Northview girls

Frosting...the heifers are in from the hill

Liquorice ...(I think)

Mandy

Bama Breeze

***Notice that only Bama and Mandy still have ear tags, and all Mandy has is her official USDA tag (required for shows). They ALL had tags like Bama's when they went to pasture. The National Animal ID System, NAIS, will rely on ear tags to trace animals to their source.....what a wonderfully reliable system they are planning.

A couple (or three) links

Stories about the border opening.

One

Two (R-Calf

Three (completely unrelated, but kind of interesting)

Too good to be true

I don't think I have said too much about our ongoing situation with our milk truck driver. It has been just one of those things. Way back in the spring our regular guy got hurt and a substitute began to pick up the milk. (The milk truck picks up every other day here at Northview, which is pretty much the norm for all but the largest farms.)


We always got along wonderfully with our regular driver and his son-in-law, who was his relief driver. They were the kind of guys who glanced in the barn now and then and if they saw something amiss, they dealt with it. For example we left one day to go to the farm show in Syracuse. Chores were done and everything was ship shape when we left. We thought. However, Dale took a look in the barn and there were little twin heifers behind old Zinnia, who had calved early. He knew we were away and put them up in front of their mama where they were safe. It wasn't his job, but he took care of it anyhow.


Dale always picked us up at 9:30 in the morning. It was no problem to be done by then. (It takes at least a couple of hours to feed grain, set up the milkers and to actually milk the cows. By the time you factor in actually getting up, getting dressed, making coffee, letting the dogs out and walking to the barn, you have to get up pretty darned early even to be done and the milk cooled by then.)


At first the new guy did the same. We missed Dale, but what could we do? Then he started showing up at 8:30. Then 7:30. Now we were running into difficulties. The milk was still warm when he was pumping it into the truck. (Illegal and wrong.) Still, it was summer and with the kids home we could be done milking by then. So, of course, he backed it up to 6:30. Terrific. Sometimes if we have mechanical problems or a calf to pull, that is when we START! We were starting earlier and earlier and still not being done before he came in. It was pretty frustrating.


We couldn't wait to milk until after he picked up either. Before we can milk again after milk is picked up the tank has to be washed. It takes an hour, which made us too late to milk 12 hours later at night. There were any number of other issues, such as him hooking up the hose to the tank before the milk was measured, breaking the tank washer, and the milk being warm so we got high bacteria counts that we didn't deserve. Still, we soldiered along and compromised at being done at 7:30. He still pulled in at 6:45, but everybody just put up with it all.


Then Monday he didn't show up. He had been promising for six months or so that he would be done driving the first of December since he has a winter job. When another guy picked us up at 9:30 we were absolutely ecstatic. We practically handed out cigars. We figured he had quit early and we could go back to our normal milking hours of 6 or so in the morning and 5:30 at night (which is when we have been milking anyhow, stretching the days out very l-o-o-o-o-n-g.) Happy, happy, happy!


However, just as we were getting ready to put the milkers on at 6:37 this morning, we heard the rumble of the tanker truck down below the gate. We had to shut down, let him draw off the milk, and wash the tank, before we could milk. It put us hours behind and I felt like kicking the wall!
Seems he couldn't get up the driveway Monday because of the ice, so Tyler got the milk. (This is another issue if he keeps driving since the boss can't add another task, sanding the driveway, to our already crowded race to get done before he gets here.)


Woe is me!

Joni's idea

Was to show off some of her favorite Christmas ornaments. Seemed like a great plan, so here are a few of mine. I'd love to see yours too, hint, hint....

Not so wild horses

Made by my mom

Naturally

Here is why I hate corn pickers

This poor man amputated his own arm after getting it caught in a farm implement, which then caught on fire. Our corn picker sits up in one of our fields abandoned because it was too darned dangerous to run...

Rainy days and Mondays

Today is both. There is a fine scrim of ice on every bit of ground, which makes walking a challenge. The milk tanker didn't show up this morning and we are hoping he isn't off the road somewhere.

