Mowing Hay

If you Google videos for "mowing hay" this is the top entry that you find. It has been viewed over 6400 times.

Alan was mowing hay in our thirty-acre lot last June. He took the big camera up and took a video of himself. So much green, green alfalfa, green trees, green tractor. I thought it was pretty cool.

Yesterday it was Sunny

And I took a couple of pictures of the morning. Today the normal rainy chill of April is back, but we sure liked summer while it lasted. I tried to tell folks not to take the windows out of the barn last night, even though it was a bit hot in there...they are going to be plumb chilly this morning I'm afraid....

Firsts

This is the time of year for firsts. Yesterday was no exception.

First herps. Other folks have seen snakes and frogs and all sorts of cool stuff, but here at Northview we were coming up empty in the reptile and amphibian department until yesterday when I was spring cleaning outside the milkhouse. I reached down to pick up some leftover trash and spotted two little orange things wiggling among the crushed stone. At first I thought they were earthworms, but in fact they were red-backed salamanders. Plethodon cinereus is a big favorite of mine. I picked them up to show the girls, then returned them to whatever they were doing when I found them. (I'll bet I can guess.)

The day was full of cleaning and feeding and sweeping and being really ticked off about some BS with our water bill which is turning my hair grey and my temper black. Late in the afternoon I swore one of the guinea fowl had escaped and was down on the long lawn tuning up its unearthly cackle. I had just sat down and did NOT want to get up and go chase it.....However, the "guinea hen" soon turned into a sea gull and then to a cardinal/robin/song sparrow on steroids, and I realized that the mockingbird had just added a new sound to his repertoire.

Then late in the evening, just past first dark, I stood out in the driveway trying to hear the woodcock. I think he was still out there. I think I heard his whistling wing twitter over the din from the Thruway, but I could not be sure.It was really noisy last night with trucks and trains and tons of traffic. However, there was no doubt that the small dark thing that fluttered past my head and went whirling around the back lawn was the first flitter maus of the season.

Herding Cats

With all the frantic spring clean up and the moving of young stock into new pens...each group as the individuals grow larger "graduates" to bigger spaces...we are busy all the time. We need to keep moving right along because if it ever dries out field work will start and then it will really get crazy.

Friday we moved the group that my 3-breed critter, Scotty, is in over to the heifer barn (she is a yearling now). Then we put some youngsters that had been inside the cow barn out in their old pen.


Yesterday, when the boss and I went into the heifer barn to water Scotty's bunch, Betty and Battlemint, a Citation R Maple daughter Alan gave me and a half shorty..hmmm he gave her to me too...were loose in the big, wide flat manger having the time of their lives. They had wormed their way through the feed through and were quite happy with the situation.

Alas they can't stay there where we store their hay, so we filled the water tub, and while we were waiting, fixed the wide place in the feed through where they had escaped.

Enter Kashette, Becky's yellow barn cat (named after a dragon and quite fittingly. she thinks she owns the world). She trotted into the barn and up the manger as if she owned that too.

Betty was quick to dispute that notion. If you have heifers you have probably seen them chase cats (and chickens..and dogs....) However, if you haven't let me tell you it is quite a sight. Hooves thundering on the hollow sounding concrete. Tails in the air. Noses down snorting hot breath on the victim's fanny. It is quite exciting. Battlemint joined the fun and all the big heifers in the other pen galloped along side cheering them on.

Poor Kash flew down the manger and out under the gate at the end. She must have kept right on going and exited by a window in the back of the barn, because when I went outside she was sitting there grooming her coat as if nothing had happened at all.....nothing to see here...move along...she seemed to be saying, but I knew better and so did she.

Spring Day

At daybreak a perfect half moon looks as if somebody chopped it off like a slice of silver cheese....A blazing sunrise, colors changing like a cinema, now peach, now tangerine, then cotton candy, clean bright white on to the blinding blue of noonday.

At sunset, pink sheep clouds nibbling their way across the heifer hill horizon, shepherded along towards evening by the tugging of the breeze. It snaps the laundry on the line and ruffles the border collie's fur as it passes. It is the kindest wind of the year, refreshing, sweet, and softly scented, with green earth and cow and clean, smooth water on its breath.

