Still more company

I glanced out at the garden pond yesterday to see an odd creature leaping futilely against the side of it. It was the right size for a sparrow or chipmunk, but it just didn't look right somehow. I grabbed the camera and ran out in the rain to find this guy trying to get in out of the weather. I think it would normally have been an easy hop for so big a green frog, but it was COLD and he was kind of floppy. I took his picture and then gave him a helping hand over the side into the rain-dimpled water. He stroked swiftly to the bottom and vanished under a cinder block.

I just bought a brand new heater, so he should have a comfy place to hibernate this winter, along with the two itty bitty greenies and one large, fat leopard that are already there.

Deer on the side lawn

The kids got up to find this little guy munching on the raspberry vines at the edge of the lawn a couple of days ago. (I missed the whole show due to being over in the barn milking the cows, but I guess he hung around for quite a while.)


The video was taken through the living room window. ....the white blur when Liz pans the camera down to the bird bath is a hole made by some idiot's shot gun pellet some years ago....there are around fifty of them there. Notice that although he looks at the house quite often, he never flags his tail in fear. Notice also the amazing camouflage. The second he walks into the golden rod and wild roses along the horse pasture fence he vanishes. I think he spends a lot of time hanging around the house, actually...partly because of the hoof prints under the window and partly because SOMEBODY is eating all my lettuce.

***It could also be that he has read the game syllabus and knows that opening day of the southern deer season is Saturday and figures it is safer next to the house.

A real meme

Cathy, of Looking Up, who seems to be one of the nicest bloggers I have ever "met" (she toots her car horn when she goes by the farm with her family on their way to the coast) presented this nifty meme today. I want to play too.

Here are the rules:

"The first three people to comment here and then post the same message on their blogs will receive a small (real, not virtual) present from me!"

According to Cathy, these presents may be as small as a bit of foliage from the garden and it may take a while for them to arrive, but this just seems like fun. I have things, small, neat, things, which we dug from the ground or found or grew. I would be happy to share some of them. Good luck

***Update...C'mon, you know you want to play..leave a comment and I will send you a small good thing...really....

Dog Song

No, not the Gary Paulsen book of the same title (although it is a good one, if not funny like Wood Song).

This is an actual dog song I stumbled upon on MySpace. I can't remember how I became friends with the fellow who wrote and sings it, but I was clicking along yesterday, hit his profile, and it began to play. I stopped clicking...frozen...listening. (If you aren't a dog person don't bother.)
But if you are you will get it...and it will get you I promise.


The girls got it when I played it for them when they came home from school last night. (Mike got some big hugs I can tell you.) The only way I could figure out to link to it is to put it on my MySpace page....so go there, click on the music player and listen to "Stay," by Joe Hash.
It is the perfect anthem for all the old dogs out there, past and present, and all the dog folks who love them.

***(There are some fine dogs whose folks have links over in the side bar, such as Feather and Flounder, Lucky,
Shasta, Cubby, Sugar, Fat Buddy
plus
Dog blogs, blogs with dogs,
this is by no means all the dogs and dog folks, but you get the idea)

Do they know something we don't know?

Liz and I visited this farm up in Stone Arabia Saturday in order to purchase some straw for cow bedding. (The straw was terrible..stiff with mold, dusty, smelly and hard to shake out. We won't be going back.) The farm worker who loaded the truck spoke very little English...at first. Then when he saw that the old lady who came in to order and pay for the straw was accompanied by a kind of cute young blond, he perked up considerably. So did his command of the language.

After each bale he leaped out of the mow with tremendous enthusiasm, hitting the truck bed with a resounding thump. He would stuff the bale into the load, wink at Liz, and then hop back into the mow. In no time we were loaded and ready to roll. If I were going back I would take her along every time....great service and he was a really nice kid!

Anyhow, just above this field of corn stubble a mass of perhaps 200 snow buntings whirled like a flock of black birds. It was easy to see that they weren't though; their size and the flashing of bright, white wings made them unmistakable. I was quite surprised to see them, although that farm usually offers a few horned larks and other birds of the wide open spaces. It is very early for sb's to show up here, as you can see from the range map on the link above. Even on the Christmas bird count we have only seen a few over the years. However, there they were on a pleasant, sunny 50-degree day, taking to the air over the corn and seeming to enjoy it....So I ask again, do they know something we don't?

The finest things in life

Are sometimes round and crunchy.
(Imagine, every bite a cold, crisp explosion of sweet, tangy juice)
(Imagine dozens of them)
(Mine all mine)
(Well, sort of)

We ran down to Pines yesterday, since Bellinger's is closed for the season (Alan says he heard that they ran out of apples), and bought a whole bushel of apples.
28 bucks! (Worth every penny, but, dang!)

