Vegetables are In!

Okay, so not all of the vegetables are in. We still have seeds to plant in the last row, but all of the started plants are in and look great. The water has been run for a couple of hours a day on them and we're eagerly anticipating their maturity.

Shooting the Bull

We've had our bull for a few years and for the first year he was really good. He hung back with the cows and kept to himself. But last year he started to get more used to his size and abilities and wasn't eager to be "handled" or walked anywhere and let me know by facing me when I wanted him to move anywhere. This spring he has given us some trouble. First he knocked down a panel fence and went out into the alfalfa for a while. I used the bobcat/skidloader to pressure him into the pasture and he challenged the skidloader the entire way. Not good if you figure that he challenged a loud steel object that is bigger than he is. Then the incident that sealed his fate occurred two nights ago. Sharon was going out in the pickup to do chicken chores in the outside part of the pasture and when I opened the gate to let Sharon drive through the bull charged the pickup and flew into a wild bucking fit. When she finished her chores and came back the bull was waiting and with head down he was mock charging the pickup. Sharon turned around and went across the pasture to a place where she could get out and climb over the fence, but the bull followed running, kicking, and mock charging the truck the whole way. It was pretty dark so Sharon couldn't see him but when she stopped and saw the bull had followed and was going at the pickup she was agitated. She finally sped across the pasture and back to the gate and I let her out of the pasture. After posting on a cattle forum that I belong to, everyone agrees that he needs to go, so I got him into the corral last night and that's where he'll live until he gets sent down the road which I hope to have done this week. I have to admit that he was very close to getting put down on the spot when he was giving Sharon such trouble. After, we were discussing the issue and Sharon said I wonder where the term "shooting the bull" comes from. I said that it definitively doesn't have anything to do with our situation...

The weather man and the weather still haven't lined up. I ran about 7 bales through the baler yesterday afternoon and it was so dry that the bales are dust. I quit baling and started baling again around 9:30PM once the humidity came up enough to bale. I could see lightning off to the west around midnight and finally at 2AM it started to rain. Just enough to wet the hay and stop me from finishing, but not enough to do anything any good. I'm about to run out and finish the baling before the humidity drops again. Oh yeah, I did find out that the new lights I put on the tractor this spring are enough to blow the fuse in the tractor. The fuse and holder were so hot I couldn't even hold them in my hand. I ended up running with my road lights on most of the time unless I was looking for rows. Luckily there was a moon for most of the night or it would have been even harder to avoid coming up on an unseen bale in the field. I'd better get running on the hay.

Another busy day lined up today. It's supposed to rain tonight (50% chance 40% tomorrow) and the alfalfa hay I cut several days ago is almost ready to bale. The humidity is super high this morning @ 90% so the hay will be too wet to bale until that drops late this afternoon. Then when it does dry down today it will be in the middle of the day and may be too dry, the leaves can shatter when being baled, but that is the management challenge of alfalfa hay. With the chance of rain tonight and tomorrow I can put some fertilizer on the pasture. Dry fertilizer that is left on the ground will actually turn to a gas over time unless it gets rain to convert it to nitrogen in the ground that the plants can use, so timing the rain is important to maximize the investment. I should have done it early in the spring, but things just didn't seem to work out, it's one more thing on my list of things to do. I also am taking one last load of straw to the sale barn this morning, but first I have go to down and pickup the rack that had straw on it the last time I tried to pickup the rack. I'd rather be busy than bored...

First Calf of 2010

We had our first calf of the year a couple of days ago. We were going down to plant the back 9 on Friday and noticed that #65, one of our older cows, was bagging. I called up to the house on the radio and announced that #65 was bagging, so everyone went down to watch. Bagging, which I meant is the water bag, not the udder bagging up with milk, indicates that the calf is about to be born any time and is minutes away. Geo and I continued down to plant while everyone else watched the calf get born. Everything was normal and went well. Sara checked and it is a pretty little bull calf. A couple of hours after it was born I found the calf outside of the string fence in the tall grass and took the time to check it over, ear tag it, and castrate band him. It took just a couple of minutes and while the mama cow wasn't pleased that I was messing with her new born, she didn't bust through the string to keep me away either. Next due is #64 from the looks of things. Time will tell.

