again

We got a few days of sun, but it's raining again. We pushed pretty hard to get our beds in and prepared. The alfalfa that we cut out of our field to make room for the beds was rained on so we went ahead and baled it into small squares without it really being dry. The average bale moisture is 45%. It should be under 19% but we needed to get it up and out of the field so I'm using it to entice the cows to go into the corral. They love the wet green alfalfa and they charge into the corral to get it. Each bale weighs around 100lbs or more so we were happy to get out of the field with working backs. George my 14 yr old ran the tractor while my brother and I dragged the bales off of the baler and onto the rack (wagon).

Progress

Even though the weather has been very wet and seems to keep holding us back from "our" schedule, things are looking good. The oats and alfalfa are looking pretty good and I checked the asparagus this morning and found a few sprigs sticking up here and there and the sun is out. I have been checking one of our heifers several times a day because she is getting close. Her udder is filling out and other changes are showing that the time is near. I'm not too good at determining how close so it could be a couple of weeks away, but we should have a new one soon.

Make Hay

You've heard it said that you need to make hay while the sun is shining? Well making hay takes longer than 1 day, and weathermen are only able to tell you what the weather is at that moment even though they claim otherwise. I cut hay on Saturday to clear the ground where the produce beds will be so that we can prep the beds. The weather forecast called for dry sunny weather for 5 days. Once I cut the hay the weather forecast was changed to sprinkles the next day. The next day, which is today, we had rain for about 3 hours. Letting hay get rained on is a big problem. Yield loss increases significantly when alfalfa gets rained on after it's cut. We'll see what the next few days holds for weather. Have to hope for dry windy weather to speed up the drying and get the hay up and out of the field.