Yesterday was certainly something. First Nick and Wally got into a discussion through the kennel fence and woke me up way too early for a morning off. Then Alan set out to skin and cut up that nice little buck he got. To his dismay something was terribly wrong with it. Every bit of meat was full of holes and blood clots, essentially ruining it. What a shame! We figure that any one of four scenarios is possible.
1) It got policed in a fight with a much larger buck, which did an amazing amount of damage.
2) Hit by a car.
3) EHD
4) (Most likely in my opinion) Some idiot loaded it full of turkey shot thinking they could kill it with a bird load.

Whatever happened, we won't be eating it.

Then the kid brought down the Christmas tree (I use the term loosely). Last year he got us this tree. We teased him about it but we liked it. I expected something similar this year when he suggested getting another, so I said, "Yeah, go ahead."

About an hour later he dragged this thing in the house.

It is over ten feet high and set up it reaches half way across the living room (you can see how wide that is in the shotgun pellet pictures below.) I am not sure quite what to think of it, but looking on the bright side, there will be room for every single one of my many and various Christmas ornaments on it.... For all of Grandma Peggy's too.... And for all the ones that have been languishing in boxes in the attic for a decade or six.

Half decorated

Wow.....

13 Degrees This Morning

***Late this afternoon Daniel Boone got another deer, a small six-point buck. He was just climbing up into his tree stand with his gun already on the rope (and of course, unloaded-there has already been one death in NY involving a tree stand ladder and a loaded gun) when it walked by. He said it was quite a scurry to get down from the stand, untie and load the 20-gauge. Then he missed it completely. It obligingly gave him a second chance. Another head shot.

Hunting safely

These are our living room windows. We love the view. We don't love the shotgun pellet holes. The glass is very thick and we have been told it would be absurdly expensive to replace so the reminder of someone's vandalism and foolhardiness remains with us. This was done before the folks bought this half of the farm back in '62.

Taking mandatory NAIS to a whole new level.

Here is the story of a farmer who defied NAIS, so the state came in and RFID tagged his cows under a court order. (What part of voluntary did they miss?State troopers enforcing ear tagging rules? Good grief!) Although I do think we need TB testing, I have to say that I admire Greg Niewendorp for standing up to the government on mandatory RFID tags.

Here is a group that wants to make it easier for farmers to direct market to the public without jumping through all the hoops that government has put in front of small operators. I have mixed emotions about some of this, as we do pasteurize milk for a reason, but still it is interesting. We know of several small turkey farms around here that were utterly defeated in their efforts to supply folks with tasty, home-grown turkeys, because state regulations mandated separate stainless steel pans for every turkey and dozens of other rules intended more to stifle small players than to make meat safer.

Happy Thanksgiving

To everyone! This is my favorite holiday. It is all about family, friends and sharing....rather than parties and getting stuff. I like it!


****Photo by Liz, right out on the lawn

Twas the day before.....

Dish washing, yam boiling, celery chopping, pie crust all over the table, onions blending their fragrance (pungently) with that of the three gifted kittens in crates in the kitchen. Liz went down to Gordie and Marie's yesterday and brought home two short haired calicoes and a long-haired black and white tom. Can you imagine a farm running out of barn cats? Me neither, but we only have four old cats and the two little yellow ones I got at Wal*Mart last year left. (Speaking of the scents of Thanksgiving preparations, I just remembered why I don't like cats in the house. Yowsa, tomorrow will be better on that front I hope.)

Liz is cooking the dinner this year (she did last year too because I had the flu) but I helped with the shopping and am helping with the clean up. We hit the stores at 6:30 this morning to miss the crowds and it worked out well. However, we had a touch of excitement on the way home. We were just leaving Johnstown when something black banged off the windshield leaving behind a mark. It made an incredibly loud CRACK sound and scared the heck out of both of us. At first I thought it was a rock from someone's tire and I looked around for a truck or car, which might have thrown it. There was nobody there! Liz thinks it was a spent bullet and I suspect that she may be right.We were right next to an abandoned farm. We didn't need any coffee after that I can tell you!

