Kindness

Yesterday the guys went to the regional junk..... er....I mean used farm machinery...auction. Before they left the boss put a draw pin in the back of the truck and tossed some hay on it so it wasn't obvious.

Way too trusting. When they went to hook up the small set of field drags they bought, the draw pin was gone. What kindness! Someone obviously forgot to bring one so they helped themselves. (At least they left the hookup for the horse trailer, which was also there under the hay.)

They were in quite a fix, many, many miles from home and too late in the day to go buy another pin somewhere. However, a complete stranger who was there working on loading machinery loaned them his so they could bring the drags home.

Of course now they have to go back up today to return the pin.
But what kindness, to loan something to someone they didn't know, whom they had no way to know they would ever see again.

However, there are rumblings that they want me to ride along when they take it back. It is cloudy and rainy and I get enough road travel on the daily college trip. It is cold. It is not a very interesting trip. Hmmm....how am I going to get out of this? My Sunday chair is calling, chores are done and I have a real good book. What to do, what to do...

Not content with breaking my headlight and crumpling my fender

The deer are now coming right into the driveway after my car (photos by Alan...out the living room window at three in the afternoon! The white spots are those infamous bullet holes.)

It was a dark and foggy night

And as Beck and I negotiated the twisting, narrow Catskill foothills roads deer began to cross the road in front of us. They were crouched so low they were going UNDER the guardrails. It was very dark. Very foggy. I slowed down as much as I could, but there was a car flying at me from the rear. (Why don't people drive within the scope of their headlights? ). I wanted to come to a complete stop, but because of the rapidly approaching car I couldn't. For a second there were no more deer. Then one leapt out of the woods right into the side of the front fender. I couldn't even stop then because of the maniac behind me and had to pull ahead into the end of a little road a few yards down the road. I think he hit one too, as he stopped as well, but I couldn't see.

We are fine as I was going very slowly. I really don't know if the deer was fine because it was too dark and foggy to even see it. The car...mmmm not quite so fine. No high beam headlight and it is loose in its socket, so I don't know how much damage was done there. Bumper is loose. Hood is sprung a little. They make cars nowadays to crumple easily to absorb impact. Yup they do. I feel pretty bad about this particular little bit of crumpling. I am quite fond of this particular car as it is the first thing I have ever owned that does the driveway without getting me stuck about twenty times per winter. Bah humbug.

The feed truck

Photo by Alan

On SUCH a lovely spring day. He let the heifers out when he left the gate open while he filled the bin. Yay! (I guess every trucker has to learn the hard way that even if you don't see any animals if you find a gate closed on a farm you re-close it after you go through.) He was profuse in his apologies, but Liz, the boss and Alan had to do some snowy-cold running and driving. The critters were headed down the barn driveway and they couldn't get ahead of them, so the boss ran the truck down the house drive and met them at the bottom of the barn drive. They came right back up then.

A frigid tree sparrow

Spitzer resigning...maybe

News reports from all over say that the governor of NY, Elliot Sptizer, may resign tomorrow.
Never liked the man. Never, never, never.
When he was attorney general it was clear that he was running for governor, rather than attending to the state's legal business. I used to use Attorney General's office publications for research for the Farm Side. When he took office most of them vanished from publication.
Although he has been a fairly good man as far as helping farmers goes, his policies in relation to almost everything else have appalled me. I was just thinking today as I read Windy Ridge's comment on gun control measures planned for New York under the current administration that the worst thing that has happened to the state in years was George Pataki's appendicitis. That was before I learned about this.
Today is the first time in over thirty years that I heard my dad give his rebel yell (over the phone). I think he is happy about the news.

The Time Change

(I could have added an adjective or two in there, but this is a family friendly place.)
We time changed this morning...got up an hour early to milk and the cows looked at us as if we were nuts. They were still lying down in their comfy beds and didn't even want to stand up. They love routine and hate anything that changes it. Last week I was asked in a newsletter how farmers feel about changing time. Anything that disrupts routines disrupts cows and makes things harder....so I don't like changing in either direction. As to why we at Northview don't just ignore the change and stay on the same schedule year round...in a word (or maybe two) the milk truck. He comes at 8 AM. We have to be done by then. If we just stayed on Daylight Savings we would always be done before 8, but meetings and such would just kill us. I do not understand the rationale behind changing and would like to stay on Daylight Savings year around. Sarpy Sam has some good points on the issue today too....oh, I was reading blogs and see that Linda does too.

