Reflections on the Past Week Before We Began Anew!
When you end up getting very little done most of the week you have to make up for it at some point. With circumstances that required us to be away for the most of two days, we really had to push both Friday and Saturday to make sure all of the livestock had what they needed to continue to be happy and healthy.
Warm Weather
Bedding everyone in one day is quite a feat.
This past week we saw the temperatures shoot up to over 50 degrees. This creates a lot more work for us than if the temperatures were to stay at or below freezing. When we see temperatures this high in the middle of January everything melts, and by everything we mostly mean manure. All of the lots, which had previously been snow-covered and frozen turned into a slushy mess and all of the bed-pack barns followed suit. This meant that lots needed to be scraped and barns needed to be bedded down heavily so that the cattle stayed dry. We managed to get both of these things completely done in one day, which is definitely a record for us!
New Cattle
These head-locks are not the easiest to use.
We recently entered into a new cattle-owning partnership where we are responsible for acquiring the new calves. Most of these calves come from two local dairy farms who raise them to 300 or more pounds before they are sold to us. We bought calves off of one of the dairy farms this week and bought a few from our sale barn to help round out the group. This meant that we needed to process these calves as soon as possible so that they could get their vaccines as quickly as possible.
Thankfully, Saturday afternoon we had the time to catch all the calves and give them their three vaccines, implant, and new yellow ear tag! Most of these new calves were bulls so we also had the added step of banding them, which will cause their testicles to fall off in a couple weeks. With two of us, processing new calves is a fairly painless process that has the potential to go very quickly. Of course, the barn they are in it doesn't really allow us to run them through the working system so we have to make do with catching them behind a gate but we got it done!
Unscheduled Maintenance
They're always looking for a way to help remodel the place!
What is a farm without something new to fix each week? Not a farm obviously! This week the Holsteins in pen 6 decided they would remove a board that is above their feed bunk. We still aren't sure how they accomplished this. The way the board was nailed to the posts meant that they would have had to pull on the board to get it to come off so we are left with two possibilities: one of the steers grew hands and we didn't notice or someone got their head stuck and pulled backwards to free themselves which effectively removed the board from the posts. Thankfully the board was not broken and the nails were still in it so it only took a moment to put back up where it belonged!
Our life is rarely dull because we have 700 animals that frequently act like toddlers: getting into things that they shouldn't be into. Not only is there countless hours worth of work to do each week but we often have to do extra jobs such as processing calves and fixing broken boards. Everything seems to be continuously piling up no matter how fast or efficient we work but we try not to let it get us down! We are eternally thankful that we can count on our parents to always be there for us when we need a babysitter and friends to be there when we need a night out, but we are always extra thankful for everyone who follows our story and listens to our crazy musings. By reading our weekly narratives you help keep us sane and we are truly grateful for that!
Sunsets like this make it all worth it!