Nice Christmas News...NOT

So we get a call today that a person, who shall remain nameless (nobody you know) messed up the milk checks and we have to give back some of this month's pay.




 This tiny little clerical error will be nice Christmas news for hundreds of farmers in the region. Some of them make a lot of milk and probably owe back thousands. Which, because of high input costs, is certainly already spent.


 Everyone makes mistakes, but this is a big one.

Murphy Was Here

Our dairy supplier was due Thursday and didn't show. We were out of the powerful liquid cleaner we use for the pipeline and bulk tank. Not good...or wait, maybe it was....

You see, there are no substitutes, and the equipment must be cleaned and sanitized every time it is used, so we made a road trip up west to get a small jug to tide us over.

While we were at it we shopped.

I don't get out much. Kind of need to be here most of the time...so when I do, watch out.

People were looking at us funny in Price Chopper I can tell you, as we perused the ham and jam and spam and bought...well. a lot....

But the cupboards were pretty bare and now they are not so much and that is always a wonderful feeling. Plus I bought some goodies at the bakery outlet for the boy to take back south with him.....yeah...if that big bundle of blankets is any indication, he is home for a couple of days. He was out with that certain special and very sweet young lady so we didn't get to see him last night....

And, of course, while we were gone, the dairy supplier stopped....of course he did. So we won't run out of pipeline soap any time soon. I wonder if his name is Murphy.

But, it's all good...

It's All Relative

Here in the USA we are continually bombarded by animal rights messages. This is cruel, that is cruel, the whole keeping of animals business is cruel....even though most management methods have evolved over generations of time, since farming and livestock keeping began. Remember veal? AR groups convinced folks that it is cruel to eat veal, so no one does. And bit by bit the vegan beat goes on....

One of the big buzz makers is confinement housing for sows. It is done to manage the potential for disease and to keep big pigs from crushing little pigs, but AR groups have used our anthropomorphic feelings about how we would prefer to live to change the face of hog farming.

Several states (usually states with very few pigs and not too many farmers) banned the practice, thanks entirely to animal rights groups' media campaigns.

Meanwhile, in other countries, where such anthropomorphism is a luxury too expensive in the face of real hunger, things like this are going on. People hungry enough to willingly and knowingly eat pork from pigs that died of a contagious disease probably aren't worrying too hard about the housing system where they were raised. They just need food.

It is all relative.

Simple

But smart. Here is a great idea from a farmer/rancher guy that is so simple it seems obvious and yet I had never seen it done or thought of it and I'll bet many other folks hadn't either. He simply floated an old basketball in his water tank so he could see if it needed to be filled. Brilliant!

Shiverish but Sunny

It is. Down into the mid-twenties last night, making it a very pleasant thing to turn on the electric heater this morning. It is tiny and it labors mightily to take the edge off the cold in the kitchen. Just now it is my best friend.

Not much of great interest happening here. We milk the cows. We feed the cows. Then we milk the cows and feed the cows. Somewhere in between the boss cleans the barn and fixes a seemingly never ending string of broken water bowls.

Feeding them with wheelbarrows is getting old fast, but on the other hand it is getting the fat old lady into shape, being wheel-barrower in chief and all.

There is a big wheel barrow. There is a little wheel barrow.

The boss brings down a bucket load of haylage with the skid steer and dumps half into them. He takes the big one and I take the little one and we distribute largess to the ladies.

Then he dumps in the other half of the load and I feed out both while he gets another bucket full.. It is heavy. There are ramps. There are cow heads reaching and slamming and grabbing on all the corners and ramps as everybody wants theirs NOW.

However, I find a very positive side to me doing at least some of the feeding. I actually know all the cows, who is dry, who is milking hard, which are still growing heifers that need a little extra, and I adjust their dinners accordingly.

Scotty gets a great big pile.....

And Lemmie, and Camry, and Blitz and Mandy....Not so much Zinnia, who is almost dry and about the size of a pick up truck. I KNOW that when they get their morning feed outdoors she stomps around and grabs more than her share.

I won't say that this has increased milk production, but they were dropping really fast and now the slide has stopped and they are holding. Works for me.

Susurrus Samaras

Out on the porch watching the dog, who knows better than to stray, better than to bother heifers, better than to harass horses or chase chickens, or fight with cats, but not better than to avail his delicate-tummied border collie self of deer innards, (which will be removed TODAY or my name isn't mom.)