Calculating Seeding Rate - Real World Farm Math 101

Our kids are home schooled, so when I came across a great math problem I decided to include the two older kids in the process. It started by reading the implement manual for the JD grain drill. As I was working my way through the manual I decided I needed to calculate the exact amount of seed being dropped by my brother's drill. My brother had said that he dropped twice the amount of seed that he had intended when he used the drill based on what the manual said, so I wanted to make sure that I didn't run out of seed or waste any seed. Each crop has a recommended planting rate based on pounds per acre, and to get the drill to drop the right amount of seed, adjustments have to be made so that the drill meters out the correct amount. The manual has recommended settings based on tire size and turns/revolutions per acre but they also recommend measuring the amount of seed dropped. To measure the seed we jacked up one side of the drill so that the wheel could be manually turned to drop seed from several seed drops with a fixed number of wheel turns. Then we used our digital scale to measure the amount. The original math we used is
10 turns from 3 drops=0.19500lbs
1 drop 10 turns=0.06500lbs
1 drop 1 turn=0.00650lbs
17 drops 1 turn=0.11050lbs
1 acre is 615 turns=67.95750lbs
This is 67.95 pounds to the acre.
But then I noticed that the tire size in the manual is not the same as the tire size on the drill so our information is WRONG!!!
Next we went back to the drawing board and decided to calculate area covered and seed dropped with tire size being a variable. Since all of our calculations were based on 10 turns/revolutions of the wheel, that was our starting point. 10 revolutions of the wheel moves the drill about 73.5 feet. The drill is 9'4" wide so doing length times width we were able to determine that in 10 revolutions of the wheel we covered .016 acres. Then multiplying by 62.5 to get to a full acre we could calculate the amount of seed dropped in an acre from the weight measurements that we made originally and yes, if we had used the original measurements with the wrong tire size we would have dropped a lot more seed than we should have. Also, doing the math also makes me think that planting with a 9'4" drill is going to take forever!

Everyday is a great day to farm but yesterday was an absolutely beautiful day to farm. Cool, sunny and a nice breeze. I finished cutting hay by noon, had lunch, then dropped the hay mower and hooked up the packer-mulcher. The packer-mulcher is made up of 3 tillage tools. It has a clod buster on the front, spring tooth in the middle, and cultipacker in the back. After disking the back 9ac I ran the packer-mulcher over the field to smooth it and get it ready for drilling seed. It looked really nice when I was done but I also noticed at the end that I had a front tire going down just as I was wrapping up. Something is down in the field that slashed the tire, so I ran the tractor up to the yard and spent the late afternoon running to town to get a new tire mounted. Today I'll try planting with my brother's drill. Something new to learn. Hopefully it's not an expensive lesson.

1st Cutting

Yesterday I finished disking the back 9ac so today I cut hay. I cut about 30ac which took me most of the day to finish. I waited until the dew burned off which was about 10AM and cut until almost 5PM. Tomorrow I have another 20ac to cut. Cutting hay makes for a long day but for me it's one of the most enjoyable things. I can't describe how enjoyable it is so I'll just say that my very best day doing tech work never came close to a day cutting hay.

Like a starter pistol going off, this week is really going to be a busy farm week. The weather is dry and the fields are just about dry enough to get back into them. I have hay to make and summer grazing to plant. I'll disk where I'm planting the cover crop/summer grazing on the back 9ac this morning and if I have time I'll cut my alfalfa hay but it probably won't get cut until tomorrow. One of the cover crop/summer grazing areas is also one of the alfalfa fields to be cut so I'll have to wait to plant that until the hay is baled. When I moved the cows this morning it is hard to imagine that some of the cows can get any bigger or their udder's get any fuller. They look like they could calve any minute but nothing yet. I think we'll try to move the calving forward a little for next year if we can now that we've got the cows calving at random times.

Farm Excitement - Bull!

