An early July farm update

Hey, folks! The calendar has turned from June to July, the humidity seems to ratchet up by the day, and we are in full-blown "Summertime Mode" on the farm. Let me take a moment to share with you where we stand on our dairy herd and forage crops.

We currently have 160 cows in our milking herd after drying off 14 cows at the beginning of this week. We should hold there for a couple of weeks before we dry off any more, and then we'll start freshening a few toward the end of the month. I haven't checked the weekly "dry offs vs calvings" projections to see where we'll bottom out numbers-wise, but I would image around 135 sometime between late August and mid-September. But speaking of bottoming out, milk production has really started its annual summer slide. We could be getting a little more out of the cows, but when you take the high cost of feed and relatively low price for milk into account we're economically better off not pushing them to their highest production potential right now.

On the forage side, we have planted all of our acreage save for our bottomland which is still too wet to do anything with. Silage corn went into the ground a good month later than I had hoped for on account of wet conditions in late April through May, but we got it in and up and fertilized and sprayed. I've spent the past week drilling 100 acres worth of sorghum-sudangrass (sudex), the first of which has already started to emerge. If all goes as planned, we'll cut and chop it all before we begin chopping corn and then harvest it a second time as hay or baleage (and may graze some of it). We aren't planning to hay quite as much bermudagrass this year, but we are in-between the first and second full cutting on our best hay fields. 

Well, it looks like my lunch break is about over and it's time to head back to the dairy. I'll leave y'all with a few recent photos I've taken around the farm. Have a good'un!

drone shot taken from the southwest corner of the farm

drone shot taken at sunset after a rain (dairy barn on right)

good ol' Ms Nosey is still hanging around

our sorghum-sudangrass has started to emerge and will be a key part of our forage program this year

Harvest is finished, but there ain't no slowing down!

We can finally close the book on this year's silage harvest! What started six and a half weeks ago ended Thursday with 165 acres of corn, forage sorghum, and sudex chopped, packed, and sealed into our three silage pits.  I'm estimating that we harvested roughly 1400 tons of silage (it's hard to be sure w/o truck scales), which should be enough to feed our milking herd through mid-to-late spring. 

dumping a load of chopped sudex

The corn in our first pit has now been sealed long enough to fully ensile, and I expect we'll begin feeding it late next week. We'll be getting a new grain mix formula from the feed mill based on the silage's forage analysis, and will add other home-grown forage in with it to make a total-mixed ration (TMR). We have about two weeks worth of spring oat baleage we'll use up first before switching to sudex baleage we harvested a few weeks ago.  We're also going to look into using cotton hulls as a fiber source in the ration so as to preserve our bermudagrass hay for heifers and dry cows.

As the feed quality improves over the next few weeks, so to should our milk production. The cooler evenings and opportunities for supplemental morning grazing will also help in that regard. We are currently up to 182 cows in milk and are on pace to climb back over the 200 mark sometime before the end of the year. In other news, we AI'ed (artificially inseminated) 9 cows this week, the first we had bred since early summer.

This coming week is going to be crazy busy. In addition to the everyday dairy chores, we're going to be cleaning and putting away our harvesting equipment, applying slurry with our honeywagon, and possibly harvesting some rank pasture grass as "get-by-in-case-of-a-long-winter" hay.  On top of that, some folks from our dairy checkoff will be on the farm Tuesday morning to get video footage for part of the "Dedicated to Dairy" campaign, I have a meeting at the Alabama Farmers Federation's Montgomery office on Wednesday, and then I'll be on Mississippi State's campus on Maroon Friday to give a presentation to the Ag Econ's faculty and grad students (Hail State!).

I hope y'all have a "dairy" good week!

More forage, and GPS-guided fertilizing

We're still building up our forage inventory, and have recently harvested 22 acres of sudex (sorghum-sudangrass). We started Monday of last week by mowing the 10 acre patch across the road from my house. Three straight days of rain showers meant that it took us that long to get all of it baled and silage wrapped, but in the end we were left with 114 bales of "baleage". They will be on the high end of the moisture scale thanks to rain and very little sunshine between mowing and baling, and I'm estimating that they'll average somewhere between 1600-1750 pounds each. We cut an additional 12 acres this week, but the stand wasn't nearly as good. We yielded 68 bales on that acreage, but the moisture level was much closer to the 55% we prefer. You can check out this video from last year to see a bale of sudex being silage wrapped.

We've also cut 25 acres of crabgrass this week. That's right, crabgrass can make a pretty good forage! This is a "volunteer" crop that has established in one of our fields over the last few years. We typically plant this acreage in cool-season crops and use it for grazing in late fall and spring, and we opted not to plant sudex on it this summer. We've had some great drying weather this week, and we'll begin baling it tomorrow afternoon.