This is an apple household, make no mistake about it. We love 'em. We eat 'em. The photo above is the already much marauded-upon basket of fruit that we bought. See all the empty spots? These apples only came home at noon yesterday and already they are vanishing like Houdini.

We chose a mixture of Golden Delicious, Ida Reds, and both red and green Northern Spies. We are making our way through the Delicious first as they are not the best keepers. I turned control of the green Spies over to Liz, as they are my favorite for pies and she is the best pie baker (cakes are Becky's thing). The hard, crisp winter keepers, the Spies and Ida Reds, will mostly find their way into Apple Snacks, my favorite winter breakfast (or lunch, as far as it goes.) I am having one now.....ahhh........

A Coyote explains

A Coyote at the Dog Show offers his take on the blog readability tool. Works for me.

Road trip

A little hazy riding south ....

Sometimes a road trip can be a wild ride to Pennsylvania to see Emerson Drive in concert because once just isn't enough.

Nicely framed

Other times it is just the weekly Friday run down to Cobleskill to take Becky to college and run over to Wally World for dog food and boots for our farm boy.

Russet oaks carpet this hill

The former is wildly exciting, off-the-charts-different for me and the girls. The second can be a pretty nice journey as well, what with dozens of migrating red tailed hawks perched on trees along the roadsides everywhere. I have never seen so many in one day before. There was even one on a telephone wire (yes wire, not pole, I don't know how he did it), and great blue herons, golden poplars, fox-red oaks and stunning mountain and valley views that change every mile.

One of my favorite swamps on Corbin Hill Road

Either way, we love our road trips (except that they are getting obscenely expensive, causing me to eagerly anticipate December when they get out of college for winter break.)



The piece de resistance for me...a good quarter mile of winterberry holly, lining the road on both sides. I wish it wasn't out in such deep swamp water, because I would snag a couple of branches for the house if I didn't have to swim to get it.

Okay, which is it?

TFS Magnum posted this fun test the other day. You can use it to discover what reading level is required to understand your blog.

I ran my three through it just for the heck of it. It was kind of startling to discover that Northview is written at the elementary school level. (Geez Louise, I thought I was a little more erudite than that.) However, I do have an excuse for writing for the underage set. Years of writing the Farm Side with an older version of Word, which measured the grade level of a written document, schooled me to make things as simple as possible. I want it readable, so people can get through it fast. (I miss that feature, which isn't inlcuded in the version I use now....and I get complaints about complicated articles too.)

Still...elementary! I was humbled. After all, I'm not Watson. Then I ran Garden Records and the View at Northview through it. Both registered Genius level. What the heck? I could see Garden Records, which has passages from Charles Thurwood's 1874 farm diary, turning out that way. They require a little deciphering......but The View is a photo blog for Pete's sake. Even the dog can read it. I am still confused.

Have a go at it anyhow and let me know how you wind up. It really is kind of fun, even if it is puzzling too.

Scouting bucks

The boy just bought a new barrel for his 500 6-shot Mossberg pump 12-gauge. He bent the original barrel when he was nearly struck by lightning while turkey hunting, (he threw it, ran and rolled when he felt his hair standing up straight) just weeks after he bought it after saving his money for a whole year. The new one is a 24", rifled barrel, ported, with a Bushnell Sportsman 3-9 by 32 scope. He is hoping that poachers don't beat him to the buck he saw last week, which, from the photo he took through my binoculars, looks like a pony with antlers. It amazes me how big deer get on a corn and alfalfa diet.

Alphecca had an interesting post today linking to a TU article about Chuck Schumer wanting to gain more hunter access to farm land. He wants to throw twenty million of federal money into that project. Good manners and attention to safety on the part of hunters would probably help more. The fellows who come in and shoot all the deer before hunting season and tag them as being shot up north where it is open make problems for the honest guys. It gets to the point where you would rather have deer and turkeys eat a third of your crops than let some of the maniacs from the city hunt your ground. We can grow more crops, but the guy who ordered Alan off our own fields at gunpoint two years ago caused a lot of other hunters to see posted signs when they hit our boundaries. Then there are the three kids from our local town who were apprehended while RUNNING after a deer, while shooting at it....right where the guys were working. Sad

When do the meaningful inspections start?

More recalls


The more you read about the stuff we are importing, the worse the situation looks. I for one, am scrutinizing the labels on everything from boxes of cereal to bottles of shampoo. But how do you know where the stuff actually origninated when they have changed the way they write the labels? Istead of saying, "Made in the USA", they say assembled by so and so in the USA? From what? From where?

This stuff is labeled for ages four and up. Unreal.