The boys and I came home from town this afternoon and noticed a large black object in the alfalfa field. That's unusual! George said "It's the bull!" I said that I didn't think so but grabbing the binoculars out of the farm truck which proved George right... again. My first thought was I have a bull laying down in a field of alfalfa and that isn't a good sign. Bloat is a real concern with ruminants eating green legumes. Green legumes build acid in ruminant stomachs that produce gas bubbles which cattle can't pass. As the legumes continue to produce gas bubbles their stomach eventually crowds out everything inside of their abdomen and they go down for the count and eventually death. While we were formulating a plan the bull got up and started walking toward the paddock where he had escaped. That was a good sign and so a plan hatched to use the bobcat skid-loader to persuade the bull to go though one of the gates into the pasture or back into the paddock. After trying to show he was boss which didn't really work against the skid-loader, the bull eventually ended up going through the main gate into the pasture. Tomorrow I'll get some step-in posts and run electric along the cattle panel that he's figured out he can overpower and then push him back into the paddock with the steers. Hopefully that process goes without a hitch. I don't need that type of excitement.

The rain is back this week and has put planting on hold. The weather has made it tough to get our field work done which turned out to be a good thing since we didn't get our vegetables in because we had a freeze warning and frost this past weekend. On Sunday I noticed that cow #64 had "stuff" hanging from her indicating that she probably dropped her mucus plug. Gross sounding? Well, it looks kinda gross too but that's the process a cow goes through before giving birth. Since the plug can be dropped long before the actual birth, I figure that she'll give birth sometime over the next couple of weeks. Things should start getting pretty exciting around here as soon as the weather clears up and the fields dry. I'll have to complete my field work so that I can plant my cover crop/summer forage and put the vegetables in right away. I also have to take a cutting of hay off of the fields that are going into beans in time to allow the hay to dry before the beans can go in. Lots to do... once the sun shines for a while.

Why does a cow go under a fence? Because the grass is greener on the other side, and when you're doing rotational grazing the grass is always greener on the other side. So just at sunset last night George happened to notice a cow outside of the grazing paddock. The other observation we've come to believe in is that animals never seem to get out when the weather is warm and sunny. Last night was cold and rainy. So when Geo made his announcement everybody bundled up to go out and pile into our pickups to help the cow back in. Cows have what are called flight zones that surround their bodies. Flight zones are areas that when invaded by what they perceive as a predator cause them to move away from the predator. As a prey animal they have the instinct to run rather than fight so moving cattle generally entails understanding the cows flight zones and working with them. A cow that's scared has really big flight zones and can be unpredictable and is just the opposite of a contented cow. A cow that is away from its herd, outside of a fence, and approached by a human is generally a scared cow. That meant that slow and steady with wide turns going in and out of the flight zones was required. After a little bit of running on the cows part she was slowly guided back into the portable electric fence area. Geo, Tom and Dan stood as a human wall to keep her from going West away from the fence opening and all was good again once she was in. Then we wrapped everything up by moving all of the cows into their next paddock to join the wayward cow. Just when we finished it started to rain and with a 30mph wind and temps in the 40's we were happy to be in too.

Burn

Today we burned off a field that has been fallow for several years.  It was a corn field that we let grow weeds and grasses for wildlife.  This year our plan is to plant a complex mix of cover crops to build the soil and feed our cattle over the slow pasture growth period during the summer.  The cover crops will also give wildlife and bugs food and shelter, at the same time it amends and feeds the soil.  There was so much plant matter on top of the soil that was oxidizing rather than decomposing we decided to plow it down.  When that didn't work because the plant matter bound the plow up it was decided to burn the field off.  It went very well.

High Tunnel

We received our high tunnel yesterday.  They delivered mine and a couple of others for farms in the county here yesterday so I delivered the others to two other farms yesterday as well.  The pallets that the high tunnels came on where way too small for the load but I managed to get them off of the semi, on to my trailer, and out to the farms with only one box opening up.  And the box that opened was mine, so it wasn't too bad.  I did have the bobcat/skidloader breakdown while I was in the process of unloading one of the high tunnels - Conked out just as I was trying to pull a pallet off of the trailer out at Dennis' farm.  I thought I would have to crawl out of a window on the skidloader because the arms were blocking the door but was able to get it running enough to get out.  After a run to the parts store for a new filter I was back "off schedule" as Dennis said and wrapped up the deliveries.  I don't think we'll get started building our high tunnel until later in the summer because of the time constraints but this will be a great learning opportunity and will share our progress with everyone through our blog and website.