Yesterday one of Liz's heifers had a little bull calf (which was a disappointment...she really wanted a heifer). Interestingly though, he was red, which proves that his mother is a red carrier, even though she herself is plain black and white. She was sired by the RC bull at Select Sires, Kenyon, but her dam has never had a red calf. When I looked at him trotting around the barn in his little calf coat this morning I wondered aloud, "How many of these do you think are alive in the world today?"

Not because he was red or a bull, but because he is a son of Citation-R Maple, a bull that has been dead for a very long time. It would be interesting to know just how many of them there are today. Not many I'll bet.

Almost a meeting

You will need to click to see how thick the snow was...

Liz and I ran Becky over to college this morning, after milking (and after the motherperson got up at four to finish the Farm Side for Friday), and then headed to Oneonta for a farm meeting (the boss stayed home to calve a cow.).

It was put on by our feed company.
With good speakers.
Brook's Chicken.
Great door prizes. We really wanted to be there.




We hopped on I 88. There was rain predicted. There was squally wind predicted. However, nothing that we heard prepared us. Or not enough anyhow. It was a boy who cried wolf sort of thing. We have canceled several tempting outings this winter because the forecasters called for blizzards and other apocalyptic weather conditions and nothing happened. We decided to ignore them (or I did...Liz wanted to stay home) and we paid the price. The wind was so fierce on 88 that Liz could barely hold the car on the road. We got off onto 7...not much better. We made it to Richmondville, called Becky and told her to skip class, picked her back up and headed home (with a quick detour to Wally World for dog food.)



What followed was 30 or so miles of the worst driving we have seen this winter. It was bad. I have pictures. I didn't take them until it had actually let up some.....The snow was horizontal! Now that we are home it is sunny again.....

****Update...to add insult to injury, not one, but two milk inspectors just stopped in to tell us that our milk hauler will be charging us another $300 bucks a month to haul our milk and we can't change haulers. Milk is about the only commodity where the producer pays the hauling to the buyer. (Everyone but milk buyers pays their own darned shipping and handling.) On the positive side (and there always is one) one inspector said that the barn looked good. Milk inspectors NEVER tell you that your barn looks good. (I think they just didn't want to get us any madder than necessary.)

Irony

Does anyone else see the irony in a former gun-control advocate getting arrested for gun law violations? And check out his nick name...so perfectly fitting...

A man who wants to give animals the right to sue us

And has been mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee. Be scared....very scared.

Lawence Tribe

Sarpy Sam Obama Animal Rights

(How's that for a string of words?)

One of my very favorite bloggers, whose opinions I have come to greatly respect, has a rather frightening post today about Barack Obama's stance on animal rights. Sarpy Sam says it better than I can, but Obama's position illustrates a classic farmer/rancher dilemma. We probably understand our animals better than anyone who isn't a farmer or a rancher. After all, we live with them and their very lives depend upon our good care. We wouldn't work at such a challenging job if we didn't love them. Yet every Tom, Dick and Harriet in Hollywood and Washington wants to tell us how to do our jobs.

Not much

Because not much is happening of interest. It is getting cold again after our mini thaw. Another storm is predicted for tomorrow. It is winter after all.

We have been selling a few head to pay the property taxes, which tend to be the bane of any and all property owners in NY. So far we sold Rip Tide, a yearling heifer which developed the unacceptable habit of sucking other heifers (ruins the udders). Sometimes we put a prickly plastic tab in their nose, so if they suck they get kicked and stop. RT also kicked out behind real bad so....

