What's Up with The Milk Numbers

According to all those dairy situation reports you read in all the farm publications, production is up from last year despite the loss of so many farms. According to a source close to the industry (who shall remain unnamed) plants are scrambling for milk and taking loads they turned away a few months ago.....hmmmm......

While We Were Gone

Nothing daunts a border collie.

If there are no cows to herd, a lake will do nicely, thank you

The bull calf tide continued....very few heifer calves this summer. Alas Spruce had a really nice boy, tall and dairy, Balsam had a Silky Cousteau son of fine proportions, and Bonneville (Balsam's daughter) had a Keeneland Astre Pat son too (same sire as Spruce's).

No more calves expected for a few weeks...However, fair preparations are in full swing. The health work is finished on Lemonade, a Holstein veteran of the show ring of Becky's, Rose Magnolia, the milking shorthorn daughter of the Select Sire Power bull, Poker(pdf) and my Broadway cow, and Gypsy, the Roylane Jordan daughter of Lizzie's retired show cow, Mandy.

Lots of clipping and washing going to be going on, which may be a challenge as Liz has started her new milk inspector job and is at least half past busy. We also have to hustle up and get Rose Magnolia and her mother, Broadway, registered, not a small feat as we have never registered a milking shorthorn before. Liz will be taking the three of them to Altamont Fair this year while the rest of us hold down the fort here at home. Maybe you will see them there.


In the meanwhile, the garden is beginning to produce, I have more lawn cows to paint, we are getting a steer back from the processor and haying is continuing apace. Although I miss camp, as I always do, we came home to glorious weather, which makes it all seem fine.

Noticed

These stories might be of interest to North-viewers....I was thrilled to learn the results of Web Moo.O, an agricultural social media contest, (which I had incidentally forgotten that I entered) (although no one has contacted me yet). I discovered it through the stats on Site Meter and did some happy dancing etc.

Northview Diary is a lot of fun for me...I love getting to know all of you....and it is so nice that the folks at Nutridense liked it too.

That's Just Ducky

I am going to be putting more camp pics up here

Sunday Stills....Rule of Thirds

For more Sunday Stills

Best Photos of Camp Week

This week was the first time I ever saw a loon chick....and this young eagle was very obliging.

Our Dangerous Southern Border

Affects unexpected people in places we might not normally imagine......

I Want It

Side A

and Side B
of the same screen door

Gimme, gimme, gimme.....rowrrrrrrrr

A fat flock of fledgling robins can be frustrating


If you are a house cat and they are inches away on the other side of the screen

Rain on Sumac

A sudden thunderstorm one hay day afternoon.

Catches the men unready and unawares, way back up in the fields.


Almost catches the laundry out, but I outsmart it by ten minutes.

The drops plink on the sumac fronds, depressing the leaflets one by one, like hot green piano keys played by ghostly hands.

A sumac player piano. I like that.

Blessing

Standing on the sitting porch in the mid day sun. Suddenly, a breeze on my arm, an eager buzz and I am being investigated.

Closely, bzzz, bzzz, bzzz, tiny jet bead eyes staring into my eyes as if wondering what I am. Pausing finally for a quick nip of sugar juice, back feathers glowing fire coal green, then back to buzz bombing me again.

Soon there are three of them, whirring around my head like airplanes on a baby's mobile. Sometimes it is a very fine thing to be the center of attention.

I think the hummingbirds have children.

Curious, glorious, bright green children.

I like them

Sunday Stills....Summer

The epitome of summer for me.....

For more Sunday Stills.....

Camp

Some among us are off to camp for a week. Fishing, swimming, canoeing and hopefully, lots and lots of sleeping. See you next Saturday, although I scheduled a few posts for the week.
Have a good one!

Strange Things in the Stats

Don't you just love

I am sure most of us who use traffic meters see some pretty strange search terms now and then. I get a kick out of watching what lands folks here and sometimes wind up scratching (or shaking) my head (although I rarely get any that are as funny as the ones Jeffro gets.)

Anyhoo, now and then Googlebot shows up in the results ...maybe five or six times a week...and it is always interesting to see what sent it here....usually calf names and growing lettuce indoors and such. However, last night it stopped by and stayed....and stayed...and stayed.....for over an hour and a half. To the tune of thirty pages.

Photos that have

Anyone more knowledgeable than I who knows what's up with that?

And what are the funniest searches that bring folks to your neighborhood?

Nothing whatsoever to do with the actual post?
(Or maybe I found the Googlebot out on my porch
and grabbed pictures of its head, paws and fur....)

