Pheasant

We saw our first flock of pheasant chicks today.  I was cutting along the edge of the lane and saw a few chicks jump.  They were about the size of quail.  I called to George via tractor sound code and he came down the lane to see what I needed.  We then walked into the grass and WHOOSH they all jumped!  I counted at least 10 not including the hen.  Our family gets such a rush seeing the wildlife on the farm.

Rain

I know, farmers complain when it rains and then they complain when it's dry, but that's just because there are so many things that need to happen at one time any extreme causes a problem in our "schedule".  Right now the rain is killing me.  I've got 50 acres of alfalfa that's bursting into bloom.  Even if it is a beautiful sea of purple and white, it's not quite what I had hoped for when I decided to let it grow a little longer a couple of weeks back.  The honey bees that are on the farm I'm sure are making a bumper crop of honey, but as the bloom goes on, the protein in the hay goes down.  I'm determined to cut the hay this week, maybe even tomorrow.  The beans have started coming up thanks to the rain and since I have to go the the USDA/FSA office on Monday to report the number of bean acres, I used the "down time" to GPS the acres.  Seems like it should be more but it looks like I only have 36.5 acres of beans. 

Early Vegetables

We were out putting in our last seeds yesterday and I noticed that we have 3" squash on the yellow squash plants.   The squash were started inside around the same time as the tomatoes so they had a great head start and if all goes well, we'll remember to start them early the next time too.

Bull - Down the Road

George and I loaded the bull Sunday evening.  He went into the trailer like he was ready to go for a ride!  When we dropped him off at the sale barn he unloaded just as easily as he loaded.  To bad he wasn't as good in the pasture as he was going into and coming out of the trailer.  He'll be sold today at the sale barn at noon.

Bobwhite

We've been building a couple of predator proof pens for the broiler chickens for the past few days.  Everything has gone well with the building and we've gotten much quicker at building them.  While we were moving cows today we thought we heard a bobwhite quail.  Bobwhite quail are not really a bird found this far northwest in IA.  I didn't think much about it until we were building pens in the late morning and the bobwhite started calling from right outside of the hoop building where we were making the pens.  I had the kids run to the house and get the video camera and the still camera so that we could capture the evidence that we have a bobwhite on the farm.  We never got the quail to fly so no physical proof, but we know that we heard it calling.  Honest!

Conservation - beneficials

We monitor the health of our farm by observing "beneficials."  Beneficials are animals, plants and insects that show that we are moving in a direction toward a healthy native environment.  So it was very exciting to see this morning, while I was moving the cows into their next grazing area, a hen mallard fly out of the grass.  I searched around a little and found her nest buried in the tall cool season grasses.  She has 5 eggs in her nest.  The thing that's so great about the mallard nest is that it shows that we're giving wildlife areas to nest and thrive while still utilizing the grasses for our cow/calf pairs.  The area that the mallard is nesting in was a very rough and heavily grazed area when we first bought the farm.  By maintaining good grazing patterns around this area we've been able to allow the area to fill in with grasses and still grow big bluestem and other forbs later in the year.  We'll avoid her nest and graze around her, leaving a large amount of cover for her to hide in.   Other "beneficials" that we've seen over the past couple of years are that we've increased the number of meadow larks and other prairie bird types, and we've seen sora rail on the wetlands for the past couple of springs.

Kiwanis

Sharon and I gave a presentation to the Kiwanis of Milford, IA this morning.  We really enjoyed it.  We enjoy giving tours on the farm, so we used video and pictures to give a virtual tour.  You never know if the audience was into what you are presenting but I think it went pretty well.