Shivering now

After a balmy October punctuated by just a few frosts, November is living up to its reputation. It is cold. It is windy. Yesterday when the boss was up in Johnstown picking up some heifer headlocks he bought it snowed. Excuse the shaky fingers, but the picture above is what this morning's "sunrise" looked like. (It seemed more like the backdrop for a Gothic romance than a sunrise to me).

So, of course last night the fire went out. I dragged poor Alan out of bed early to try to get it going, but the water temp was only 105 when we came in from milking. That does not translate into balmy indoor temperatures. I was up against the Farm Side deadline, so I really wanted to write rather than play Daniel Boone. However, you can't type when your fingers are shaking and you can't think during an environmentally induced brain freeze (with no ice cream in sight.) Therefore I hauled myself and a big stack of Country Folks, Lancaster Farming and assorted other newspapers, oh, and a box of matches, out to the stove in the yard. There I found, much as I expected, that the reason that we are cold is that we are burning huge, round, blocks of green maple. (I suspect it has something to do with certain people being busy chopping corn, but it is still absurdly cold inside). Unsplit, wet wood is about as easy to light as a pile of snow and gives off just about as much heat.

With a little help from the boss I got the sadly-smoldering, super-sized rounds of soggy wood close enough together to be kissin' cousins at least, piled on some shredded paper and waited. And waited.
He went off to feed the cows, while I watched not much happening. The thermometer crept up to 113, which is a long, long way from the stove's optimal operating temperature of 187. The wood kinda, sorta gave off a few anemic wisps of cool, yellow flame, but a conflagration it was not.

I was irked, not to put too fine a point on it, as I do like to make deadline and thus money. The Farm Side is sort of the meat and potatoes of my writing efforts (with Northview Diary being the gravy, the frosting on the cake, and a whole lot of fun). I make a serious effort to get a column in every week. This wood stove induced slow-motion frenzy of cold-fingered misery was not much of an asset to my work related goals.

Finally I went hunting small wood. There really isn't much left around the stove, as having to build frequent fires is not exactly a new issue. (I wonder if I could get frequent fire miles?) At first my efforts came up empty.

However, just behind the stove is an estimable pear tree, which weights itself down with fat, magical pears almost every summer. That sweet specimen of arboreal splendor had my interests at heart yet again. During last night's thundering November winds it dropped, not one, but two, gnarled, twisted, knotty branches. These branches were dry, crispy, and small enough for me to break up for kindling. Within a mere matter of minutes my fire was jumping and I was back inside at the computer typing, still with my hat and coat on, but with functional fingers and brain (or at least as much as usual anyhow).



Thank you pear tree. You look great in spring, you provide treats in summer, and you help us keep warm when the cold winds blow. What a friend!

Ap-pear-ent success!

Overwhelming voter turnout

NOT

The boss and I just voted in this not-much-going-on off year election. I surprised by how few had gone before us. He was number 45 and I was number 46. Granted this is a small town. Granted the Supreme Court justice is the only really big office on the ballot. But still......

Gender select

You can choose whether you end up with a heifer or a bull with this technology, but it has its drawbacks. I won't get into them here, but you can read about them in the article. Or here. We have been thinking about buying some gender select Fustead Emory Blitz-ET (Blitz has produced one million units to date) to breed Liz's cow, Junie. Liz has two daughters of Blitz from her show cow, Mandy, and they are quite nice. Junie is a pretty good cow ( we won't discuss her temperament, which is a whole 'nother story), but she has never had a heifer calf. She doesn't exactly fit the recommended parameters for using the stuff, having put her heifer days well behind her, but the boss has a phenomenal conception rate in AI. If anybody can get this thing done, he will. I am not sure just how I feel about volunteering to reproduce Junie, but.....

This is so neat

I am sure every Blogger blogger in the known world (except me) already knew that they have a cool little site called Blogger Play where you can see all the photos that are being uploaded to blogs around the world. In real time! However, in my usual slow to catch up fashion I just stumbled on it yesterday.

And was enthralled. This morning in quick succession I saw bunches of bananas, cute little boys, gorgeous sea coasts, knitting, snow and new lab puppies. I just know I am going to waste all kinds of time looking at it....

I watched, but I didn't see this picture of the northern sky go by.

A cow's life

Partly because many folks are far removed from farm life, and partly because every farm is different, I get a lot of questions about how the cows here live. With that in mind I thought I would tell you about a day in the life of an average cow here at Northview Dairy.

Let's use Beausoleil because she is a real middle-of-the-road, ordinary girl (and a family favorite.) In summer her day would begin somewhere out on the pasture hill, where she and her herdmates at some unseen signal would start down to the barn.

