Making Hay

Monday morning I made decision.  It is what a boss does, at least he is suppose to do this.  I made the decision to mow hay.  Very little chance of rain the last time I had checked and I have no idea when that was.  You know, one thing you can't trust is the weather man.  Poor guy.  So, Mr. weather man says 20% chance of rain, we mow hay.  By Tuesday morning there is 60% chance of rain.  Now is when the dilemma beings.  Rain, we need it.  How to pray?  We need rain yet we have hay on the ground.  We WANT it to rain.  Yet we DON'T want it to rain.   So, we assume it will rain.  We ted the hay several times and by 4:30 in the afternoon we start baling.  The sun is shining brightly much to our delight.  Finally about 7:00 we decide it really isn't dry enough and we need to wait.  Thirty minutes later I see this very wide, dark, ominous cloud looming on the western horizon.  At 8:30 it begins to rain.  It is now 9:15 and it is still raining.  Apparently I missed this one.  I messed up the decision.  But, we needed the rain worse then we needed the hay.  

Why My Anger Turned White Tonight

We had three heifers calve in the last 36 hrs. Life was all "cool" until the low cows arrived in the holding pen. These heifers were firm believers in the first shall be last, or maybe it was the last will be last. Actually they didn't want to be there to begin with so after holding a committee meeting they decided to open the gate and get out. I heard them do it and raced out as fast as I could, which is not very fast. I managed to find some nice choice words to hurl in the general direction of the ears and sent two of them back into the fold. The other one suddenly had the desire to travel and crawled through my board fence ran wildly through the dry cow lot before taking down an electric fence. My anger was now turning a shade of red and I sent the heifer careening back toward the barn. She was still feeling her independent spirit and tore down the electric fence on the other side of the dry cow lot. At this point I cut my losses and hurled many vocal epithets her way before heading back to finish milking while she went hiking around the farm yard. I finally get to milking again when I hear the gate opening again. (Oh I am really getting mad) I dash wildly out to cut them off. This time one of the two crawled under a fence and got in the high group. Not big deal but highly annoying. I brought her back and went to milk. Would you believe it? She did it again, same thing. (Man I am really getting mad now) I bring her back again. By now I can empty a side of the parlor and put these annoying creatures in the barn. So, I make an attempt at this. Cows are such idiots. Well, one of these heifers opened the gate again while I was trying to get them in the parlor and every cow in that hadn't been milked headed back to the barn. I was so hopping mad.... Man I was mad... Did I mention I was mad.... I was so mad I wanted to kick something. ( this is so childish....) I was stomping back down into the parlor and I spied a five gallon bucket of towels and gave it a vicious kick... I had towels all over the front of the parlor. It was great... Well, not really but ....
If I would have been watching somebody else doing what I was doing I would have laughed so hard.... I decided enough was enough and I wasn't going to fool with it any more. So I milked waht I had and went to the house....
So I have a heifer that apparently has mad cow disease.... (not really, just stupidity or something...) I also have decided I am having an allergic reaction to one of my spider bite meds. I am itchy. I wonder if I am like flea bitten dog....
Anyway and so forth.....
Good night...

Trucking Silage

Jack was pleased as punch...

New Truck?

Here is the newest member of the Airy Mont Fleet. We spent most of the day yesterday trying to get the body the box off. There is a huge winch centered directly behind the cab and attached to the frame. A very tight fit. Something is still somewhat attached. So far we have had one minor issue. The boom rocked out of it's cradle and landed on the cab which ruined the windshield. Hopefully we can get it off today, maybe.... I really want to get it off before I leave....

Stuff

I think I have every thing loose on the truck. Hopefully we can take the body off next week.
(I will try to post a picture so you know what I am doing. A picture will tell the story much better than I) The milk tester was here this afternoon. Cows tested at 74. I was surprised and pleased. For as hot as it is they are doing quite well....

Expansion

I went to Rustburg today and met with the NRCS fellow. Don Yancy is his name and he is a very nice guy. Anyway, their is a federal program and a state program and both of them deal with manure storage. I think the state program is a little better then the federal program. Now I need to figure out where I want to put stuff and how many head I can have. After this Don will bring an engineer out and we will look things over and decide what needs to be done. What a process....

Expansion

Let's see, on Feb. the 7th I had a meeting with Westfalia/Surge representative. Bruce Thompson, Darrell Carol, and Rick Warren came. My dad was here as well. We met for 2-3 hours in the afternoon discussing what my goals are and what I want to do. In a perfect world where money isn't an issue what would I do? Well, I said, I would milk 4-500 cows and put in a 24-26 stall rotary parlor. They say rotary parlors cash flow very well. They made a few suggestions and I liked what they had to say. Going into debt doesn't scare me too much but it could. It will be a very interesting process. I haven't decided what I am doing for sure. I know now that if I expand I will have to buy cows to support the expansion.

