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.