Friday, March 03, 2006
Thursday, March 02, 2006
True horror story
Here are two links to some really nasty pictures of what the animal rights organization PeTA actually does to animals. These are photos of the pets two volunteers from that organization are alleged to have picked up, having expressly claimed that they were going to find homes for them. They did indeed find homes for these highly adoptable creatures...in garbage bags in someone else's dumpster. Do not look at these if you are sqeamish, but if someone from PeTA posts in your comments about how wonderful they, are you can share.
Brooming the Cows
We are chopping ice off the water tanks every day. Some days it is four inches thick or more. The ground is frozen solid; it is near zero most mornings and the wind has a savage bite to it. However, no matter what the weatherman or the calendar says, spring is coming. House finches and chickadees are singing their mating songs, cardinals are calling cheerily from down below the drive and the first blackbirds are showing up at the feeder. The cows are shedding like crazy too, with clouds of hair flying all over the barn.
This leads to an interesting phenomena. The cows go nuts when they see a broom, or at least they do on my side of the barn. See I have been spending quite a lot of time sweeping floors and cleaning windowsills in honor of the fact that, since we are shopping for a new milk market, we are meeting a lot of new milk inspectors.
A bit of sweeping and polishing helps give a good first impression when they walk into the barn to talk turkey.
Anyhow, as I walk down the aisles brandishing my tired, old, barn broom, I also sweep off the loose hair on the backs, rumps and tails of any cows that are lying down. This is something I do every spring. The cows love it. Within a couple of days of my starting, they begin to beg, cow style, to be next for grooming. They stare at me intently and swing their heads up and down, clanging their stanchions. Some will even moo at me and groan eagerly when they see the broom coming.
While the stiff bristles are scrubbing off their excess hair, they put their heads right down to the floor and chew frantically, in a reflexive action like a dog moving its leg when you scratch its ear. Cows that are normally about as friendly as crocodiles lean toward me and jostle their neighbors to keep themselves closer to the wonderful tool. Some of them insist on standing up, which makes it much harder to broom them, as I am not terribly tall. The smart ones stay down though, so I can get at every itchy inch.
It makes the job fun to have them enjoy it so much and they really look amazingly better when I am done. Clean cows are another important issue for milk inspectors, so I get a business benefit along with the satisfaction of making the cows more comfy.
Cows
Farming
Signs of spring
This leads to an interesting phenomena. The cows go nuts when they see a broom, or at least they do on my side of the barn. See I have been spending quite a lot of time sweeping floors and cleaning windowsills in honor of the fact that, since we are shopping for a new milk market, we are meeting a lot of new milk inspectors.
A bit of sweeping and polishing helps give a good first impression when they walk into the barn to talk turkey.
Anyhow, as I walk down the aisles brandishing my tired, old, barn broom, I also sweep off the loose hair on the backs, rumps and tails of any cows that are lying down. This is something I do every spring. The cows love it. Within a couple of days of my starting, they begin to beg, cow style, to be next for grooming. They stare at me intently and swing their heads up and down, clanging their stanchions. Some will even moo at me and groan eagerly when they see the broom coming.
While the stiff bristles are scrubbing off their excess hair, they put their heads right down to the floor and chew frantically, in a reflexive action like a dog moving its leg when you scratch its ear. Cows that are normally about as friendly as crocodiles lean toward me and jostle their neighbors to keep themselves closer to the wonderful tool. Some of them insist on standing up, which makes it much harder to broom them, as I am not terribly tall. The smart ones stay down though, so I can get at every itchy inch.
It makes the job fun to have them enjoy it so much and they really look amazingly better when I am done. Clean cows are another important issue for milk inspectors, so I get a business benefit along with the satisfaction of making the cows more comfy.
Cows
Farming
Signs of spring
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Great Game
Hat tip to A Coyote at the Dog Show for this really entertaining game. Just put aside your politics for a few minutes and have fun. Good hunting!
Monday, February 27, 2006
Apples to Apples or Calculating the Price of Milk
I spent a long time pushing the old pencil today, trying to compare the various milk pricing deals we have been offered. (It was plumb painful; mathematical calculations are so not my thing.)
