Cover Crop

We uploaded a new YouTube video showing our 10ac cover crop test plot.  It was an interesting experiment.  While we were recording the video the mosquitoes were unbelievable, so you'll have to excuse the cameraman (George) for the camera movement as he swatted the mosquitoes away and some of my head movements trying to avoid having all of my blood drained.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S9RFWjQ1F0

GRP

The NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) was out to our place the end of last week.  We participate in the Grass Land Reserve Program (GRP) which is a conservation program designed to keep grasslands, grasslands for all of the wildlife and environmental reasons that converting to cropland disturbs.  As part of the program they come out every year or so to document and observe our operation and to make sure that we are still in compliance and also to give advice.  I've mentioned before one particularly harmful piece of advice that I was given by their grazing specialist who is no longer with NRCS.  That advice still continues to impact our operation and has allowed us the opportunity to try different grazing techniques in an attempt to heal the setback that the advice caused.  Anyway, they have a new GRP manager (I think that is what he is) and the local NRCS office wanted to bring him by.  They came out and also had a Pheasants Forever representative with them.  We did a quick pasture walk and discussed our current operation, past operation, and future direction, with the takeaway that they wanted to see what the pasture looked like next year after this years MIG/mob grazing/Holistic Management grazing results can be seen to see if we might want additional grazing advice.  I am excited to see how this years grazing leads into next spring, advice not withstanding...

Wet Bales

I can say that I've never put up any bales that were wet... until now!  There were several bales that I was watching because I was worried that they baled wet.  They baled with high moisture but I didn't think they were that wet, but I can say "yes they were too wet!"  I'm going to pull the offending bales out of the hoop building.  Man they smell!  Lesson learned, and hard lesson at that.  The last cutting is on pallets so I have to pull the bales, and the pallets stack everything outside, then put the pallets back down and the hay back on the pallets.  This is going to take a while...

We lost a calf yesterday.  It was very quick.  The calf was down the day before yesterday, and one of our neighbor/customers stopped by and talked with Sharon who must have pointed out the calf.  Sharon called me up from the back of the farm and when I came up the neighbor said that he thought it was pneumonia based on how the calf was standing with his legs way back.  He also pointed out that the calf was hanging out around a mud puddle to cool down from his fever.  That's the difference between lots of experience with sick cattle and not.  We knew something was wrong, we just didn't quite know what.  I tried to treat him with antibiotics but calf went down so fast.  I did quite a bit of research on cattle respiratory infection and posted on-line for additional info, but it was more for the next time I have the issue rather than this particular case.  Cattle resp. infections seem to be prevalent in calves that are in feedlots or confinement type operations such as dairies, but it's also a known problem on open pasture as well.  There are many recommendations for prevention through confinement management and use of vaccines but since we don't really confine our cattle or pre-treat our calves I guess it really comes down to watching for problems more diligently and treating them at the first sign of being sick.  So if you've ever wondered why non-treated, "all natural" farm products are more expensive?  Here's an example.  Loss is higher and management is higher.  How much easier would it have been to have treated the calves when they were born with an 8-way vaccine that covers many issues...

Hay Stocks

With this years hay put up its nice to see that we have a great stock of hay on hand going into winter.  The haying went well and I put up some very nice hay.  May be a little on the high moisture side, but as of today it looks great.  Since the hay is up we've been working on getting the fence replaced down in the back 9ac of the farm so that I can move the cows down there to finish out the year.  Its been both a pleasure and a chore.  With the kids back to school, I've had to do much of the work myself until late in the afternoon when their finally free to help.  I've been able to listen and look at the changing season which has been very nice.  It allows me to make some observations and I've noticed a couple of really interesting things.  One is that when I look out across the fields I've noticed that our farm has a great number of birds flying over it compared to my neighbors farms.  I assume that's because we have a greater number of bugs that are living on our diverse landscape.  I've also observed that this years weed population is significantly higher than past years.  Thistle has been an especially difficult plant to get out of the pasture, but with the amount of clover and other forbs in the pasture I don't want to do anything radical that might knock back the diversity.  I'm hoping that by continuing to increase diversity we'll eventually get the thistle marginalized.

Last Cutting of 2010

I cut raked and started to bale my last cutting of hay for the year.  The weather has been a little cool, but I think that this cutting will be my best of the year.  The wind yesterday was both a blessing and a hassle.  It helped to dry the hay down pretty quickly, but it also blew any north-south windrows around and made a mess of the field.  Because they're calling for a 30% chance of rain tonight I didn't let hay scattered on the field slow me down.  I just baled what I could when I would get to windrows that were too spread out to pickup and kept going.  I baled last night starting at around 8PM when the relative humidity(RH) got to about 70%.  The humidity was sucked up by the leaves and kept them from shattering while I baled.  I baled about a third of the field by midnight when the RH was too high and brought the bale moisture up too far.  There's always a nagging fear that when I bale into the night I can bale too long and pickup too much moisture in the bales.  That can lead to bales heating and actually starting a fire.  It would be nice to have an on-the-fly bale moisture tester on my baler, but with my luck it'd be one more thing that would break down during baling and with the small windows of opportunity that I've had for good baling days this year I don't need another thing from keeping me from striking while the iron's hot.  I'm waiting for the RH to go down this morning so that I can get back too it before it's too dry and I have to stop again.  The window of opportunity will close quickly once the sun shines on the field for long.