This time of year she wakes up when the light goes on shortly after five AM. I suspect she doesn't mind her human alarm clock because she is about to get roughly a scoop and a half of Pennfield 20% protein grain. While she and her pals are eating, someone is pulling the milking machines down from the wash in place system and setting them up for milking. By the time the grain is mostly gone, people are washing cows' udders, three at a time on two sides of the barn, with a spray solution of Clorox and water and a clean, individual washcloth for each cow. The teats are carefully dried and the milkers attached. While those six are milking the next six are "prepped". As the milk flow stops, the milking person removes the machine and sprays each teat with Fight Bac, which is darned good stuff I can tell you. The pre-washing, careful drying, and disinfectant at the end of milking each cow helps assure you, our customer, clean, healthy milk. It also helps keep mastitis infection at bay for wonderful Beausoleil and her buddies.

Between cows on our farm each milking machine "claw" gets dipped in sanitizing solution too. We take cleanliness and udder health very seriously here. Two cows (Fitty and Aretha) whose milk is not good enough to sell (by our standards at least) are milked last and the milk is fed to our pigs and our beef steer, Hermie.

When everybody is milked, the calves fed, and the pipeline and machine washer set up, Beausoleil and her pals are let out of their stalls to go to pasture for the day. She is an old cow and waits for the impetuous youngsters to crowd out the door before she strolls calmly outside. Out on the hill she will find two feeder wagons full of ensiled corn and grass haylage, which the cows eat at will until late afternoon. Then they generally head down to the barn.They usually come in on their own, wanting to be milked again and to get a second feeding of that tasty grain. We feed a mixture of pellets and steam flaked corn, which the cows simply love. When the door is opened they crowd inside and hustle to their individual stalls, eager to eat theirs before the neighbors reach over and gobble it it up.

Then morning chores are repeated, washing, milking, calves and all, plus bedding is put in each stall if no one found time during the day. Last thing at night, before the cheap help heads for the house, baled hay is put down for all the animals. This keeps them busy at night with something to chew on and tunes their tummies up for the morning grain feeding. Beausoleil is usually one of the first to lie down in her bed to chew her cud and sleep until the light goes again on in the morning.

Life is a simple routine for the cattle, the same activities repeated day after day because that is how they like their lives, as boring as possible. Come winter, they will get most of their food in the barn because of the weather, and sometimes will stay in all day (they can't walk on ice too well). Most days though, they get a period of time out in the yard for exercise. In summer, they are only inside at milking time, spending their days and nights out in the pasture.

There you have it, lifestyles of the rich and ruminating.

So sad

The poor man who was mauled by the beef cow last week died. If any of the local news entities saw fit to mention it, I didn't see it. Had it been the other way around we would have read headlines for the next two years. Channel 9 News is still anguished over the theft of three pit bull puppies from the humane society even though they have been returned. My heart goes out to his extensive family. He was a lifelong farmer from Berne.

Why I don't mind

(Click for a better look)

Driving Becky down to school now and then.

Note the pile of books on the right.
(Ignore the pile of bills in the center...I am)
Notice instead, the bright, beautiful day.
The glorious rural scenery; a handsome farm is framed in my windshield, there where I wait in the visitor's lot. There are cows on that hill and ducks and geese in the creek along the bottom....Check out the comfortable cab of my (nasty-gas-sucking) SUV (which gets up the driveway, which chances to be my main concern in vehicular virtue).

Trees changing all gold and russet. Green pastures, late alfalfa, and burnished corn fields, row on row. Aspens glowing against the dark evergreens. Hills and valleys set in sharp relief by the rays of the low -lying sun. Every inky shadow a counterpoint to some shining thing in that brilliant spotlight.

Add good music in the CD player and good company both ways and the ride and the reading time make a nice change from my usual days....still I DO wish that girl would get her driver's license.

Strange visitor

Yesterday ...considering the season that is. Today I suspect she is submerged in the garden pond, shivering like the rest of us.

Liz is off to

This great adventure

What do you say

To a dog who turns thirteen on Halloween?

Why, Happy Birthday, Mike, of course.

Bad things happen

Yesterday the boss took a couple of cull cows over to the auction in Central Bridge.
Finally.
We had planned on selling them along with a couple of excess heifers as long possible before the Canadian border opens to imports of beef and dairy cattle of all ages (November 19th). We figure that prices will drop then, and judging by how some of the futures markets are acting, they probably will. Anyhow, the day we were going to send them originally was the 25th of September, the day the boss broke his shoulder. Then the brakes went out on the pick up (luckily without a loaded trailer behind it) so there was even more delay.

