Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Busy Monday, Wet Tuesday

Monday always seems to be pretty busy on the farm, and yesterday was no exception.

Our local large animal vet arrived on the dairy around 8:30am to pregnancy-check 60 cows from our milking herd.  Most of the cows he checked were pregnant, and it now looks like we're going to be calving heavily in the month of August.  We didn't have an opportunity to bring in the last group of heifers we bred, so they'll have to wait another few weeks before we can get an official pregnancy confirmation on them.

Following lunch, our local DHIA technician joined us for the afternoon milking so he could record each cow's production and take quality samples.  We've since gotten the weights back and should have the quality report by the end of the week.  Combined with the pregnancy results, the DHIA report will help us make a determination on which cows should be culled from the herd and which ones might need an extended dry period.

Today wasn't quite as busy, and the weather certainly could have been better. We tried to keep a roof over our heads as much as possible due to the never-ceasing rain, and our morning tasks included vaccinating a group of 20 calves we'll wean later this week and repairing a cable on one of our front-end loaders. Fun, fun stuff.

Along with weaning the calves I just mentioned, one of the bigger jobs still on the week's agenda will be to select our next group of heifers to breed.  Other than that, it'll pretty much be the same-old, same-old.

Man, I cannot wait for springtime to get here!

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