Argersinger Road

I trudged down the barn driveway today and took a few pictures so you can see how little it looks like a county road in New York State. There was just no way the guy on Sunday could have been mistaken about where he was.

Farming
Trespass

Argersinger Road???? 

Nope 

Still not 

Alert

I got my weekly update from Drovers Magazine today and two stories jumped right out. One is on the sale of banned beef products to Japan. Looks like the Japanese company actually deliberately ordered the illegal material, then cancelled the order. The USDA is still taking blame, but it looks to me to be shared.

The other is that Sen. Tom Harkin has introduced legislation that would put the burden of proof "in proving unfair actions away from the producers and onto the dealers, stockyards and packers. The legislation also would make several changes to the Agricultural Fair Practices Act, intending to prevent discrimination against producers belonging to an organization or cooperative. The American Meat Institute expressed opposition to “any expansion of existing authorities that would adversely inhibit producers’ and packers’ ".
Farming
Beef

Tired Iron

I put a couple of pictures of the tractors over on The View at Northview if you want to see them.

Farming
Farm tractors

Night Checks

So far I have been out of the loop on the night time calf checks. We only have two cows hanging fire right now, Ricky and Aretha. Ralph and Liz have been taking turns going out at night and I have been doing the early morning and daytime checks, but they are getting tired and I can feel my turn coming.

Night checks are a misery. Even with the best of flashlights, the lumpy frozen ground is hard to walk on. Since we have been having folks prowling around, (see below) I am nervous going to the barn in the dark. I often take Mike and Gael along, although if there is a calf they are a pain in the neck.
There also have been a lot of skunks around whenever it gets above freezing and I am not much more enamored of them than the human kind.

Alan and I were counting up yesterday and between now and the end of April we are expecting 14 of our 56 cows to calve. That adds up to a lot of nighttime hikes. One of these days I am going to get a remote camera and put an end to all this fun. Oh, well, if you can get past the bogeymen in the bushes, it is nice out at night, quiet and clear. Guess I will live.
Farming
Calves

Another picture by Alan, last night out in the woodstove. All that nice wood was a gift from friends who had county work done on them, trimming some dead trees. Thanks to them we are nice and warm. 

For Pete's sake, fill the feeder will ya? 

Corn Planter

If you guessed some kind of planter or seeder, you were correct. The boss's folks had several of these. Alan wants to see if he can plant some sweet corn with it next summer.

What is it? 

What is it?

The guys found this out in one of the buildings. I am sure many of the farmers who stop here will recognize it, but everyone is welcome to take a guess.

Leave an answer in the comments section if you would like.

Here it is

Several Northview readers have suggested that the next step after mandatory national animal identification will be the same for us human folks. Here is the New York Times, (who else) advocating just that and sugar coating it enough to give a whole herd of Holsteins a three day sugar high. It never ceases to amaze me how far the Times will go with its social agenda.
National ID

At College Today

One of Liz's friends found out that the reason her apartment mate had not been back to school in a while was that she had been arrested in NYC.....for allegedly murdering her last roommate. The person in question is out on bail and back in school, so the friend moved in with another mutual friend. Whew! Liz said that she felt like coming home and kissing her brother and sister, just for not putting her through stuff like that. There is something to be said for living at home.

A couple of other NYC kids sat in the lounge today complaining loudly about how terrible their recent visit to the cow barn had been. The cows stink and they are big and mean and ugly. And how can anybody stand to work around them...and on and on about how awful the ag portion of the school makes their lives.

After a few seconds they noticed the thickening silence around them. Then one very large, solid, good old boy informed them that he was a farm kid, quite liked cows and did they want to make something of it. The city kids quickly appealed to the rest of the folks in the lounge. After all there couldn't be more than one cow lover on campus could there? And cows really do stink don't they? However, they discovered that every single other person in the entire lounge was an aggie. They decided to leave while the going was good and the ag students had a good laugh. I wonder what part of ag and tech school they missed when they enrolled.




agriculture school

Mike looks like a serious boy, doesn't he? but there is a tennis ball just off camera between his front paws.  

The golden time just before dusk when every tree stands out in its own sharp shadow 

Another try

Okay, today I am going to write this in Word

and cut and paste. Thanks to all the kind folks who suggested that I try Firefox. I did use the earliest version for a while, but had trouble with sites that wouldn’t load. If this business with Netscape doesn’t improve, I will have to download the newer version, which is said to address that problem.