We had a bit of a rodeo loading them, as they are both wild ones (that's the main reason they were making the one-way trip as we will make allowances for gentle cattle). I was a nervous wreck, worrying that he would get bumped and set himself back again, but we eventually got them on the trailer. He drove over to the sale barn with them to find out that this had just happened. We still don't know who was hurt, but it really troubled me that Liz had to go over there for her AI lab last night. I fret about her working around all those wild and crazy cattle anyhow, and knowing that something like this had happened earlier...well, it just bothered me. The auction was still going on because of the days disruptions, even late in the evening when the class convened. I was awful glad to hear my car pull in last night (her truck is getting a new computer just now). I hope the man who was attacked comes along all right. This was just an awful thing to happen.

Back to normal

Starting this past Saturday, we got ourselves back on a semi-normal schedule of time off for the cheap help. (The best Sunday morning I have had in a month.) Starting yesterday the boss and I began doing weekday morning milking and chores without any help.

It has gone amazingly well. The boss lost a huge percentage of the mobility of his right arm and a good portion of its strength when he fell. Still he manages to milk the north string and the three cows-from-Hell in the west line, because I am afraid of them. If I absolutely have to, I can milk Hooter, who would like to step on my head or kick me to kingdom come. Ditto Drive, who has the added feature of being a really BIG cow who flat out doesn't like me. However, I have managed to reach this ripe old age having never, ever, put the milker on Soir Noir (who should be called Coeur Noir in my humble opinion). I am hoping to keep both my record and my brains intact. They don't give him much trouble, except Hooter, who is a typical Jersey pain in the neck.

I am very grateful that he is back, even partly. You don't appreciate what someone else does until they don't do it any more and you have to. I have always taken for granted being able to leave the barn when milking was done. Now I have to stay until every last little tidbit of work is done, setting up the washers, putting in the soap, milking the bucket cows, every bit of it. I miss the good old days when those were his jobs and I took care of last minute supper preparations or tossing wood in the stove, and taking care of dogs and such....but at least he can milk so the girls don't have to before(and after) college. That was rough on them and I am glad it is behind them.

They are closing the river down and opening the locks early this year, because supposedly they are running out of water. The bigs boats are scurrying south while they still can.

The sumacs remind me of the ghosts of British soldiers, standing in scarlet ranks and waving at us as we pass.

Source of e coli contamination in Topps recall found

And, whaddayaknow! It was imported beef......

"FSIS officials said that late last week the CFIA provided FSIS with PFGE patterns, or DNA fingerprints, from tests of beef trim from a Canadian firm, Ranchers Beef, Ltd., which supplied trim to Elizabeth, N.J.-based Topps. Although Ranchers Beef, located in Balzac, Alberta, ceased operations Aug. 15, some product remained in storage and was collected and tested by CFIA as part of the joint investigation of the Topps recall and as part of its own investigation into 45 illnesses in Canada from E. coli."


As you can see the Alberta plant where the contamination originated had shut down before the recall was even instituted, but USDA delisted them anyhow. Talk about an empty gesture.

Here is the rest of what they are doing about it.

"On Oct. 23, FSIS announced new initiatives to protect public health against the risk of E. coli O157:H7, including expanded testing, including testing of imported trim at the border. On Oct. 19, FSIS notified countries that export beef to the U.S. of new policies and programs, and is working with them to ensure they implement the same or equivalent measures to protect the public from E. coli risks. On Oct. 4, FSIS publicly outlined the timeline of the Topps recall, the preliminary findings from its investigation of the Topps recall, actions already taken by the agency and further steps to reduce E. coli 0157:H7. "

Another story on the topic.

My stomach hurts from laughing so hard

If you want to share my pain, go watch this video
(I think this lady knew my mom...and since I became my mom several years ago......)

HT to Kim Komando

A new site and an interesting story

I received an email from AgWeb today announcing new features for their online publications. One of these is a whole page of agriculture-related blogs, from which I gleaned this story from NYT, I will have to file it under Hmmm, as it makes me say hmmm. This is perhaps because I love steak and potatoes, cookies, potato chips and any number of supposedly deadly foods.

Anyhow, I am going to put the AgWeb blogs link right over in the sidebar, because I think I will be reading them often. People often ask the boss where I get the ideas for the Farm Side. The long and short of it is off the Internet, except when I am writing about the travails of feeding pigs when the pig owner is out of commission. Then they come straight from real life at Northview.

The Honey locust

....is sending its leaves flickering down like yellow confetti at a tree party

Who knew

That the United States had a serious foot and mouth disease scare this summer?

This story proved something something many of the serious farm and ranch bloggers have been saying all along. We don't need NAIS. The pigs in question were imported from Canada, but were still promptly traced to their source, even though they were commingled with a number of others in a slaughterhouse.