Something makes a soft, sweet, swishing sound, like pattering rain drops falling down.

What could it be?

The sky is cool slate grey, with milky yellow undertones, not a drop in sight or sound.

Mr. Half moon is sliding through the branches of the box elder tree that is playing host to that same deer.

It is pretty out, and kind of warm too, all things (like November for example) considered.

What is that sound?

Barely a puff of breeze ruffling the samaras on the box elder as it whooshes by. How sweetly sibilant.

Farm Side Freebie Friday

Here you go.

A little bit of everything this week so hang on tight.

It is Unanimous

Heifer hill, early morning and mid afternoon

All the kids have off-farm jobs now....well, Alan's is off our farm and on another one. Good thing I have been getting in some practice helping feed cows...

Our Neighbors

Just down the road a piece. This is where we used to go for ice cream when we needed a summer break and bought sweet corn and peas and honey and met friends and socialized. I loved to sit in the car there and look across the green, green fields to the sandy cliffs along the Schoharie where the swallows nest each summer. It is a wonderful spot but the flood hit there hard.

This story offers a real tribute to the persistence, toughness and heart of this NY farm family. These are good people and I hope the road before them is smoother and easier than the one they have traveled this year.

Vet Check Day

This year's last poplar leaf

Spent almost all of yesterday in the barn feeding cows and letting them in and out. (We used to have a power feed cart, but it passed away last winter).

Now the guys feed with wheel barrows, which doesn't really take that long, but it is tedious. I figured that this year it would get done faster if I "manned" one of the barrows and so I do. Figure in a couple of weeks I will either be pretty fit or pretty dead. So far the trend is towards fit.

Had a relatively new (to us) veterinarian do some preg checking and it went quite well. She was competent and fun to work with. Most of the cows we thought were carrying calves are in fact and a couple we were pretty worried about surprised us in a good way. Dear old Zinnia gets to stay another year, which made my day. Nobody likes her but me, but I like her a lot. She doesn't even belong to me...is Alan's cow...and she steals other cows' calves and guards them even from us...but I just like her.

However, thanks to NY State's exorbitant tax rates for land, somebody has to go to pay some bills (we spend nearly two months income paying county and school taxes on our land) and it leaves us looking for income outside the milk check after we get done being fleeced.

Unfortunately Blink, a sweet old retired show cow and Cider, not so sweet, and in fact downright mean, will go to the auction today. Nuff said.

Winter Storm Watch

Classic example of red neck engine repair

Noon today, yep the global is definitely warming and fall is lasting longer and ending later......not.....I should have known when everybody got crazy wanting to bake that bad weather was sure to follow. We aren't much different than wild animals when it comes to that, gather in the nuts, fluff up the nest and get ready for the bad news.

And so the scurry to get the barn ready begins. Big job and it is about two weeks earlier than we like it to be. I watched a weather demon yesterday all wink, wink, nudge, nudge about the weather and wanted to take out the TV...(He couldn't say whether it would be mildly cloudy or we would get a foot of snow. Dang, talk about a job where you can be wrong every day and still get paid. They should all run for Congress.)

I didn't though because the guys enjoy it, although how they can is beyond me. I just asked the boss to bring me up a skid steer bucket of driveway sand to bed the stalls with. It is really comfy for the cows, stays where I put it and gives them good traction to get up and down.

At least yesterday was gorgeous. The cows dried out and were fluffy....or fluffy-ish at least. Brought in the last of the water cannas. I was going to let them freeze, and indeed the tops did freeze down to the roots, but when push came to frosting, I didn't have the heart. Thus my kitchen is awash in huge pots of cannas, water cannas and grown-from-seed amaryllis.

It is like a jungle in here....a particularly favorite old friend stopped by for a short chat the other day (is there anything on earth more enjoyable than one of those friends you can not see for months or even years and pick right up where you left off) and remarked at the amount of greenery.

I can't help it. I love plants...and animals....and rocks.....herptiles....birds...I think I would curl up and blow away if I had to live in a city separated from living and growing things. Spent fifteen years in a small town once and it about drove me crazy. And even there I had gardens and flowers and dogs and cats. I think maybe I was born to be a farmer....even though I was born in the city.

West Comes East

The kids stumbled upon a large and prosperous looking beef farm a couple of hours from here. Saturday they took me to see.