Then there was Fitty (number 50, AKA Beech) Fitty kicked. Pinned people on the metal post in her stall to try and crush them. Killed her calves as soon as they were born if she got to them first. Had chronic mastitis (udder inflammation) so we fed all her milk to the pigs for three years. Got loose last week and tore up the barn and beat on baby calves (bad timing.) She still made it to ten years old, which is old for a dairy cow. Can't say as I miss being scared spitless if I got stuck milking her. (The boss usually did it, but he tends to wander off.) 187, another heifer. Had either an udder injury or some other serious infection and lost a quarter. Too bad, she was pretty gentle, and very well bred.

And by far the worst, old 49. Veronica. Daughter of Juniper Rotate Jed. Super high producer in her younger days, but almost 11 and not milking so great any more. One of Alan's cows, an old standby. A bit of a kicker but we all liked her. She loved the broom and would moo coaxingly at me whenever I was sweeping cows or currying them.

No one wanted to sell her but we couldn't get her bred this year and she was only giving twenty pounds of milk. If not for the tax man we would have made the not-so-businesslike, but after all this is our farm isn't it, decision to keep trying on breeding her. Let her hang around another year. We liked her. It hurt to put her on the truck and of course, she went sweetly, just walked right on the trailer. Alan swept her off and curried her a lot the night before and asked me to do the same yesterday morning. Of course I did and no doubt she was the best groomed cow at the auction barn. There are two more to go next week, Aretha, chronic mastitis, also feeding pigs right now, and 471, Marge, 14 years old and going downhill. (She could die on the farm and be buried here, but for the tax man.) Imagine selling SIX cows to pay just one of the two sets of taxes (that is just property taxes, school and county) on this place (and they will not pay the whole shot by any means.)

I wonder if the legislature in Albany, when they dump unfunded mandates on local governments and schools know (or care) that a nice old cow died early to fund their overspending. The other three would probably have been sold anyhow....maybe not Rip Tide (who will grow up to be a dairy cow on some one else's farm), but Fitty was long overdue before she killed somebody. Not 49 though. The poor old girl was taxed to death.

Some cogent anti NAIS arguments

....are offered by these ladies. Cattle Network has run a long and aggravating series of pro-NAIS articles, mostly interviewing government folks who are paid to be in favor of it and folks from organizations, which have been paid or coerced to be in favor of it. The ladies interviewed in this other side of the coin rebuttal have made some great arguments here. Some of them are new to me even though I have been following this intently since it reared its ugly head.

Birds

With the world locked in ice, and covered by about a foot of snow so powdery and fluffy that it looks and feels fake (not to mention slippery) there is little to be seen outdoors. Nothing but unrelieved white, punctuated only by the grey of the trees and an occasional flash of vague color from a salt encrusted car down on the Thruway. This season is when the birds really come into their own as points of interest. (Of course we watch them all year, but now they are the only show in town.)

Day before yesterday I trudged through the drifts up to the orchard to get some dried apple wood to boost the lame, wet-wood fire that was supposed to be warming us. (HAH) Over the river a large raptor soared, spot-lighted by the brilliant sun just showing over the southern horizon (she ain't so very high in the sky these days.) It flashed past, simply glowing, white-black, white-black as its wings slowly pumped the wind. It was probably nothing more than the hungry red tail that hangs around all year, but it looked like an ancient dragon patrolling up the small breadth of still-open water.

Yesterday I went out on one of my perpetual motion trips to the stove just int time to just miss seeing the Cooper's hawk, just missing a pigeon. She huffed and puffed on the barn ridgepole snapping her elegant wings open and shut in irritation when it scooted under the eaves and into the barn (I have seen her duck in through the open window after one now and then, but she didn't yesterday). She is so respected by the neighborhood flying rats, that not one pigeon landed on the heifer barn roof for the rest of the day (they sat on the house instead, darn 'em.)

Same day, feeding the birds. When I walked toward the swing set where the feeders hang I didn't see a one. However a veritable cloud of juncos, gold finches, chickadees, white-throated sparrows, Sassenachs, mourning doves, blue jays, tufted titmice, and who knows what all else, flew out of the old Christmas tree. Alan put it up so some of the feeders hang among the branches. The birds seem to love the shelter, and I am kind of fond of it too. I can just lean back here at the computer, twitch open the edge of the curtain, and peer right into the center of it. (Voyeurism of the best sort.)