The barn blackboard

Revisited

***Note the bandage on the right wing...guess where we got that idea.


I took these photos of Alan's and my time wasting efforts yesterday morning and yesterday afternoon some darned cow erased most of them as she walked by...good timing I guess.

The shelter dog controversy

On a number of the doggy blogs I read I have been following the controversy over shelter dogs and intrusive inspections by shelter personnel. etc. (You have certainly heard of the flak over Ellen DeGerneris' dog). This story offered an aspect that startled me. We are importing dogs to adopt out from our shelters from other countries. They are serving as vectors for foreign diseases. What!?! I thought our shelters were overrun. Why do we need dogs from other countries?

The story raised the issue of the canine version of rabies, which was recently eliminated here (dogs still get other kinds of rabies, such as bat rabies). I might add, what about foot and mouth disease? Dogs can't get it but animals other than hoofed creatures, including people, can carry it. One incident would devastate the American farm economy and the fall out from that would hit everybody in the nation. Lots of critters would die too. You would be staggered by how many animals would have to be killed if that disease were accidentally (or intentionally) imported here. A little common sense would be appreciated by me at least.

"It's a ticking time bomb," said Patti Strand, president of the National Animal Interest Alliance, a group that represents breeders, pet shop owners and others interested in animal welfare. "We've spent fortunes and decades eradicating many of these diseases, and they may be reintroduced."

A ticking moab if you ask me.

Falling revisited

Of course

It is important that we attend the interment of my dear uncle's ashes today. He passed away a couple of weeks ago and I want to be there. I need to be there. The kids feel the same.

So, of course, Boston showed up at the barn this morning trying unsuccessfully to have a calf. One of our best cows....naturally. Liz checked her and the calf's head was back, so she turned it. The boss checked Boston and thought maybe Liz has it right now. We gave the cow a bottle of calcium to tune up her uterus and get things going.

Maybe.

So now we wait. And hope she gets the job done so we can all go. At least I will go with a kid or two but it would be nice if the calf came so we could all go.

Meanwhile I took a picture of the old cat, Stormy, looking wistfully at the back end of all those birds yesterday (no she didn't catch any...she hasn't caught anything much in years being a very old cat. I just thought she looked funny sitting in the bird bath dreaming.)



And of a little spider on the watercress in the garden pond. I thought she was something the birds had deposited, but a closer look revealed her hungry, well-camouflaged little self.



*****Update, Liz just came in from the barn. It's a heifer (YAY) and barring complications we can go where we need to. I am thankful indeed.

The Birds

This morning the long lawn, just outside the living room window, looked (and sounded) like a scene from a certain Hitchcock movie, which scared me so bad when I was a little kid that I hid under Grandma Lachmayer's dining room table. Now her table graces my dining room and I am not worried a bit about this mixed flock of red winged blackbirds and a few other odds and ends, such as blue jays, getting in through the doors. Heck, I am not even worried about them pooping on ...er, repainting...my car (the girls took it to school today). However, it was quite attention-getting to have so many noisy birds swirling around the window.



They hung around for a while, picking something out of the goldenrod and sumac bushes, then flew across the old horse pasture to a dead elm tree where they loomed over the neighbor's cornfield, planning today's raid. Yesterday thousands of them rolled over in undulating flocks that took long minutes to fly over. Oddly they were flying west.
I wonder if they know something we don't.



***And I have lovely (well, sort of lovely, I took them through a none too clean window) photos, to add to this post, but Blogger is bogging down in the photo upload department again, so I guess those will have to wait.

******Update, they finally loaded, but you have to click to see all the birds.

Help me

I'm

F
A
L
L
I
N
G

Instant pick me up

I was kind of dragging this morning. Heck, I admit it. I was REALLY dragging this morning. Got through milking somehow and came in to this desk to finish up the Farm Side as today is deadline. Despite my usual enjoyment of that job it was looking like just another chore this time. It took me ten minutes just to proofread the first paragraph. Then on my monitor I found the upper note. Nice...a real make my day kind of treat.

A considerable time later ( I am simply not on my game) I found the other note low down on the side of the computer itself. It was accompanied by chocolate. Frozen chocolate. (You can see it below the notes.) Need I say more? I am happy now. Bring on the deadlines...I can lick 'em all.


Thanks Beck, I love you too!

Big processors at work

Hood buys smaller company.

Daybreak

It happens quite often. (And usually I am there to see it.) Only during the longest days of June does the sun make it up before I do and even then it is still low in the sky. This has nothing to do with any particular virtue and everything to do with being a dairy farmer and morning person. Dawn is the finest time of day and I like to see what it brings.