In between the day's bright ends, cleaning pens and moving heifers, fixing and filling and planning the planting. Heifers on Saturday, heifers on Monday. Salesmen and electric fences, shovels, wheelbarrows full of baleage (when is somebody going to straighten that bent axle and find some grease I want to know?) skirling skid steer, singing songbirds, snarling river, snaking brown Schoharie...it is spring in the valley, sit up and take notice.

A Joyous Easter Gift

Mullein

I was on the telephone with one of the world's best brothers yesterday, our weekly Sunday catching up session, when I saw them for the first time and heard them killeee, killeee, killeee-ing as they fluttered over the yard. They were still there at just about dusk last night when Alan and I were out lugging in the last feeding of baleage. They made my day.

A pair of sparrow hawks...kestrels...the smallest American falcons. When the boss and I were younger, a lot younger, a pair nested each year between the roof boards in the heifer barn. They have always been among my favorite hawks and their presence nearby all summer long was always a delight.

Then West Nile virus wiped out most of the area hawk population (not to mention crows, jays and chickadees, the heifer barn hawk family included, and we never saw them down here by the house again.

Slowly, at least the population up in the fields returned to some semblance of normalcy. There were once again fluttering crosses of bird, hovering over the farm machinery waiting for large insects to be disturbed as the driver worked the land and gathered crops. (If you are a bird watcher a tractor seat is a wonderful place to be. The wild things are quick to take advantage of stirred up insects, mice and voles, or turned up earthworms and seem to be drawn in as if by a giant net when the engine starts. We have been delighted by ring-billed and herring gulls, foxes and coyote pups, swallows and swifts, juvenile red-tailed hawks, so new to the game that they had to walk around the field clutching at prey, and of course sparrow hawks, which take advantage of our actions by catching and stashing dozens of critters in nearby trees for future snacking.)

Thus yesterday I was overjoyed to see a single kestrel winging around the heifer yard peeking between the roof boards, checking out the old nesting site. When he was joined by a second my heart was thrilled. When I looked up late in the evening to hear that familiar call, my Easter was complete.

I hope they stay.

Sunday Stills....Happy Easter

I wish you all a joyous and wonderful Easter

For more Sunday Stills....

My Favorite Herb

I have this love affair with lovage. My mom gave me a chunk from her plant several years ago and at first my reaction was mostly dismay. You know...the whole six feet tall and growing like kudzu thing. It smelled so strongly of celery that I was afraid to use it.


Last year I overcame my trepidation and slowly began to use leaves in soups, stews, spaghetti sauce etc. Then we all started cooking meat with it. Soon it became a staple, with dinner seeming downright bare without it. Last summer I froze some (wash it and throw it in a freezer bag) dried some in the oven, dried some on paper towels, left some on the counter to wither until I got around to using it, and we cooked with it all winter.


The last two jars are just about empty. Maybe two or three good tablespoons left. I was beginning to worry about running out and have been skimping the past couple of weeks. Then today I went out to shoot my Sunday Stills Easter pic and look what I found! If I was the type I would do a happy dance.


And on a totally different topic...how would you react, say you were pretty darned conservative and wrote a farm column for your local paper, and included in the text of your column, right at the end, not separated in any way from your paragraph (in a story about goats btw) the powers that be placed a public service announcement for the area Democratic Committee? I am sorta kinda dumbfounded.

Fencing...not with Swords

Some of these are worth a click to see more detail...

Although there were a lot of thistles and I don't think I have ever seen it as wet as it is now.
Liz did most of the thistle stomping, while I carried the hammer (in my handy dandy hammer loop, something which I usually cut off of jeans because of the danger from power take offs. However I don't use them any more, PTO's that is, being an old broad, and the hammer loop was sure handy). We got the field behind the barn up in single strand electric in just a couple of hours. Amazing that the snow and odocoileus didn't take it down worse than it did. usually heavy snow and rampaging deer are rough on fences every winter. This year in places the fence was up for several sections in a row and all the insulators were lying around in plain sight.
It was GOOD to get outdoors.