Second Nesting

(Not unlike second breakfast, only with birds). In all my years here I have never seen anything like this one for birds. We keep remarking about it. Phoebes have chosen the house yard for their second nesting and they are right in front of the windows all day long. And I do mean right in front. You can see every detail of feather color, even the shading between charcoal neck and dingy grey breast feathers (they should really do their laundry.)

Now that I know the call of the indigo bunting I am awakened by them several times a week. The baby robins on the porch have shown phenomenal growth this week. From the bare ugly skull heads of last week to cheeky fat robin faces complete with the little white markings in less than three days. They still sound exactly like the bearings on the washing machine when it is spinning off balance and thus still drive me crazy thinking I have to fix it.
Earl will probably remember the killdeer baby we saw in the opening to the thirty-acre lot when we walked up there. All week long the guys regaled me with stores of how it would jump in front of the tractor when they passed and run before them all the way down to the ag bags. It slowed them down a lot but they got a kick out of it just the same. Anyhow yesterday it finally figured out how to get out of the road.

Saw the sparrow hawk streaking for the heifer barn like his tail was on fire. In hot pursuit behind him, the house mockingbird. You wouldn't think a fast little falcon would be intimidated by a clown like the mocker, but he was really moving.

Saw what I thought was a new warbler right at the window yesterday too. Warblers are not usually so obliging and are hard to identify. This one was just feet from my eyes, picking insects off the cow parsley. I looked her up in Peterson's first after getting out my lovely stack of field guides and there she was...a female yellow. We have had yellows all along the driveway all spring,,,,but just were seeing the males.

And then there is the gold finch picking larvae out of the wasp nests at the big windows (excuse the lack of clarity...I will wash them later) and grabbing spider silk, evidently for its nest. It is a bold little critter and let Alan get these pictures.

High Tech for Everybody

But us. Ag columnist Chuck Jolley shared a link to this well-written piece on Facebook. Mike Barnett man tells it like it is and I wish I could walk up to him, shake his hand and thank him for it."

Wordless Wednesday

Four

AM that is.

Got up a while ago to see Liz off on her trip to Cornell. Cat and dog are cared for and water heating on the stove for kitchen clean up...hint to the boss...I am out of firewood. Warm showers are good. Cold ones are character builders, but not so pleasant.

Another hay field about cleaned up yesterday. Cows are back in the heifer lot and liking it there. And when someone drops off a shopping bag full of beans, you rejoice and freeze them.
So that is what I did.



In the afternoon I worked on this guy. Need to get him done so he can go to his new home wherever that may be. I will miss him I think.

The porch robins...taken through the screen door, sorry.

More Melamine in Milk

Yet another reason to keep it local when it comes to buying dairy products.

Middle 'O Summer with Frogs and Fogs

Gratuitous green frog, just because I can

The mist is lying soft on the foothills this morning and tossing scarfs of itself all across the heifer pasture. It is creeping down across the old horse pasture as I type this, fading the trees to shadows of themselves and dewing up the grass.

Indigo bunting, cat bird, robin, mocker and who knows who else are singing up a dawn chorus as bright as the first of June. Last night the mother robin actually slept with the nestlings instead of standing on guard all night. Must be it was cool enough to brood upon them rather than over them. Chickadees are back from wherever they have been hiding and Alan rescued a baby yellow warbler from the path the other day. We have been blessed in the bird department this year.

No cows in the heifer pasture this early morning. They spent the night in the old day pasture. The grass is good and Bonneville had her bull calf there yesterday. She came down to the barn at milking time, but we wanted to let her go back to him so, despite wanting the cows to have a wagon of green chop in the heifer field, we sent them north and west instead.Sky is pink and gold and orange and it is still cool enough for comfort.

That makes two bull calves this week, one a fat, sleek, milking shorthorn cross and the other BV's Keeneland Astre Pat son. As time goes on we are not losing our liking for the good crossbred shorty calves. We sent a steer one to the processor for our freezer last week and I am much looking forward to having our own beef again. We raise it much, much leaner than store beef where there are high allowances for fat content. Ours has a very good taste and I love cooking with it. We have been without home-raised beef all winter, mostly eating game with an occasional store bought hamburger or hot dog thrown in. The menu is about to get a lot more extensive.

Liz starts her new milk inspector job today, with her first training trip with our regular inspector. Tomorrow she will be off to Cornell University for some formal class work. Most of that will probably be review as she did study in the field in college. I know this is going to be a challenging task, (the inspector comes to tell you what you are doing wrong, which is usually not anybody's favorite thing) but I suspect she will do it well. Meanwhile we will feed the pony and get the cows grained while she is gone and hope she has fun down in the other half of the state.

Enjoy the day!

PS, the boss heard a man on television last night, who said that there were detailed ingredient lists on cow feed long before they put them on foods for human beings!

Sunday Stills.....Shadows

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