On the not so happy with the birds front, crows and mallard ducks are marauding the ag bags to pick out corn. I am perfectly happy to provide fifty odd pounds of black oil sunflower seeds over the course of the winter. It keeps the birds happy with me and I with them.

Hundreds of tons of corn from our winter cattle feed being ruined is another story. Ducks can spread salmonella to cows when they leave droppings in feed. We chase them away whenever we see them. I don't feel too sorry for them either. They have a whole darned river to forage in, plus plenty of corn left on the ground in more open places where the wind has blown the snow away. I used to take Mike up to herd them out of the bags, (which was a lot of fun and pretty near as effective as the Cooper's on the pigeons). The first day I tried it, it was stormy and when we got to the bag fifty or sixty turkeys, maybe two hundred mallards, and crows and starlings too numerous to count flew up in a tornado of black and brown in front of us. My intrepid dog, who thought nothing of grabbing a bull by the nose and hanging off until the bovine reprobate changed his mind about where he was going, was terrified by the uproar from the birds and almost quit me for the house!

*** I ain't not supportin' nobody yet, but have you noticed the photos on the front page of all the papers of the winners of the Iowa caucuses? Gigantic color shots of Obama...itty bitty snaps of Huckabee, or nothing at all. Hmmm, any favoritism on the part of the media? Nah, couldn't be, they are merely unbiased reporters of history in the making.

Links

Here are a couple of links for your head scratching puzzlement. One is about offering a day off for cows. Believe it or not, a pasta company has put calcium in their macaroni so cows can have a day off. What a thought...time off for cattle. They even have a bovine sellout...er, ....spokes "person" thanking them for their "generosity".

The knotheads!

If you give cows a day off from milking their udders rapidly fill with excess milk, to the point of extreme pain. They bellow and scream to be milked and thrash and bang their stanchions. If left more than a few extra hours without milking, they can develop painful udder infections, from which some could die. We dairy farmers don't milk every twelve hours because we are super Vikings or like being perpetually tired or anything masochistic like that. We do it because it is necessary for the cows' comfort and health.

Milking machine equipment repair companies are available on a 24-hour emergency basis (they don't come cheap, but they do come when called) and most farmers own generators so if the power goes out the work goes on. As far as the Northview cows are concerned, thanks but no thanks Ronzoni, we will get our calcium from milk and continue to work every day as always.
Mooove along with your silly, selfish, city-centric ad campaign.

And this is a bit sad, but had me scratching my head; Elderly man hurt riding pet buffalo. That simply doesn't need any explanation...the headline says it all.

I am working on a post on some incredibly cool Christmas presents we received from someone who seems to know us better than we know ourselves. However back-to-back, big, bad snowstorms have put everybody into overdrive just getting chores done and when we come in we all seem to fall asleep in our chairs....but soon...

Crazy day

It started out as ordinary enough though. We milked the cows and fed the calves and the boss cleaned the stables. Then while we were working we began hearing gunfire all around us. The boss went outside to look, but thought it was across the river.

We decided to move some calves outside before we went in to eat. Big rodeo. They had not been led for the most part and jumped all over Liz and tried to run over the rest of us and leap through the gates and generally gave us a rough time. Heard more shooting, this time up behind the house. Went in for breakfast. Heard still more shooting. Boom, boom, boom..clearly a shot gun,...glad I am not buying their shells as there had so far been at least 20 shots.

Suddenly I heard a LOT of shooting and it sounded like it was right over in the cow pasture. The boss, Liz and I took off right away as we had put the springing heifers out there while we moved calves. By the time my slow, old self got up there (visions of all kind of bad possibilities dancing in my head) the young stock were coming back up from where they had bolted down to the barn gate. We never did find out who was out there or even just where they were, but after we went out the shooting at least stopped. I found one of the heifers hiding by the big tree in the upper photo and thought it looked kind of interesting.

Spooked but interested in what I was up to.

