Dairy Update

It's been crazy busy here lately. I'll put it to you this way. It's 8pm on Thursday and here I am blogging instead of watching The Office, because we just finished supper. It's been this way for weeks. The guys have been busy in the field. Our crops are out sans about 3 acres of corn. Pat is busy applying anhydrous ammonia (nitrogen fertilizer). His dad has been working on hauling out the manure pile. We stockpile during the summer when our crops are growing and haul it out in the fall after harvest. Since they are busy doing field work, that leaves the milking chores to me, Pat's mom, and our hired help. That's not out of the ordinary, but it means there is no getting done early!

If that isn't enough, we've also been calving heavily. Our cows calve year round but for some reason we always seem to calve heavier in the fall and spring. You'd think we could time that better! I'm currently at 25 calves, down from our peak of 30. We've had 5 sets of twins since the 13th of October! I've been pestering Pat for an actual calf barn instead of our hutches. We use wooden hutches with 5 or 7 pens in each hutch. A lot of people like the poly domes, but those didn't work well for us. The wooden ones keep our calves cool and shaded in the summer and insulated in the winter. I like our hutches, however, hauling milk to the 24 calves behind the barn gets to be a pain, especially in the mud and snow. My dream is to have some type of building (hoop barn or whatever) with 36-40 plastic stalls and an attached, heated, prep room. Funny, when did that become my dream...

At any rate, it's been busy on and off the farm. I have a 30 minute presentation to prepare fo school and so far all I've done is read the article I'm presenting on. I'm still searching for my motivation but it's not in the carpets that need to be cleaned, or the windows that need to be washed, or the piles of laundry that need to be folded, or the new blinds that need to be put up, or the mud room that's getting redone. I bet it's hiding in the dirty bathrooms or on the sticky kitchen floor. Someone remind me why I volunteered to host Thanksgiving this year???

Election Day

It's election day. Did you vote? I did and in the political spirit, I am posting my favorite political joke, taken from the latest issue of Reader's Digest.

A woman in a hot-air balloon is lost, so she shouts to a man below, "Excuse me. I promised a friend I would meet him, but I don't know where I am."

"You're at 31 degrees, 14.57 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude," he replies.

"You must be a Democrat."

"I am. How did you know?"

"Because everything you told me is technically correct, but the information is useless, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've been no help."

"You must be a Republican."

"Yes. How did you know?"

"You've risen to where you are due to a lot of hot air, you made a promise you couldn't keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You're in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but somehow, now it's my fault."

Wordless Wednesday: Halloween Edition

Adventures in Potty Training...Again

It feels like I've been potty training for years. Maybe because I have. Anywho, it's Tate's turn this time. I figured since he wakes up dry, it was time. He does pretty well except that he won't tell me he needs to go. If you take him every couple of hours, he'll be dry. Forget to take him, wet. I think I need a couple of days of him half naked and he'll get it, but I haven't had a couple of days with him lately.

Anywho, yesterday Pat took him in the tractor in the morning. He took him potty twice, but when I got him at 1:30 he was soaked. Luckily Pat had a diaper in his pickup, but no pants. So poor Tate got to wander around the corn field like this:
It was pretty chilly in the morning when they left and Tate wanted to wear his new snow boots. Maybe I'm biased, but I think he's rocking the pantless snowboot look.

Skip to My Lou

We recently made a quick trip to my parents' where my niece attempted to teach Cole how to skip. I didn't get a video then, but I got one last night of both boys attempting to skip. It's definitely good for a giggle.

The Great Fall Flood

So this post is a little late, but here goes.

About a week and a half ago we got a ton of rain. Some areas got up to 6" of rain on already saturated ground. We didn't get quite that much, but we got plenty. Fortunately for us, our worst field had already been harvested for corn silage.

Corn silage was an adventure this year. Our cows eat a variety of grain and forage. We feed them a mixture of ground corn, dry hay, haylage (fermented alfalfa), and corn silage (the entire corn plant, chopped and fermented). Some years we also do wet corn (corn at a higher moisture than typically harvested) or earlage (the ear of corn, husk, cob, and all, chopped up). With all the rain we'd been getting our silage didn't get harvested until later than usual. We ended up having to have a neighbor chop the last bag of silage with his self-propelled chopper since there was no way our pull type chopper would make it through. Fortunately we finished, but our neighbor wasn't so fortunate. He chopped half a bag after we finished ours, but then got rained out. The bag sat open (which drove Pat nuts since silage spoils easily) for over a week until he finished it the other day. Silage is ideally chopped when the corn plant is still fairly green, but some years you don't get ideal.

We didn't get any wet corn or earlage harvested this year, but our cows can do without. The important thing is that they get a mixture of forages and grain and our hay crop this year was fantastic.

After a week of drying the guys have been off trying to find dry fields to combine soy beans. We've gotten out a few fields and so far the yield has been great. They are anticipating a long harvest, especially since one of Pat's uncle's fields went under water earlier this week. The water is receding, but the damage has been done.

Here are a couple of pictures taken about a mile from our house. In our area, we have a series of deep drainage ditches that dump into local rivers. The drainage ditches were full (the one by our house has got to be at least 12' deep) and overflowed into the road ditches and fields. The 6" of rain they got to the south of us also had to travel up these drainage ditches, which caused the loss of Pat's uncle's field.

These pictures are pretty mild compared to some of the flooding to the west of us. I didn't go for a drive out that way when it was at its worst and the couple of times I was out there I didn't have my camera, go figure!

Why I Don't Eat Lipton Noodles

Recently a friend of mine was complaining about having a cold. Normally that would not be cause for a status comment, but every time this particular friend complains about a cold or sinuses it reminds me of a story. When I was in college, the first time around, I was fortunate to have a lot of really awesome friends. One such friend's, we'll call her J, parents had recently moved to Lincoln. Her dad was in between jobs, thus her family was in between houses and living in an apartment. One weekend we decided to head to Lincoln and nab some real food. Keep in mind this was B.C. (before cell phones, or at least before most people had cell phones) and also when being on the internet tied up your phone line. We tried calling her parents to see if they were home, but her sister was on the internet, so we couldn't get through. So we stopped by. Her parents weren't home, but we decided to make up some Lipton noodles. I was never big on Ramen, but I lived off of Lipton noodles for years. Anywhoodle, while we were eating I said something incredibly hilarious, as I usually do, while J was taking a bite. My witty comment forced her to laugh and in doing so she inhaled a noodle. No big deal normally, but this noodle took a peculiar turn and wound up in her sinus. Seriously, you could feel it at the bridge of her nose. It wasn't a little spaghetti noodle either, it was a fettuccini noodle. She was of course in a bit of pain but the situation was so funny we were both crying with laughter. The noodle did come out with a sneeze, and I haven't been able to eat Lipton noodles since without thinking of that story. It always makes me laugh a little.