Would you believe kids over at school were really giving her a hard time yesterday because she is doing the cooking? I don't mind a bit doing it myself. However, she asked a couple of weeks ago if it was all right if she did it. The kids all learned to cook partly from their late grandmother, some from me and some from my mom. They all like to. However, her buddies think it is cruel that we are letting her undertake such a big meal. She says if she had been born just a couple of generations ago she would be married by now and cooking for her own family and doesn't care what they think.

Gee, I'm glad she's not (married and cooking for somebody else I mean). It is nice to lean back and watch someone else doing all the chopping and rolling and boiling. However, it is back to the salt mines for me I guess....well, actually, the kitchen sink. I am waiting for the woodstove to get some more water hot for me and then I will tackle more of those darned dishes.

A little randomness

Grandpa's gold finches

Blue jay inspecting the lawn for errant sunflower seeds

Oh, deer

The final rule

Explained

The link above will take you to a question and answer page on the new rules for importing cattle from Canada to the USA. The USDA will now allow animals born after 1999 to be imported for beef and breeding purposes, plus allowing many more categories of beef products and by products. The coming weeks market-wise should be very interesting, as usually allowing more imports from Canada is rough on cull cow prices here in the US. The final rule also allows many more dairy animals to be imported, usually resulting in excess milk production and lower farm gate milk prices. This time, however, the Canadian Loonie is very strong vs. the American dollar. Things may not be as bad for US farmers as they have been in other years when the border is open (although conservative estimates point to 600,000 head coming south in the next year.)

I am not holding my breath anyhow. The border opens today and we already took a $400 hit on one heifer we sold last week....evidently buyers are planning on higher supplies and lower prices. (We were getting $1200 and got $800 instead for a breeding age Holstein heifer.) Farmers in Canada are already hurting too, due to the divergence between the currencies. I don't pretend to know what will happen in the next few months in either the beef or dairy markets....other than that food giants like Tyson and Dean Foods will prosper and we farmers won't get rich selling our products to them.

We will be

Processing venison today

Blissful joy, a morning off

I didn't see this today....this was actually taken yesterday.

As close as the kid got

Our one winged warrior

Is mostly back to work now. His shoulder will probably never be the same as there are muscles detatched from the bone that are not going to grow back. However, he is a typical tough farmer and just keeps going and going. He managed to get all the corn chopped and finished up Thursday. You can see in this picture from last week that his right arm doesn't work too well, but he gets things done some how...(he is bringing me firewood in this picture, bless his heart.)

Farming is different from most jobs in that respect. There are a finite number of people to do work that is absolutely unforgiving. Cows must eat, drink and be milked. The stove must have wood. Things have been kind of ugly....cows don't get bedded or stables cleaned until late afternoon and I do most of the former. Not so neat and tidy as it might be, but they have something to lie on at night anyhow. One side of the stable manure has been piled outside under the chute for weeks....that will get cleaned up pretty quick now that he doesn't have to try to chop acres and acres of corn with one arm and worn out equipment. Just yesterday, Liz and I helped him get all the fans out of the barn, move calves, change calf collars, build stalls, clean mangers and a half dozen other jobs that have gone begging until we had enough help and time to do them.

Now we have to rebuild the sawdust shed for yearling calf housing, tear out half of the old calf tie up and put in the new headlocks so we can catch the yearling heifers to breed them...oh, and get some Amish in to patch the roof if we can... rebuild the pig housing....get the five bred heifers and two dry cows down off the hill ....and on, and on, and on..etc.....

I am awful glad to have him done with corn and able to help in the barn all day....you just can't imagine how glad.

On another note, today is opening day South, deer season. Cows are all staying in the barn except the seven out on the heifer pasture hill and they have a lot of feed down here to keep them busy and close to the barn. Show heifers are locked in the barn yard. Horses are in the barn.....and my son is somewhere out on Seven County Hill with a twenty gauge and a dream.
I forgot to have him borrow a cell phone from one of his sisters, so I will worry and worry.
I trust him.
It is the poachers who will have by passed our no trespassing signs I worry about. The ones who hunt in full cammo and take sound shots and can't tell a deer from a billy goat or a Jersey cow. It is an insult to call them hunters. They are just idiots. I hope he doesn't meet any.

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.