Saturday morning fun on the farm

We don't "officially" work on Saturday mornings between breakfast and lunch, but there are often chores that need to be attended to before we return for the afternoon milking. For instance, my dad and I moved cows into a grazing pasture this morning, and I then distributed a couple of hay bales to some heifers. I documented the work with three six-second "Vine" videos which you will see embedded below. Be warned: the videos are short but the cheesiness value is very high.

Scattered thoughts on a foggy Wednesday

The fog started rolling in a few minutes before 6:00 this morning, a sure sign that it's going to be another muggy day here in northwest Alabama. Though it won't be terribly comfortable, we already have three hours of work under our belts this morning and might as well go for 8 or so more!

We'll have one tractor back in the cornfields this morning trying to clean up the weed problems while I "burn-down" a couple of other fields in preparation to no-till plant some late season silage corn. We have enough seed to plant 45 acres, which is how much acreage we have in Yellow Creek bottom. However, it looks like we'll never get all of that acreage dried out before our corn planting window closes. So, we'll plant as much as we can in the bottom then finish out in a couple of our upland fields (17 acres worth). Hopefully we'll be able to use most of that seed in the bottom and can go back to our original plan of planting sudex on those two other fields.

Speaking of sudex, we'll probably be drilling that into our milking herd's grazing pastures next week. The ryegrass has just about played out and the cows are making their final pass through each of the paddocks.

So last week was mostly focused on herd health, this week is on weed control, next week should be planting, and the week after that? Harvesting bermudagrass hay, hopefully!

Quickly, a couple of words about Alabama politics. John McMillan and Dorman Grace, the two most qualified GOP candidates for Commissioner of Agriculture and Industries, are headed towards the Republican Party's July run-off ballot. The winner of that election will go on to face unchallenged Democrat Glen Zorn in the November general election. Also, congrats to fellow young farmer Clay Scofield for pulling in the most votes for the GOP's nomination for State Senate District 9's seat. Best of luck in the run-off, Clay!

Have a "dairy" good Wednesday, everyone!

Lots of Sudex

We planted nearly 45 acres of sudex (sorghum-sudangrass) this year for our milking herd to graze. Thanks to a dry spell earlier this summer it was very slow to come up, but once the rains started coming the sudex started growing. And growing, and growing! Due to the heat, we can only graze our cows for about two hours each morning after milking, and night-time grazing in our sudex paddocks is out of the question since they are across the road from our barn (not safe to move cows across a public road at 3am). Between the rapid growth and the narrow grazing window, the cows haven't been able to keep up with it.

We've already cut, green baled, and silage wrapped around 175 bales of the sudex that had grown too tall for the cows to graze. In fact, we still have approximately 30 more to bale later today. All of this has come from a 26 acre field the cows have been in only twice. We're also starting to bush-hog the 18 acres worth of paddocks they've regularly been grazing. The sudex there has also grown too tall for them as they've been stripping off the leaves but not eating the stems. Cutting it off about 6 inches tall should stimulate more nutritious regrowth.

Even though our sorghum crop (which we'll chop for silage) is "hit or miss" depending on which field it's in, our sudex grazing/hay and bermudagrass hay crops have really done well so far this summer. With milk prices so low and feed costs so high, growing quality forage is an absolute must on our farm. Thankfully we've had the weather to do it for most of the summer.

Lots to do today

We've got plenty of tasks lined up for us today on the farm.

I'll be hooking up our spray wagon before much longer and head for the sorghum fields. We didn't get a very good control on broadleaf weeds at planting time, so I'm going to attack the morning glory, sicklepod, and cuckleburr that's beginning to plague our forage.

My dad started replanting some of our crop yesterday evening and will hopefully get finished with that today. Roughly 20 acres of sorghum in one field was destroyed by worms over the weekend and will be completely replanted with sudex (sorghum-sudangrass). He will also be doing some "spot" replanting in a few fields where our sorghum stand is not very good.

Meanwhile, the other guys will start off feeding all the heifers and will then build a fence to create a couple of new grazing paddocks. Later they will start getting the haying equipment tooled up so we can bale the few acres of sudex we cut yesterday afternoon.

And of course, there are 174 cows that will need to be milked around 1:00pm.

Here's to another hot, humid, busy, and hopefully productive day on the farm!

It's Friday

By the end of today I think we will be able to say that we've gotten a lot accomplished this week, but we've still got a whole lot to do.

We've got our oats and ryegrass planted on the 50 acres directly across from our farm. We'll strip graze our milking herd on these fields this coming spring, and maybe even this fall if the weather works out right. On a related note, I spent a couple of days spreading organic fertilizer onto these fields and in doing so emptied our storage tank. While the nutrient value of the fertilizer isn't quite stout enough to fully meet the crops' requirements, the moisture it provided to the soil should help with seed germination.

Speaking of moisture, there's a chance we may get "a stray thunderstorm" on Tuesday, but that's all they're predicting right now.

We're going to try to get our equipment ready today to start cutting our sorghum silage on Monday. Hopefully once we start we can get through it with minimal downtime. Things tend to get a little more intense around here when we're chopping silage, so I'm sure I'll be letting out a big "JOHN DENVER!!!" once we have the silage covered and sealed in the pit.

Fall preview

I went out early this morning and the temperature was a cool, dry 57 degrees. It looks as if maybe summer's on its way out as our lows are supposed to stay in the 50's and our highs will be in the low 80's. The change should let us spot-graze our milking herd a little more in the mornings without worrying about them getting too hot 'round about 10:30.

On the agenda for today, we'll have a concrete crew resurfacing one of our silage pits (and another tomorrow) while we replace half of the belts on our hay baler. If we can take care of that pretty quick, we should be able to get back to cutting crabgrass. I could see us cutting and green-baling 8 acres worth today and then wrapping it tomorrow.

Overall, here's what we're facing. It's funny how everything kind of stacks up and needs doing a the same time.

• Our forage sorghum is ready to cut. Before we can, we have to have our silage pits resurfaced (they should be ready to go by next week), our dump wagon re-plated (the plates are ready, the machine shop just has to come out and weld them on), our dump truck fixed (or hire/rent another truck), and the ground in the bottomland has to be dry enough to run on. With any luck we'll be able to start in about next Tuesday, but it's too soon to know that for sure.
• We planted 20 acres of BMR sudex which is ready to harvest. We can either chop it and pack it into a pit like our forage sorghum or we can green bale and wrap it.
  
• We've got roughly 45 acres of bermudagrass that will be cut for hay this season. 10 acres is ready, another 25 should be in about 10 days, and the rest in about three weeks.
• 40 acres worth of oats and ryegrass is ready to be drilled in right now. We plan on strip grazing our milking herd on it late this fall and then again in the spring.
• Roughly 50 acres of crabgrass will have to be removed (cut & baled, maybe wrapped) to drill in our other crops.

We've got our work cut out for us over the next couple of weeks!

Changing Feed

We've run out of corn silage, and we're almost out of peanut hay, so our cows' TMR is changing. We'll be building it around our baleage (probably 3 bales a day), and will use dry hay (bermuda or ryegrass), cotton hulls, and custom-mix dairy feed. We've still got a few more days worth of grazing in the fields across from the barn, so that will help a little.

70 Pounds +

We measured our cows milk production yesterday, and they broke the 70 pound threshold averaging 71.9 pounds/cow. We also had 19 cows produce over 100 pounds.

The recent surge in production is due to the amount of wheat and oats we've been able to let them graze. It's raining this morning, so that probably means that Friday morning will be the only opportunity this week to graze them and cut back on the TMR.