Wish you could smell the maple trees in bloom. You don't smell much of anything outdoors in the winter, as many of us who work out there notice when things warm up and you can again. Yesterday as Liz and I came down after getting the electric fence up, wave after wave of it wafted over us. It was sweet as hot sugar and in fact smells a lot like hot sugar. It was wonderful for me...not so much Liz who is allergic to maple blossoms. (For some reason she won't let me plant any maple trees down by the house.) I have read that it was a poor season for the maple folks, with a short and spotty run.

Joated posted this video arrangement of the weather maps of the last 22 Hell Storms that have nailed the northeast. Wow! I had actually noticed that they looked a lot alike on the weather map but it is something to see them slashing up from Florida or over from the left coast one after another.

To Make up for the Gloom and Doom

The sun came out yesterday...

Sorry about that stuff yesterday. Things looked awful, scary and bad. We dodged that bullet, thanks to a hard working professional in town. A worry that has been hanging over me since last summer like a big, black blanket, hangs no more...or at least much less.
And the grass is almost green.
The sun came out yesterday after all that Godawful rain.

To make it up to you for me being such a party pooper yesterday, here are some fun things to do and cool folks to visit. Please pay them a call to get your grins on.

Check out real chickens in party hats. They are so cute!!

An ongoing archaeological dig in a former pig coop.

Calving, calving and kidding.

Baby horses in all their incredible cuteness.

Thanks to a FaceBook Friend for This

Story explaining much of what is causing farms like ours to wither and die...written by folks from NYC.

***One of the nice folks I have met on FaceBook had the link today...thanks Luv

Sad Today

****Update, my extra level of woe this morning was caused by being turned down for some credit we absolutely needed to stay in business. Our banker found another option this morning so for now....and I guess now is all we get to ask for. Thank you all of you for listening to me and caring. It means a lot.


No good things to report. Nothing good on the horizon. As I have written about other dairy farms giving up and quitting and good lifelong farmers ending up with nothing left.....hardworking farmers kidding and not in a funny way about becoming Walmart greeters... our own farm has been teetering on the brink.

The brink may be here. I am sad. I don't know who we will be after we sell the cows, if we end up having to sell them. I hope we can hang on. Green grass is so close...maybe four weeks...maybe less. Green grass won't pull us out of the hole, but it would cauterize a couple of the bleeding arteries.

If we can't last it out, well, we can't. Misery loves company and thousands of farms have folded in the past couple of years. There is nothing so special about our tiny operation to make us any better than the thousands of other farm families who couldn't survive on pay prices that are less than two thirds the cost of production.

One-thousand Pound Fine

For selling a goldfish to an underage piscesophile. You read it right. A 66-year old great grandmother sold a goldfish to a 14-year old, breaking highly enlightened and commonsensical British animal welfare law, which requires that someone attain the far more astute age of 16 to purchase a fish.

Bomb Found

In locker at Hormel Plant

Dairy Anti-Trust Hearing in Batavia

John Bunting linked to this live blog from the hearing yesterday. I am working my way through it as well as waiting for analysis from NY Farm Bureau to be posted. This is a complicated topic, but if something isn't done soon this country is going to change in a big way but not in a good way. Has the cooperative system been perverted until some coops work to make money from farmers rather than serving them? Will USDA do anything about this? Time will tell, but whatever it happens it is already too late for a lot of farms.

Here is another story about the meeting.

"Maybe I'll Be a Greeter at Walmart"

A quote from a dairy farmer after auctioning off the cows on his family's farm, which has been in business since 1809.

Lancaster Farming ran this article, with the opinions of several farmers and farm service folks on the current economy.

Some Extras From Sunday Stills

Liz, doctoring on one of our very best cows, Mandy

The boss, clean up time

Becky, making buckets for baby's breakfasts

Bama Breeze's new little red one, Rio

Rose Magnolia, nom, nom

I just couldn't stop at four for Sunday Stills...sorry about the poor light. Not much sun this week.

Sunday Stills...a Day in the Life

My work hat, from Allied Federated Cooperatives, the company to which we used to sell milk. Back in those days things were sweet. Plus pocket stuff...Swiss army knife and shepherd's whistle. Books....the best of things. Liz 'n' Jack. Bayberry


For more Sunday Stills....

Hay There

Ta Da (the power of love)