Anyhow, back to yesterday afternoon

. I was Sundaying it up in fine fashion and acting very un-farmerly. Feet up, handmade (by my wonderful mother, who never met a stranger) lap robe keeping off the chill, first book of the Outlander series in hand, I was enjoying a few comfortable chuckles and some genuine, pure-D relaxation.

Enter my son, in an incoherent panic

, "Mom, will you talk to the sheriff for me? They are over there at the barn yelling at dad."

Well, I got out of the chair

a lot quicker than I got in. Visions of my volatile husband in a one-man standoff against the local authorities leapt to mind. He was armed only with a skid steer and a bucket load of corn, but handicaps like that have never stopped him before. It is nothing for him to get in a screaming match with trespassers bearing shotguns when he is totally unarmed. So far he has come out ahead, but I worry.

When I finally got the kid calmed down

, I discovered that someone driving a Jimmy had come creeping up the barn drive and, when he saw the guys, took off in a swirl of gravel. He drove into our sand pile trying to get gone. He saw the boss coming down to confront him and screamed some words that will not be typed here and threatened to run over him. That is when the kid ran for the phone.

Anyhow, the policeman

who answered my summons was a wonder. In this increasingly urban area you don't find too many people who understand just how much trouble prowlers can get into on private farm property. This officer was real understanding though and I sure appreciated that. By the time he arrived the guy in the Jimmy had stopped cussing and was claiming to be looking for Argersinger Road. (Yeah and there is a bridge downstate that I could sell you cheap too.) Argersinger Road is a nice, smooth, paved, public highway. Our barn driveway washed out in all the rain we have had, so it consists of a couple of nearly impassable ruts winding straight up the mountain. You can barely get a tractor up it. And at the bottom, there is a FARM SIGN for Pete's sake. It does not say Argersinger Road on it, I promise.

We will probably

never know whether he was looking to pick up a heifer calf, as some local youths recently got caught doing, or if he wanted to get into the abandoned farm house half way up the driveway. Had he not threatened to run over the boss and actually pulled his car right up to him, we would have just told him to light a shuck and let him go. The sad thing is that he had kids with him. Nice example to set for them.

At any rate

, he will be going to court next week, down in town, and even if he only gets a warning, hopefully he won' be back.

Trespassers and the browser from hell

I would tell you all about the trespassers at the barn today, who flat ruined my Sunday off, and darned near ran over my husband, oh, and the nice policeman who came and arrested them. And trying to find a phone number for the police, but discovering that 9-1-1 is all there is. And Alan's message when he came in the house in a panic and how I thought the police were trying to arrest his dad, and he was standing them off armed with with nothing but a skid steer with the bucket full of corn.

However, Netscape, the browser from HELL, has eaten, not one, but two, carefully constructed posts and I flat give up.

While you wait for details, I will write them an irate message and try to calm my heartbeat down after all the excitement. Talk about adrenaline overload!

More Ravens

I want to thank Karbon Kounty Moos for stopping by and telling me that ravens are a problem for calving cows out in the west. Here they are merely something unusual to see on a cold winter day, and from the sounds of things I hope they stay that way. Moos left a link about them that is worth visiting so I moved it up from the comments section to make sure that you didn't miss it.

Here in the Northeast, we have had little problem with predation by birds, although we have more than an adequate supply of extra-large coyotes and coyote-dog hybrids to keep us busy.
However, there is a large colony of turkey vultures that nest a few miles up the road at Little Nose Mountain. (It is on the left in the picture. Back when Magnum was alive I rode the trails pictured in the story at that site. It is an amazingly wild area for being only a few yards from a major highway.)

The turkey vultures followed the interstates north a couple of decades ago, feasting on road kill as they came. It is said that black vultures are following their path and that worries me. They are known for harassing livestock and doing serious damage.

However, last summer even the turkey vultures pinned a pair of newborn Holstein calves under a feeder wagon and were very hard to discourage. There is no doubt about identification either.

I hope this isn't the start of a trend. It is hard enough to discourage predators on the ground without having them dropping in from above as well.
vultures
ravens
livestock predation

An Unexpected Crop

Guess what the eighth most valuable crop in Washington State is. It ranks behind apples, which are number one, and ahead of sweet cherries, which it kicked out of their former ranking.

I will give you a clue. The agriculture department doesn't have anything to do with recording it, but law enforcement agencies do.