Soooo.....we went back in to try to finish our breakfast. While we were inside the corn meal that was delayed by yesterday's storm was finally delivered. Then a fellow that is interested in buying some semen from the shorthorn bull when we draw him arrived unexpectedly to look at him and check out his daughters. Guess he liked him because he wants to buy some when we get it back.

I had to kind of hustle him along as we had a big day of cleaning mangers planned. I felt bad about it, but my help was needed. It was a major task as we have been behind since the boss got hurt. We mostly got it done anyhow and the guys built a real nice feeder for the calf pen where we put the ones we moved. Cows got fed pretty late, which made milking a bit late too, but we were still back in the house by just after eight. I had cooked a roast and some potatoes and carrots and everything was ready when we came in, for which I was grateful as I was just plain ready to be done. It was about as busy a day as we have had in a while and I sure would like to know what was going on with all the shooting, but we got a lot done so I won't complain....doesn't pay anyhow. Now I am going to go take a shower so I don't smell like bad feed and cow manure and get all rested up for tomorrow's dose of fun on the farm.

Monks harassed into getting rid of chickens

I hope PeTA is proud to have driven a group of Trappist Monks into getting rid of their chickens by relentlessly harassing them about their egg business. The monks say that they couldn't continue their lives of quiet contemplation while being pestered by these pestilential pests. Talk about cruelty! Taking away these men's livelihood just to make news headlines seems pretty darned cruel to me. Their capitulation must have been frosting on the activist's nasty cake. Those folks will rejoice when all domestic animals are dead, as they view them as unnatural exploited abominations. (You hear that Mikie? Nick? Gael? You unnatural hounds you). Pretending to care about comfort for farm animals is just that-pretending. Complete and total animal liberation is the animal rights goal and that includes dogs and cats, right along with chickens and pigs.

We never got rich and missed out on Disney World

Our Liz is about to graduate from college with a Bachelor of Technology degree. She has to finish an internship working on another farm and then she is done. Since she started college, four long and challenging years ago, she has wanted to come home and work into the family business with an eye to taking over. She has worked here on the farm since she was a toddler, including during all those years in college. (As have her siblings.) She has still maintained a spot on the Dean's List the whole time, as well as a membership in Phi Theta Cappa, and taken as many as 24 credits at a time.
Yeah, we're proud of her.


And yeah, we would love to have her come home to farm. (Any and all of the kids are welcome if they can work out a way to work together.) There have been plentiful times when we thought eagerly of retiring, but the place was kept afloat so we could take over and it only seems right to try to do the same for the next generation.


Wouldn't you think that the profs at an ag and tech school would be delighted to see her join us? Wouldn't you expect them to love to send young adults home to continue the family farm?
That is certainly what I expected.


However, for weeks, months even, Liz's teachers have been berating her for throwing her life and education away by coming home, especially since we are a small and not particularly outstanding farm. Discussion has become quite heated. All the many ways we might fail or she might fail have been pointed out. Her skill at breeding show cattle has been called into question (there have been several critters with the Frieland prefix that stood grand champion over the years-all of them hers). Her intelligence has been belittled. (That "dumb farmer" stereotype again). One teacher pointed out today that when she marries and has children she will want enough money to take them to Disney World and can't make it on a small farm.


And that, right there, just nailed me to the wall. Disney World! As if that were the gold standard of pleasure and achievement. The be-all-end-all epitome of American existence.

Although my folks ran an antique shop and book store when I was a young 'un, the boss comes from untold generations of farmers (we literally don't know how many). This farm itself is well over sixty years old and our kids are the third generation at this location. (The great grandparents had another farm on the other side of town.) We both grew up somewhat less than wealthy by conventional standards and never made it to Disney World. Can you imagine that? And then we went ahead and raised our kids the same way.

I know I should feel the depths of cultural deprivation over the Disney issue but actually I was perversely proud when Liz and Becky were in the lower grades and failed a test based on their cultural knowledge (they didn't know all the characters from the Little Mermaid or some other Disney flavor of the day movie.)


The boss and I both grew up showing at the county fair and thinking that was pretty big stuff. We have had visitors sneer at that, but darn, it really WAS fun. So we made sure our kids got to do it too.