Miles of fences, hundreds of animals, an impressive array of feeder wagons. All you knowledgeable ranchers out there, what on earth are these cow? And what are those things? Dairy farmers everywhere want to know.

Windy

Over the river to view the woods

Even the frogs are snuggling down

Kite flying weather this day. I swear the big old moon was bobbing around in it when I came down the stairs this morning. Said wind and moon were quite a surprise as we retired to the tune of still more rain. Glad it stopped.

Thanks to the rain we are back to routine catch up jobs and buttoning up for winter, until the fields dry enough to get back on them. We pulled Scotty out of the pen she was in with some other heifers and gave her a nice big stall as she is going to calve pretty soon. She was plenty tame and gentle when she went into the pen. Nowadays, not so much. She is only half Jersey, the other half being milking shorthorn and Holstein in equal parts, but the side she shows the public is that stubborn Jersey bit.

You wouldn't think a little bitty cow like her could be that adverse to cooperation but she surely was. Of course Liz needed to get done early, which was probably why she put up such a discussion.....they KNOW when you need to get done and react accordingly. The CO in cow is not synonymous with the CO in cooperate.

Thurwood Thursday

Charles Thurwood was a farmer up around Fort Plain, NY. In 1874 he was of an age with Alan, who is 21, and working with his folks pretty much like Alan does today, except there were no tractors. He kept a diary, something like this diary, of what he and his family did each day and how their lives were back in that other century.

Every now and then I take a look back at that diary and think about our parallels.

And there are many.

Yesterday's entry:

"Cloudy and windy and cold and we picked apples and father went over to Mr. Bujer and bought a horse for $110 dollars. Eleven years old and in the afternoon father went to Fort Plain."

And yesterday here in modern NY, just a handful of miles east of Fort Plain, Alan might have written: "Cloudy but pleasant, not much breeze, and I chopped alfalfa and put it in the ag bag and father worked on the driveway and mother saw a mangy red fox in the house yard. No wonder the chickens were raising Cain all morning."

There is quite an almanac in the front of Charles' little leather-bound book. The states and territories of the time are listed there. No Colorado or Idaho on that list. NY State had a population of 4,380,759 back then. I have no idea how accurate those figures are, but I think we have a few more folks living here now.

Pretty soon it will be time to pick the Winesap apples for jelly too, but we sure won't be buy a horse any time soon, no matter what the price or age.

Escaping from the Flood

Old Faithful

For the past several days we have been finding a few cows in places where they don't belong each morning. We figured it was probably due to the boss doing some electrical work and forgetting to plug the electric fencer back in on Saturday. He does stuff like that pretty often nowadays.

Yesterday morning we had all the cows and all the colored heifers, but every single black and white Holstein heifer was missing. Of course it was still raining but Liz and Alan went hunting for them, fond them in a hay field and brought them home.

Alan spent the entire day fixing fence. The problem was undoubtedly precipitated by the lack of electricity on the fence. A plethora of overgrown rose bushes lying on the wires didn't help.

However the biggest issue was that the flood took the corner off the fence, ripped the post right down. Our creek is usually just a trickle, but it has been swollen to little Niagara status a lot lately. Anyhow, the kid worked the whole day and got it about half finished...good enough to get by but he will have to finish it today.

Especially since he left my good hammer and my not quite as good, but good enough, brush cutters up along the fence in a bucket. It is unwise to fail to return mommy's tools around here.

It has been very weird this summer how the heifers have segregated themselves. Now and then they gather in one bunch, but most of the time the two brown Jerseys pair up with the two red milking shorthorns and the black and whites form another group entirely. It is not because they were particularly raised together or anything, but they sort by color pretty much every day....odd....

Well-Meaning But....

Great article here on how ill-informed folks often make the wrong call on animal welfare situations. One of the best I have read.

Sunrise

We're having one!

Yesterday, not so much. This video shows one of the reasons Liz didn't make it home to milk last night. All the roads approaching the farm from the west, north and south were closed, so she just couldn't get here.

Beck, Alan and I did all the milking and Beck fed calves while the boss went out and churned up mud getting the cows fed. Took him all of chore time and then some and he cut a tire on the skid steer on the slate banks that were carved out by the water rushing down. There is a good eight inches of heavy gravel with rocks bigger than my fists piled up in front of the cow door. Guess when they get the skid steer tire fixed he can use it to fill those holes.