You would think it would be simple though, wouldn't you? Say, so many dollars for so many hundredweight of milk, so much to haul it to the plant and so much for dues and services. Instead they make it darned near impossible to compare. One place charges forty-five cents a hundredweight and the other eighty cents for hauling. Obvious decision right? Nope, the one with the lower hauling has a higher stop charge. (If you are not a dairy farmer, you probably don't know that not only do you pay to ship your product to the plant, but you also pay for the truck to stop at your place-fifteen times a month.) One has a better base premium and the other higher dues. One charges a nickel to participate in the CWT program, the other includes it in the service fee. And on and on until my head is spinning trying to compare. There is no apples to apples and oranges to oranges about it. More like apples to arachnids and oranges to orangutans.
However, both the boss and I, independently, came to the same conclusion, so I think we know where our milk will be going. It is just a matter of talking to the new inspector now and seeing if we share the same, or at least almost the same, philosophy on just how clean the milkhouse has to be and other milk inspector-type issues. No matter what we do we will be paid less than we have been being paid. The demise of Allied Federated Cooperatives is going to be very rough on a lot of farmers in the Northeast. I am wondering if I should sell all my Allied hats, coffee mugs, carpenter's pencils and all the other things they have given us over the years on e-Bay. They are collector's items now.
Dairy Farming
Milk Pricing
You would think it would be simple though, wouldn't you? Say, so many dollars for so many hundredweight of milk, so much to haul it to the plant and so much for dues and services. Instead they make it darned near impossible to compare. One place charges forty-five cents a hundredweight and the other eighty cents for hauling. Obvious decision right? Nope, the one with the lower hauling has a higher stop charge. (If you are not a dairy farmer, you probably don't know that not only do you pay to ship your product to the plant, but you also pay for the truck to stop at your place-fifteen times a month.) One has a better base premium and the other higher dues. One charges a nickel to participate in the CWT program, the other includes it in the service fee. And on and on until my head is spinning trying to compare. There is no apples to apples and oranges to oranges about it. More like apples to arachnids and oranges to orangutans.
However, both the boss and I, independently, came to the same conclusion, so I think we know where our milk will be going. It is just a matter of talking to the new inspector now and seeing if we share the same, or at least almost the same, philosophy on just how clean the milkhouse has to be and other milk inspector-type issues. No matter what we do we will be paid less than we have been being paid. The demise of Allied Federated Cooperatives is going to be very rough on a lot of farmers in the Northeast. I am wondering if I should sell all my Allied hats, coffee mugs, carpenter's pencils and all the other things they have given us over the years on e-Bay. They are collector's items now.
Dairy Farming
Milk Pricing
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Saturday, February 25, 2006
What I DON"T Believe
In response the comment on yesterday's post about how wonderful alternative farming is.
Don't get me started on the whole organic thing. I am no fan of chemicalling everything to death and using drugs to take the place of good husbandry. If you care about your cows and take good care of them, they will take care of you. My kids literally love their cattle. This whole place was in mourning for months when old LV Dixie died. She was one of the family after a lifetime in the show ring. In fact, our oldest is passing up a free ride to vet college in the Caribbean to come home and run this little dairy farm on a thin, fraying shoe string because she loves her cows. However, only in magazines is organic husbandry better for cows than using modern medicine when they are ill.
You wouldn't deny your child an antibiotic if they were ill and I will be damned if I will do the same thing to my cows. Organic husbandry means that if your cow gets sick, you give it a few probiotics and hope the hell it gets over whatever ailed it. Even the best cared for cattle, under the most natural of circumstances get sick sometimes and they need help. I have watched acquaintances of ours go to organic dairying to make an extra buck and watched their cows DIE of curable diseases. I believe in grass feeding. I believe in not dumping twenty different hormones into an animal to make up for stuffing it in an overcrowded barn. However, do not bother to tell me to throw away the bottle of Excenell for a scouring calf or to NOT give Star, our eleven year old pet some penicillin when she suffers from a retained placenta. Good management prevents some of these things, but just as no matter how much we love our children we can't always keep them from getting sick, sometimes even well cared for cows NEED medicine. Ours are going to get it if I have any say in the matter.