I'm also fertilizing our harvested fields, and I'm doing so with the aid of a demo GPS unit thanks to the Extension Service's Amy Winstead and the Alabama Precision Ag team. I applied 16 loads of dairy slurry ("Water 'n Poo") today on the first sudex field we harvested, and the GPS was a big help in making sure I got full coverage with the right overlap widths. The real test of the system's guidance (or my reliance upon it) was going to be tonight when I intended on spreading in a bermudagrass hay field after dark. Alas, a slow leak on a rear tractor tire progressively got worse this afternoon and forced me to postpone any further fertilization until the tire has been patched.

In other news, the weather has been great this week considering it's still August: low humidity, low temperatures in the 60s, and highs only in the low 90s with a nice breeze. The cows are much more comfortable, are eating more, and hopefully will be producing more milk than what they have been lately! Our intentions are to begin harvesting the last of our corn silage next week, and I'll be off the farm Monday and Tuesday attending a conference in Chicago.

Have a "dairy" good week, everyone, and don't forget to raise your hand for chocolate milk!!!

Hay & Grazing Update

We finished baling our hay early Friday afternoon without any further mechanical or weather issues. We had a light yield this time, thanks mostly to the lack of July rainfall. Taking our superb first cutting into account, though, our hay inventory is about where it usually is in mid-August. We'll get our bermudagrass fertilized soon and will hope to be cutting it again in late-September.

Our next little bit of field work will involve harvesting a 10 acre field of sudex as baleage. We'll mow it, "green" bale it the next day, and then silage wrap the bales.

Speaking of sudex, we planted this crop in a few grazing paddocks and turned our milking herd into one for the first time this summer. It gets too hot too early for our cows to both graze and eat TMR, and so far we've opted to keep feeding their TMR twice a day. At their current low level of milk production, though, we're going to try to give them a heavier evening feeding and graze them from 5:30-7:30am. We may still see a further drop in production, but grazing may still be a more economical choice with the price of feed increasing lately. Time will tell.

Cows, crops, and links for 7/8/10

Summertime in the Deep South can be mighty tough on farmers and dairy cows alike due to the heat and humidity, but the first few days of this month weren't quite so bad. The air was drier and the nights were a little cooler, and our cows responded with their highest average daily milk production since mid-May. Now that the heat index is starting to creep back up, I'm sure our production will come down a little bit. Even so, the combination of keeping the cows cool (they have access to fans and sprinklers most days from 9am-6pm) and providing quality feed will help them make it through the summer without too much heat stress.

Speaking of quality feed, our forages are looking pretty good. They could use some rain, of course, but we've gotten enough timely showers over the last few weeks to keep anything from "hurting" for water. Our bermudagrass hay fields have all been fertilized and are growing nicely. Our early corn is pollinating and will probably be ready to chop for silage by the end of the month. Our bottom land corn is knee-to-thigh high and looks really good. And the sorghum-sudangrass (sudex) that I planted last week looks to be nice and thick. I've got a few photos below for your viewing pleasure.

And finally, here are few links for you:

• Our farm was currently featured on WCBI-TV's "A Day in the Life" series. You can learn more and find links to the video segments via our website's News section.
• I've posted a new GDF Vocowbulary video explaining what a dairy's "parlor" is.
• I also posted an opinion piece, "Don't put all your eggs in the social media basket", Farm Bureau's YF&R Blog.

Have a "dairy" good day, folks!

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.

Silage...done.

We're pretty much done with our silage harvest for this year. Dad cut the last load of sorghum out of our Yellow Creek bottom fields yesterday afternoon about 4:00. All that's left is to move the equipment back and cut about three loads of BMR sudex in front of my house to "cap" the pit. After that, we'll cover and seal the pit and let it do its thing for a few weeks before we start feeding it to our cows.

Friday morning on the farm

Our cows were really milking good this morning, so I hope that kind of sets a tone for the rest of the day.

We'll start chopping more bermudagrass after breakfast. It's been going into the pit pretty good, and time will tell what kind of quality it returns as silage. We expect to finish with it mid-morning. Once we do, we'll swap the head on the silage chopper and transition back to chopping sudex. We'll use the sudex to "cap" over the bermudagrass in the pit, as it will pack tighter. There's a chance if everything goes well that we can chop all the sudex in a long afternoon, but more than likely we'll e fininshing it up one afternoon over the weekend. We'll get moved back into the creek bottom either Sunday evening or Monday morning and will resume chopping our sorghum as soon as the ground is dry enough to run the equipment over.