Reforestation

Today I was in the FSA office (Farm Service Agency) in Rustburg. As I was leaving the forester, Mr. Jarvis, caught my attention. We have are almost finished logging off a sorry piece of timber. I would guess it is close to 100 acers of scrubby stuff, loads and loads of pulp wood. Anyway, the forester was telling me that Short Leaf Pine is becoming a diminshing species. This means they would like some people too consider replaniting these pines. To prove this, they are offering more financial aid. $50 an acre instead of $25. The cost of the seedlings is the same. I was also told the return on Short Leaf Pine is higher in the long run then Lob Lolly Pine. So, I said great, Sign us up. So he did...

Phase 1

They removed the metal from the roof first. Things will never look the same around here again. As you will see...

Phase 2

I missed the actual act of pulling the building over. Demolition is lots of fun, except for the cleanup.

Phase 3

The last section to remove. This was the old shop and we were going to leave it until we realized it would only be in the way. We also discovered some apparent Termite or Wood bore damage. Quite a bit actually...

Demolished

Disappointment

I was disappointed today to discover we would be wiser to demolish a building instead of remodel it. We were planning to put new metal on an old machine shed and the guys started removing metal this morning. We discovered the building was not fit to be fixed. After further review we will be taking the whole building down and have no plans to replace it on this site. Such is life...

Expasnion (Part II)

This morning Beverly Cox from the Virginia Cooperative Extension was here. I told her what we wanted to do or what I was thinking. She took lots of notes and is trying to get some professors from Virginia Tech to come out and help me think through this whole process. It is exciting and also a bit scary....

Triplets

While I was feeding the dry cows I noticed a cow, Shania, standing down at the other end of the pasture. I figured she had calved because she was about three weeks early. I told Sonny she was fresh and I saw him going down with the four wheeler. I saw him put two calves on the four wheeler and head back to the barn. The cow didn't follow him so I walked down and got her. When I arrived on the scene I was shocked to find a third calf. All three calves are alive and drank well. They were also all bulls...

Bad Day Part II

The power guys showed up about an hour later to reconnect the line to the transformer. They wanted to disconnect the fuse at the main power line. The main line runs through our pre-fresh pen. We currently have a rather vigorous or hyper active heifer in this group. She runs at people and makes them think she is going to gore them. So, one of the line guys went meandering down through the pasture. He seemed to be a tad nervous and was continually looking over his shoulders and wondering when an animal would pursue him. He was half way across the pasture when this heifer noticed his presence. This put her in a very hyper mood and she went galloping off across the field. This brought the line man out of his meandering and caused him to stride with a purpose towards the fence. His purposeful stride turned into a gallop and in a few seconds he was hurdling the fence like and Olympic gold medalist. I decided I should meander out and make sure the local paramedic wasn't needed to calm his racing heart. When I arrived on the premise we had a little discussion about what had transpired. I told him that animal had a very inquisitive nature and seemed to enjoy scaring people. He informed me he was sure he was going to hear about this caper for quite some time. I am sure he will. He had to feel rather silly as he watched me shoo the animal away from a distance of 10 feet.

Expansion

I am in the process of gathering information concerning the possibility of expanding. I am looking at putting in place 5-10-15 year plan that will get me to 150 milking cows. This will be a rather long and tedious process for two major reasons. The first being I don't intend to borrow money or buy cows. The second reason consists of upgrading some of the facilities. My reason for looking at expanding is rather simple. I want my boys to have something that will support them when the time comes. If I don't expand I am not sure I will survive. I need to be able to spread my costs out over more cows which will make it cheaper to operate thus allowing me to stay in business.

Liquid Nitrogen

I was shocked to hear liquid nitrogen has rocketed to $335 a ton. Typically, nitrogen is cheaper in the fall than the spring. However, I have decided this is an absorbent price and I am going to go a different route. I am going to try to get some turkey or chicken litter from up in the valley, Harrisonburg. This is much cheaper per ton. I can get litter delivered for $32 a ton and if I put two tons to the acre it is still cheaper than liquid nitrogen. I hope it works. If anyone from the valley reads this and know of someone who has litter to sell, let me know.

Another Farm Photo

This photograph was taken from the North side of the farm. Amazing how nice everything looks from a distance.

The Farm

My Brother-In-Law took a solo flight the other evening after work. While he was up he took some pictures. (You can read his rarely updated blog at Bool's Blog on my side bar. He may post lots of cool things now.) Anyway, this is how it looks from the air. That is our other house across the road.