organic
Don't get me started on the whole organic thing. I am no fan of chemicalling everything to death and using drugs to take the place of good husbandry. If you care about your cows and take good care of them, they will take care of you. My kids literally love their cattle. This whole place was in mourning for months when old LV Dixie died. She was one of the family after a lifetime in the show ring. In fact, our oldest is passing up a free ride to vet college in the Caribbean to come home and run this little dairy farm on a thin, fraying shoe string because she loves her cows. However, only in magazines is organic husbandry better for cows than using modern medicine when they are ill.
You wouldn't deny your child an antibiotic if they were ill and I will be damned if I will do the same thing to my cows. Organic husbandry means that if your cow gets sick, you give it a few probiotics and hope the hell it gets over whatever ailed it. Even the best cared for cattle, under the most natural of circumstances get sick sometimes and they need help. I have watched acquaintances of ours go to organic dairying to make an extra buck and watched their cows DIE of curable diseases. I believe in grass feeding. I believe in not dumping twenty different hormones into an animal to make up for stuffing it in an overcrowded barn. However, do not bother to tell me to throw away the bottle of Excenell for a scouring calf or to NOT give Star, our eleven year old pet some penicillin when she suffers from a retained placenta. Good management prevents some of these things, but just as no matter how much we love our children we can't always keep them from getting sick, sometimes even well cared for cows NEED medicine. Ours are going to get it if I have any say in the matter.
organic
Friday, February 24, 2006
I thought I had heard everything
The New York Times is so afraid that we don’t know how to take care of ourselves and need a full time nanny, (preferably a New York City Liberal nanny of course) that it is advocating teaching eating as a classroom subject. The paper uses the usual flawed data, such as that children will die younger than their parents, and that we are all "addicted" to sugar and fat, to bash hamburger and chicken, and as an excuse to rejoice that whole milk has been banned in NYC schools. The writer wants lunch to constitute the "core of the curriculum". (For some it probably already does.)
The author suggested one thing that seemed logical to me, getting kids involved in actually growing some food. This makes sense, first of all because growing food is hard work. Get them up off their butts and out in a garden, put rakes and shovels and hoes in their hands and the so-called obesity epidemic might be a thing of the past. Growing food of their own might also put them just a tiny bit in touch with the people who normally grow it for them. Farmers and ranchers that is. Somehow, though, I think this would just turn out to be another attempt to accustom us to government baby sitting, as applied to our families.
Obesity
Farming
The author suggested one thing that seemed logical to me, getting kids involved in actually growing some food. This makes sense, first of all because growing food is hard work. Get them up off their butts and out in a garden, put rakes and shovels and hoes in their hands and the so-called obesity epidemic might be a thing of the past. Growing food of their own might also put them just a tiny bit in touch with the people who normally grow it for them. Farmers and ranchers that is. Somehow, though, I think this would just turn out to be another attempt to accustom us to government baby sitting, as applied to our families.
Obesity
Farming
Thursday, February 23, 2006
House Guns
Here is my house gun as per a post on Alphecca about which one you keep handy. This Mohawk 10C is my favorite because I can shoot it. I have had it since I was 21, which has been a fine long time. It was the first gun I ever owned except for "dummy training rifles" that my brothers and I played "Combat" with when we were kids.
I got really ticked at my son when he came back from hunting with it and said that he "dropped" it on the ice and slightly cracked the stock. I got even more ticked when he admitted that he and his dad had dropped a tree on it when getting firewood and that is how it really got the crack. My dream gun however, is a cannon to set at the top of the driveway. I also want a military tank to scare the bejesus out of all the jacklighters poaching our deer every fall.
house guns
I got really ticked at my son when he came back from hunting with it and said that he "dropped" it on the ice and slightly cracked the stock. I got even more ticked when he admitted that he and his dad had dropped a tree on it when getting firewood and that is how it really got the crack. My dream gun however, is a cannon to set at the top of the driveway. I also want a military tank to scare the bejesus out of all the jacklighters poaching our deer every fall.
house guns
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