Wednesday morning update

A large-animal vet will be coming to the farm tomorrow morning to give our cows a check-up, so we've adjusted our forage gathering plans a little. We cut a few acres of crabgrass yesterday that we'll bale and wrap today, and also cut 10 acres of BMR sudex that we'll bale and wrap tomorrow afternoon. We'll also be cutting about 10 acres of bermudagrass this morning that we intend to dry bale on Friday.

Also from yesterday, one of our silage pits was resurfaced and looks really good. I just looked out my son's bedroom window and could see that the crew is already working on the second pit.

Our cows seem to be enjoying this milder weather, and the forecasts I've seen show that is should be like this for several days. I hope so, because the cows aren't the only ones enjoying it!

A new week beigns

After getting another round of rain in here Saturday evening (1.1 inch), we're pretty certain that our sudex crop is going to make something. We don't have very much acreage planted, but I'm planning on spraying the weeds in it today. The air conditioning on the tractor I'll be using is temporarily out of commission, so I'll be starting early and finishing as quick as I can. We may do some limited replanting in one of our fields tomorrow, but I'll get a better handle on that after I've sprayed what's there.

Our cows milked better this morning than they have in the last 10 days. We've cut back their forage a little bit, and dad thinks the change in TMR formulation might be responsible for the upturn. According to the long-term forecast, we should have very hot days the first half of this week but then things will cool off somewhat. We could be seeing nighttime lows down to the mid-60's and highs only reaching the low 90's. That doesn't sound like a big drop, but the cows will notice it.

Wow!

Dolly has come and gone, leaving behind 3.5 inches of rain at Gilmer Dairy Farm. We enjoyed nearly constant rainfall from about 5:30 to 8:00 last night. I cannot remember how long its been since we've had that much rain in one evening. We even had a lightning strike that knocked our power out overnight!

We had ammonia nitrate spread on about 20 acres of bermudagrass and 10 acres of sudex two days ago, so this rain couldn't have come at a better time. The question we'll be wrestling with over the weekend is about that sudex field. Our stand is pretty spotty, and we may opt to go in and replant portions of the field early next week. Of course, if we don't get another rain for two weeks, the ground will go back to being like concrete.

Own the cow front, we dried off 10 this morning, who were averaging 23 pounds per day apiece based upon the prelim. milk weighing report we received. We're happy to see those cows go dry for a couple of months (pregnant cows are typically removed from production two months prior to calving). Next week's a different story. We've got 14 due to dry off next Friday, who are averaging 46 pounds per day apiece. We can hold a couple of those heaviest producers for an extra week, but it's still going to be a blow drying off that many who are above the break-even line.

Can we plant?

Can we plant? That's the question I hope to answer within the hour. We're a little over 50 acres short of planting all the BMR sudex we inteded to drill in this summer due to the dry conditions. We've received some rainfall over the last couple of evenings, so I'm hopefull that the ground has softened up enough to run our grain drill over it.

As late as we're getting into the summer, we may only plant about half of our remaining acreage. This would allow us to get an early jump on our fall planting (wheat, oats, ryegrass, etc.).

Wrapping up the workweek

It's Friday, and looking back on the week it doesn't seem like we've gotten much accomplished. That doesn't mean we weren't busy, but we weren't "hammer down" like we usually are. We did get 61 bales of good quality bermudagrass rolled up for hay, as well as an additional 20 bales of rough bermuda we can use for roughage this fall. We've also trained our new employee this week to make and distribute our milking herd's TMR feed.

We've still got about 50 acres of BMR sorghum-sudangrass (sudex) to plant, but we can't until we get some rain to soften the ground. But not having the humidity needed to help generate a rainstorm did have one good impact...the heat index stayed down and the weather hasn't been as stressful on our cows (and us).

Happy 4th of July

It's Independence Day, and that means we're only planning on working a "short" full day.

We've already milked the cows this morning and will go back after breakfast to feed heifers and clean the place up a little bit. I'm hoping we'll be done somewhere between 10:00-10:30. After lunch, we'll come back and milk the cows again but that should be about it. We'll probably be done about 3:30, which will give me a little time to rest before firing up the grill for tonight.

Looking forward a little bit, our rain chances over the next ten days are a little more promising. There's no promise of how much we might get, but right now there's enough chances that surely we'll get one thunderstorm to rain on us. We desperately need it, and not just for our hay and pastures. Once we get some moisture, we'll be able to plant our sorghum-sudangrass (sudex) crop.

Speaking of hay, dad finished baling our first "pure" cutting of bermudagrass late yesterday morning. We had 63 bales of Russell bermudagrass off of 13 acres and 146 bales of Tifton 44 off of 31 acres. Not bad considering how dry its been. We have another 20 acres or so of Russell that's ready to be cut as soon as the weather forecast is favorable.