This day brought an exceptional one. (Despite the fact that I only got quick peek out the barn door). When we went to work the sky was clear as mountain water. (The grass was about that wet too.) Orion was wheeling overhead, bright as winter and almost as cold. It was exceedingly dark except for the starlight and about as quiet as it ever gets.

Then, about the time I was taking the milker off Mango to switch it onto Bubbles, a sharp, clear, golden light appeared toward the east. It made a bright band across the tree-lined horizon and seemed to unlock the colors from the night. Black sky changed magically to a liquid midnight blue, edged with silver and turquoise. The stars were like holes in dark paper, letting bright light shine through like tiny spotlights. The dead elm in the creek stretched skeletal branches toward the sun, as if warming fingers that were ever cold. It was breathtaking, (could have just been the cold, but I thought it was the sky).

I watched for a second then turned back to my job. Milking machines wait for no man (or woman) and cows have little patience with dreamers. By the time I stopped to look out again, the sun was all the way up, the sky was a cold white-blue and it was time to turn the cows outside and feed the pigs. (Which is a whole 'nother story, which you can read in the Farm Side this Friday if you are so inclined. ...and have a buck as the paper is still a pay site.)

It was a beautiful daybreak though, a nice side benefit to working where there is little to block the sky and the air is clear enough to let it shine through.

Baxter Black on animal activists

Thanks to the Center for Consumer Freedom, without which I would not have read this.

Light

OMG

This happened in our bird count territory. HT to wonderful cousin as we don't get this newspaper. Read the whole story as it is spine tingling. It's a bear of a tale.

We have been fed again

And very well too! I thank our benefactor. Good stuff

Yesterday

Lot #1

Some friends of ours sold their cows after a lifetime of farming with purebred Holsteins. Health was the issue I guess. When the auctioneer asked them to speak to the crowd, they simply couldn't. I was almost in tears too, because I had a pretty good idea of how they felt. So many years, such beloved animals, and in a couple of hours it would all be gone. We know the auctioneers quite well after years of attending sales and now and then buying a calf or two....they were Dave Rama of the Cattle Exchange and the dean of pedigree readers in the Holstein world, Horace Backus. They spoke very highly of this farm couple and I have never seen them work as hard to get the money out of the cows. Usually auctioneers sell as fast as they can to get people bidding impulsively, but these guys announced right at the start that they were going to take as long as it took on every cow, until they brought what they thought they should.

Horace Backus

They were fantastic cattle, with real deep pedigrees, .... lots of old fashioned sires like Paclamar Astronaut and Paclamar Bootmaker up close. It was a pleasure to see them as we have done a lot of the same kind of breeding over the years. Just sold our last Astronaut a couple years ago and I milk a daughter of one of our Elevations. My favorite yesterday was an excellent 90 Encore daughter and her own daughter. ....great big, deep-bodied black cows with an obvious will to milk.


I would have loved to have bought one, had I the money or the facilities to keep animals of that caliber..we really don't have either. Our barn is probably a couple of hundred years old and we are real hard pressed to house big cows. Mandy has to have a special stall and she barely fits in it. Anyhow, I felt pretty bad for them, but there was a crowd of the top Holstein folks in the region there for a chance to buy their cows. I think that says a lot about how very well respected they are and what a great job they have done at breeding a top quality herd. We had to leave pretty early as our own cows had to be fed, but I hope they did well enough on the sale to take some of the pain out of seeing the cows go down the road. I wish them the best anyhow.

Name the Calf

It's actually Liz posting this. But Mommy said it was okay. I'm doing a 'Name the Calf Contest' over on Buckin' Junction and Maqua-Kil Farm. See, I've kind of had two heifer calves born in the last couple of days, which both need "S" names. I've got one, but need another. Wanna help me out? You might just get to see the name you put in on a calf. Head over to one of the two to check it out if you have the time and inclination.

Annual meeting

Montgomery County Farm Bureau held its annual meeting last night. It was a fine and stimulating meeting...spirited debate on farm policy issues, dinner with good friends and colleagues, and some excellent speeches by several FB luminaries. (Notice I didn't comment on the food...far better that I don't.) Liz brought a friend of hers, who turned out to be a mannerly, pleasant, and entertaining young man, whose presence bumped the fun factor of the evening up several notches. (I do like farm boys, hands down.)

And then there was the election of board of directors members. Liz, running for the second time, finally made it on. She was delighted. We are an awful political bunch and she wants to get her feet wet. Much to my amazement I was elected too. The amazement part came in because I was already on the board, and had no clue that my term was up. I was pure-D astonished to see my name on the ballot, which is what I get for running off to Pennsylvania to see Emerson Drive rather than attending to my duties as a board member. (I missed last month's meeting.)