When things got tight when they were small, instead of hopping on a plane for a warm climate and a theme park, we took "nature walk" mini vacations hiking around the farm. If one of us couldn't go their grandpa took them. They learned to recognize real birds and animals, to read tracks and know trees and plants. (Too bad about missing Minnie and Mickey, but they got to see robins and green frogs instead.) When we had time we took them hunting brachiopod fossils in Schoharie, digging Herkimer diamonds or hit the Old Stone Fort Museum or the NY State Museum. Or Blue Mountain Lake Museum. Or the Farmers Museum in Cooperstown. Poor deprived little things.

They missed out on jaded people dressed up as imaginary characters, and million-dollar thrill rides, and had to make do with piddly little tractor, horse and pick up truck rides (and cow rides sometimes). They had to suffer with just time with their folks and the grandparents...every day. However, they did get the chance to know that what they did every day mattered. Not only did their help mean a lot to us, but every time one of them picked up a shovel, taught a new calf to drink from a bucket, or drove the tractor out to rake hay they were helping feed the world.


To me, that stacks up pretty good against flying down to Disney World, but then I am not much of a sophisticate, so I could surely be wrong. And we certainly may fail, Liz or no Liz. Farming is tough stuff, no matter whether you have fifty cows or ten thousand. (The challenges are different, but I know I would much rather get up every morning and go out and milk our fifty than be the owner of a 10,000 cow place when the INS shows up and there is nobody left on the place to milk them at all.)


Anyhow, I personally can't wait until Liz is done with her education and home farming with us. If the farm fails, she has that degree to fall back on. If it succeeds, well, good, maybe she can afford to take her future children to Disney World.
If they even want to go.

Florida dairy closes

I thought that this story of a southern farm family's struggle to stay in the dairy industry was interesting.

The ice one

Me zero

I was helping the boss drive the heifers out of the barnyard this morning, so the milk truck doesn't have to wait for the gate to be opened. I was carrying my empty coffee cup, four bags of wet cow washcloths and a fiber glass sorting stick. I took a step.
And crashed flat on my back on the icy hill, banging my head a good one and wrenching at least one arm. He said I was talking but my eyes were open and not looking like anyone was home.

All I can say is, the ice won. Bah.

Winter wonder-land (or why can't the calendar get it right?)

According to the calendar, winter arrives in this hemisphere on or somewhere around the 21st of December, close to the old Julian calendar solstice.


That same calendar is ALWAYS wrong and has been every single year of my life. Winter up here begins WAY before the 25th and ends when it gets good and ready. Believe it or not, we had frost the 8th of June this year, the latest I have ever seen. (There was ONE year, back when my brother was still in the service, when we had the oats planted by the end of March and all the fence built too, but it was such an aberation we are still talking about it.)


Wikipedia says this, "Winter is one of the four seasons of temperate zones. Almost all English-language calendars, going by astronomy, state that winter begins on the winter solstice, and ends on the spring equinox. Calculated more by the weather, it begins and ends earlier and is the season with the shortest days and the lowest temperatures. Either way, it generally has cold weather and, especially in the higher latitudes, snow and ice."


Say what you will about Wikipedia, they got that one right. In fact, it looks as if winter is throwing its snow hook our way starting about noon today. (Oh, joy.) Not to mention its ice. Rain. Sleet. Freezing rain. High winds.


I think I will hibernate.


Or, alternately, I will betake myself off to the grocery store for some dog food as we are out, and have five (count 'em, five), bottomless canine consumers, warn up the homemade soup from last night's dinner for the human contingent and pray for school closings, which will send the company of helpful and entertaining young adults my way tomorrow.


***Stormy day update, file under unbelievable: the tank driver mentioned in the post below turned the dial on the bulk tank washer backwards AGAIN today and broke it (these things are like a washing machine dial and can't be turned backwards. He has been picking up milk for decades and knows better). Last time he did it it cost us six hundred bucks to fix. Eventually we got part of that paid for by the trucking company. I doubt we will get them to do anything this time. The boss is so mad he is fit to spit.