Round One of planting complete

We finished all of our work down in the creek bottom yesterday afternoon. We've now got 50 acres of forage sorghum planted, with all of it's fertilizer applied as well as the pre-emerge herbicides. Hopefully we can get some rain pretty quick so the sorghum will pop on out and get a good start before the herbicide wears off.

I'm not sure what I'll get into today. I'll probably burn down a couple of fields where we're planning on drilling in BMR sorghum-sudangrass.

It's hot in NW Alabama

We returned from Panama City Beach about 4:00 yesterday afternoon, and I believe it's hotter in Lamar County than it was on the coast. It doesn't help that our home's air conditioning apparently broke down while we were away.

Our cows' production has continued to declined since we had to change their feed formulation about three weeks ago. Even though our TMR has been formulated by a professional, something isn't jiving. It may be the feed itself, it may be the amount the cows are eating/not eating, it may be the heat, or it may be a combination of reasons. Anyway, their health is good but we've got to figure out a way to get their production back up.

Speaking of things to fix, the new Jay-Lor mixer wagon we bought a few weeks ago still isn't doing what we think it should. It's taking too long to grind up the baleage and is throwing too much of it out of the mixing tub. The dealership has sent someone to look at it and they are supposed to come back end of the week to make some adjustments on it. We'll see if it makes a difference.

In the "what else can go wrong" category, both of our New Idea 5406 hay mowers are out of commission with broken gears in the cutterbar. Hopefully we can buy replacement parts for just what's broken without having to buy an expensive kit/combo. Our other alternatives would be trying to find replacement parts at a salvage yard or buying a new mower and robbing parts off of one of the old ones to fix the other.

Luckily, with an assist from our Gehl cutter/conditioner, they were able to get all of our ryegrass cut down. We'll put our hay baler on this afternoon and start what will probably be about a three day process to get it all rolled up. We'll be putting all of this hay up dry, as opposed to the baleage we made off of the first cutting.

So, between the normal milking and feeding schedule today and tomorrow, we'll have to bale hay, haul some baleage to the "home base" to grind in our feed wagon, field apply some organic nutrients, and hopefully finish disking our cropland in the Yellow Creek bottom. If we can get all of this accomplished, hopefully next week we will be able to start either drilling in our BMR sorghum-sudangrass (sudex) in our upland fields or start the process of planting our forage sorghum in the bottomland.

It looks like it's shaping up to be a long, hot, hard summer.

What we've accomplished

Over the last few days, we were able to harvest 68 bales of sudex baleage (bringing the grand total up to 106) and 143 bales of dry bermudagrass hay. On a per acre basis, neither of these are very good, but we're happy to get anything this year considering the drought. Other than helping dad change the milk machine inflations late one afternoon, I can't think of anything I've done this week that didn't involve cutting, baling, or wrapping hay.

I'll be going in to work at 3 am tomorrow morning to milk with my father while one of our employees handles feeding the cows and heifers. Once we finish milking, I'll prepare the cows' afternoon feed and then will be loading up to go to Starkville. It's homecoming at Mississippi State, and though I'll miss the Ag Alumni breakfast at 8:00, I should be there in time for the FarmHouse Association Meeting at 10:00. Afterwards, me and some of my old friends will enjoy pregame festivities in the Junction adjacent to Davis Wade Stadium. Then we'll watch State hopefully beat UAB starting at 1:30 pm.

Hay Time

After moving heifers and dry cows from pasture to pasture, weaning calves, and receiving a truckload of alfalfa yesterday morning, we turned our attention to our hayfields. I ran our cutter/conditioner through our remaining ten acres of sudex, which we project to bale green on Wednesday. Late this morning after the dew has dried, a couple of our employees will join in with our conventional hay mowers to help me cut about 40 acres of bermudagrass. We've got a long day ahead of us!

In other news, I made a few slight updates to our farm website over the weekend, most notably adding links to old articles about us at the bottom of our "farm news" page.

End of week wrap-up

Let's review:

• Tuesday - a continuation of Monday, as our full, 1000-gallon water tank slid off a wagon and busted. I also hit a lot of rocks as I was spot-cutting some sudex in a couple of our fields.
• Wednesday - nothing major to report other than weighing milk that afternoon.
• Thursday - I baled and wrapped the sudex I cut Tuesday and wound up with 38 bales. That's not very good, but considering the drought we're in I'm happy I got that many.
• Friday - I placed the hay bales I made on Thursday while the others cleaned up around the farm. This afternoon, we cut a field of bermudagrass and will plan on baling it Monday.