Anyhow, I looked down the list of other folks vying for the open seats and figured that pretty much all of them are seasoned FB veterans who would do a great job of steering the county. Those that didn't fit that category are the young and the eager. They have a lot to offer too. I found that I didn't care at all whether I was reelected. I like the board largely because it helps me keep up on important issues (and see my friends), but any member can attend board meetings so it wasn't like I had to be out of the loop if I lost.

However, it turns out there were exactly as many open seats as there were candidates.....which worked out well for all concerned.
Welcome aboard Liz. This is going to be fun!

Lost and found

Alan tossed this rock on the table this afternoon, having found it out on the hill yesterday. He often carries sharp bits of flint to cut ag bag plastic when he is feeding the cows, and at first he thought that is what this was.

I was reading when he put it down and looked up casually and said, "yeah, nice," without much enthusiasm. Then I realized that it seemed to be a bit of the yellowish jasper we find every now and then. If it was jasper it was one of the biggest pieces I had ever seen so I began to examine it more closely.

That is when he pointed out the casually worked edge

And places where fingers fit

And showed me how it might have been held.

I think it was manufactured near here and somebody lost it. .

Art by 3C

Click for a close-up

Advice

For this poor man. SSS****




****Shoot, shovel, shut up

NAIS (allegedly) losing steam

(Although maybe only until Hillary has her hand on the throttle.)

According to this story in the Des Moines Register, even Collin Peterson is folding his tent (at least for a while).

"The chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn., says he has given up on the program until there is a new administration. Peterson once introduced legislation to make animal ID mandatory.

"We have our head in the sand if we think we can get by without having one," he said."

Just call me sandy head I guess, because I sure don't feel any need to do more government paperwork and stick more ineffective tags in my cows' ears. If we do end up, as we probably will, with a different party in the White House next fall, I wonder what will happen to NAIS. I am not eager to find out though.

Kegan's pickerel

My handsome nephew Kegan (that's him with the ruler) caught this 28 inch pickerel up at Peck's Saturday. That is one amazing fish and he didn't even have a steel leader. Photo credit goes to cousin Scott's weekly missive and I am thinking to one of my favorite aunts.

25 years today

Since the boss and I met...(been married 22) He asked me to dance and I did, only because of his farmer's tan. I thought by the looks of him that he must have had fifteen years on me (only four, but he was kind of a party animal in those days and didn't get a lot of sleep).


A lot of water has flowed down the Mohawk since then. Lot of gallons of milk been made. Tons of hay baled or chopped. Corn planted. Gardens grown. Toddlers morphed into teenagers, and at least one twenty-something. The babies I used to haul to the barn in a Snugli or Gerry carrier are running it now. They started helping as soon as they could pick up a shovel. Liz has been showing cows since she was six and we gave her Sonora who made the front page of the Recorder when Liz took her off the trailer at the fair. We were the first people I ever saw to get one of those high rear wheel jogging strollers so we could haul the kids around. We started with just Liz in the seat and ended up with Becky in the seat, Alan on her lap, and Liz riding on the foot rest. They were darned heavy too, but our bright red kid buggy would go over anything. Now everybody has them, but I will never forget how excited I was to find something practical in which to drive babies around fair grounds and such.

I will also never forget the day I had Becky in the Gerry on my back while I worked, (not really doing much more than keeping the boss and his late father company. There is danger in inherent in family farming and I always tried to be careful. However, things happen that are impossible to predict.) After a while she got heavy and I had just taken her to the house to leave her with grandma when a steel barn support upright fell on me and crushed me. Cracked my skull, broke the little cartilage thingie on my sternum. (My head is still pretty fragile and I am careful not to bump it.) God was sure watching that day, because if she had been on my back things would have been a lot worse. No one could have known THAT was going to happen, so we sure got lucky.

At one point I often walked around with Alan in the Snugli, Becky in the Gerry and Liz hanging on to the hammer loop on my jeans. Sort of a human baby tree. We hardly ever left them, no matter where we went. Still don't if they want to ride along and amazingly they usually still do.

I think the best thing we have to show for all the years is the kids...Anybody can run a business or grow a crop and there are plenty of farmers who do it bigger and better than we do, but I sure am proud of my kids. Wouldn't trade em for anything, although some nights when they get fighting...well, dang.

Anyhow we are still crazy after all these years. The boss is still flying with one wing and we are still covering all the milking and feeding, although he is chopping corn every day. I don't know how he even gets into the tractor, since most of the time we have to tie his shoes for him....but I am still glad I fell for that farmer's tan and those rugged, outdoorsman good looks. Really I am.

Hundreds of these this year

Praying mantis.
Photo by Alan