It was hard to even get to the barn last night, normally a five-minute or less walk. The mud was boot top deep, the creek under the culvert bridge, which normally holds barely enough water for a cow to get a careful drink sounded like Niagara and would have washed you away had you stepped into it.

It was spooky to even step out onto the darned bridge. It has washed out several times, once just as the milk truck was about to drive onto it, and it always makes me nervous to cross when we are getting a lot of rain.

Beck warned me not to step into the water rushing across the barnyard up on top too. However, I am a shorty and couldn't begin to step across, it so I waded right in. Sure enough it was racing fast enough to nearly pull my feet out from under me. Wow! The kids grabbed my hands because they are such nice folks, and, although I would have been fine without, I was thankful.

What a year!

Puddle Wonderful

Actually I don't think puddles are all that wonderful these days, as in, if I don't see another one this fall it will be soon enough. But aren't these puddling butterflies wonderful? I love their pink legs and little green tennis ball eyes.

Devil Tailed Toad Strangler

(When it's not raining, it is pretty)

Yeah. We were milking last night while the rain pounded down. Cows didn't want to go back out into it, let me tell you. Take a day of fixing and changing to keep them in and they are really much better off out, so we insisted. They protested, but went eventually out to their feed in the heifer pasture.

They weren't the only ones. The barn was full of teen aged toadlets too, little couple-inches -long fellas that came inside out of the rain. (It has rained enough to drown slugs all over the paths where we walk) We are big herptile fans here at Northview, so the toads all got escorted outside to safety too. Nothing good about the collision between half a ton of cow on the hoof and half an ounce of Bufo.

Then when we came in the house, we found that a friend had put up videos of a little sneaky snake of a tornado up around Glen somewhere and other folks were saying that they had seen two. Another video I found this morning showed it coming right at one of our friend's family's farms, but is was sucked up into the sky before it hit them.

Wow! We didn't even get any wind to mention for which I am grateful. I guess the twisters were both little devil tails, stirring things up but not doing much damage. Still, this is weird as heck. Not your grandma's upstate weather.

Alan and I ran errands and visited folks earlier yesterday and came home along the river. You would not believe how big a channel it cut during the Irene and Lee flooding. Another wow. It looks like a glacier came through at warp speed, cutting gouges and flinging rocks and mud behind it.

We have stayed away from Schoharie and Middleburg and the other really badly damaged areas, but I shudder to think what it is like down there. Poor folks.

Hey, if by chance you want to read this week's Farm Side, the paper put it up online. Usually it is only on the pay site, but here it is if you are interested. Just Look and Listen

Not Helpful

As you can see the Sudex got away from us.

Supposed to cut it when it is as high as your wallet.

It would take a pretty tall guy for that to be the case

here, even if he carried his wallet in his hat. However, the weather is what it is and volume is good too. We will take all the feed of any description that we can get.

These pics belong to Alan, who took them with his cell phone and posted them on

Facebook where his low down,

thieving , conniving

mother could easily steal and repost them.

Thanks guy, for this pretty darned cool taste

of autumn field work on a hill farm in upstate NY

The Rubber band girls of summer seem to have left for warmer places already. I am keeping their feeder full, but there is no sign of their humming and buzzing around my head when I go out on the sitting porch. Not much reason to go out there now anyhow. All the house plants are inside; nothing left but the hummer feeder and the parsley and basil. I will let the basil freeze, as it is always full of bugs if I bring it in...and the parsley doesn't care about the weather....although it does seem perkier if I water it occasionally.

I miss the hummingbirds and the other summer birds, but the blue jays are bright and beautiful as they scream across the pasture, alarming all who will listen. We do have a few killdeers and those absurdly frustrating fall warblers. I had a pair literally three feet from me the other day and STILL couldn't identify them! They were pretty though.

The guys got some feed put in yesterday and a lot of mowing and such done on Sunday. It is not usual to work Sundays here, except for milking, feeding and chores, but with this awful weather you take the weather when you can get it. They got it so they took it.

Now it is raining again, so they won't be able to do much today. Guess it is going to warm up a bit though, which would be good. This taste of cool fall weather we have been having is very invigorating and we get a lot of work done, but it is plumb uncomfortable around the house.

Oh, well, better days are coming, it says here in fine print. And we still have grass, greenery, cows, buildings, and each other, a lot better than a lot of folks are dealing with. Take care out there.