Late night cattle drive

When the phone rang at 11:48 last night, I knew it could mean only one thing...cows were out. Actually, eight of the heifers in the pasture right next to my house had been spooked or ran through the fence by something and had high-tailed it down the road. After an initial search, we hadn't found the heifers but did find where they tore down their fence. We decided to give finding them one more try before we called it off until daylight. About three miles down the road we finally found them and got them turned back around. Luckily for us, they never strayed from the right-of-way on the way back and we never met a vehicle either. We had them back in their pen about a quarter 'til two this morning. Despite the time of night and the distance, this was actually a pretty easy "cattle drive" compared to some of the wild ones we've had in the past.

Heifer breeding time

We caught 38 heifers this morning that are ready to be bred. If we're successful with our AI'ing, they should calve sometime in early-to-mid December.

Applying fertilizer? Not so fast!

Yesterday I hooked up our sprayer wagon with the thoughts of applying some liquid nitrogen fertilizer to some of our spring forages. I thought I could cover somewhere between 40-50 acres before the rain moves in today.

Wrong answer.

It turns out that our pto roller pump has deteriorated to some degree and won't deliver the pressure needed to spray out the N-sol at the correct rate. So, we're stuck until a new one arrives sometime next week.

Meanwhile, we weighed our cows' milk yesterday and should get preliminary results back today. I'm going to guess that our average (of only those milking) was around 67 pounds each.