Here are a few photos I snapped over the past few days that can help tell the story of what's been happening on the farm.
Monday morning we "worked" a group of 65 Holstein heifers and Angus-crossed calves. We ear tagged those that didn't yet have one and gave them their vaccination booster shots before moving them to a new pasture.
I didn't go looking for a beautiful sunset on Monday evening, but I found one while my son and I were trying to get a couple of loose steers back into their pasture. The milking herd gathered along the east side of their pasture to check out all the commotion and provided us with this photo opportunity.
I created a YouTube channel for my farm shortly after purchasing my first smartphone in the Summer of 2009. After getting a little bit of attention for my "Water 'n Poo" song, I decided to to start uploading a series of short farm updates called "MooTube Minutes" every few days to keep people up-to-date with what was happening on our dairy farm.
These videos where originally shot and with a smartphone, but I eventually upgraded to a tripod-mounted FlipCam that allowed me to merge different clips together and upload a higher quality video from my desktop. I posted these updates fairly regularly for a couple of years, but several weeks would go by between episodes by the time I recorded my last one in May 2014.
But now, the "MooTube Minute" is back.
I've been using other apps to share farm video over the past couple of years, including a few different live-streaming services. I started doing a daily live stream on Periscope recapping the day's farm work a couple of weeks ago and have decided to begin uploading at least some of them to YouTube. These new MooTube Minutes are generally going to be a little longer than the originals (3-5min) and will more often than not be shot "selfie style."
If you would like to interact with me while I stream/record, I encourage you to download the Periscope app and set a notification for when I go live. If you simply want to watch, you can do so live or later via Periscope and Twitter, or you can watch the ones I upload to YouTube without the live comments popping up on the screen.
It's been a long, cold Winter, but Spring has finally sprung and that means that the grazing season is upon us! The wheat and ryegrass we planted late last Fall has gotten tall enough (and the ground firm enough) to begin grazing our milking cows in the mornings, which we've done now for four consecutive days. The girls have already responded by upping their milk production a couple of pounds, and I suspect that number to climb by a couple more pounds by mid-week.
As a reminder to my local readers, most of our cows' grazing land is across the road from our dairy barn. Be prepared to stop and watch the cows cross the road for a couple of minutes if you plan on driving by our farm around 8:30am or 1:00pm.
Now, here are a few videos and photos from the first few days of grazing:
I love the sight of our black & white cows out in a green pasture!
Mooooving on down the road back to the milking barn.
cows on their way to graze
With their bellies now full of green grass, the cows are ready to head back to the milking barn.
Hey, folks! I'd like to apologize for the lack of blog activity over the last couple of weeks, and hopefully this MooTube Minute will catch you up to speed on what's been happening on our dairy farm lately.
It's been a busy two weeks, but we're nearly finished with our ryegrass harvest for this year. Our yields have been comparable to last year, and we should have enough harvested to make it our milking herd's primary forage from June until possibly as late as early October. Up to this point we have cut and chopped just over 75 acres with 12-15 more to go. Depending on the weather, we may pass on chopping a few of those acres in favor of rolling a few bales of dry ryegrass hay.
We will follow our ryegrass with a BMR forage sorghum variety just as we did last year, but we won't be planting that crop for at least a month. Next up on our "farming" agenda is planting our silage corn, which we tried to do two weeks ago but got rained out. That was probably a blessing considering we've had barely a sprinkle since then. If all goes perfectly (which, of course, it never does) we'll have our corn planted by the end of next week, spend the next vaccinating heifers and doing some pasture maintenance, followed by our first cutting of bermudagrass hay.
Here are a few photos from our ryegrass harvest, followed by my latest MooTube Minute video update:
We mow the ryegrass with a hay conditioner, which leaves the cut grass in a windrow.
Our silage chopper (forage harvester) is a bit of a hybrid. The chopper itself is a John Deere, but the forage head is a Gehl model my father modified to attach to the Deere.
Once the forage wagon is full, it dumps over into the truck. The truck then hauls the ryegrass to the silage pit/bunker where it is packed.
Happy New Year, everyone! I'm sure you're probably happy indeed if you're getting the same kind of weather we're enjoying in Lamar County, Alabama. Yesterday was windy and today is cold, but it's clear and dry and the days are going to warm as the week progresses. It's the kind of weather well suited for getting things done around the farm.
Our field work this week includes a little planting and lots of fertilizing. We'll have about 60 cows and heifers pregnancy-checked on Thursday, and of course we'll be milking and feeding every day like always.
For a little more on this week's farm activities, check out my newest MooTube Minute video below.
Silage chopping has run pretty smoothly this week, and I'm happy to report that we now have one silage pit full of sorghum. We'll take some time this morning to cover and seal the pit with plastic so the chopped sorghum will ferment properly. It will be several months before our cows eat any of this feed (we'll use up the corn silage first), but we expect it will preserve nicely.
We still have approximately 20 acres of sorghum remaining, which we'll chop next week and pack into our smallest silage pit. Once we're finished, harvesting 25 acres of sudex (sorghum-sudangrass) will be next on the to-do list. We might chop it and pack it into the pit as well, but we'll most likely make baleage out of it by cutting, baling, and wrapping.
For your viewing pleasure, I've included our latest MooTube Minute which focuses on our silage harvest. I hope you enjoy and, as always, have a "dairy" good day!
That's the question our local large-animal veterinarian will be answering when he comes to our farm this morning to check about 80 cows and heifers for pregnancy.
Many of the cows he'll examine were artificially inseminated with Angus semen during the summer. We decided to use Angus from mid-June through August because it was best economical option during what is historically our lowest conception-rate season. We suspect most of the cows are pregnant because we haven't seen them come back into estrus (heat), but we want a professional opinion just in case there are any problems with the cows' reproductive systems.
We AIed the group of heifers in question at the beginning of summer, and they've had a bull roaming the pasture with them ever since. After examining each heifer, the veterinarian will be able to tell us if the size of her fetus matches up with her AI date or if she was likely bred by our herd bull. Any heifers that he calls "open" (not pregnant) or suspects of being short bred (<30 days) will either remain with the bull or will be sent to pasture with the next group of heifers we'll breed in early December.
In other farm news, we dried off 15 pregnant milkers yesterday, dropping our total number of cows in milk to 169. This is our lowest point of the year, but we'll be rebounding shortly as we'll be calving-in many more than we'll be drying off over the next few months. On the forage planting front, I planted rye and triticale on 30 acres of prepared ground last week (see the MooTube Minute below). We can possibly finish planting oats on the prepared ground this week if we get an overnight rain. I don't expect we'll be in any hurry about no-tilling our grazing land, so it will probably be the first of November before we start planting the rye/ryegrass mixture.
If you happen to be in Indianapolis this week for the National FFA Convention, make sure you swing by the AFBF YF&R booth at the Career Show and say hello!
This afternoon we mowed the last 13 acres of bermudagrass we'll harvest this summer. Ideally it would have been harvested about 10 days ago, but silage chopping ALWAYS takes precedence above any other field work on the farm. The hay will be a little on the mature side and therefore the quality will suffer a little bit, but our heifers and dry cows will be happy to eat it this winter. Even without the 50+ acres we lost to fall armyworms a couple of weeks ago, we've had a productive forage season with both hay/baleage and chopped silage.
We still have a little fixing to do before we actually bale this hay. The tractor we generally rake hay with, a Ford 6600 (as made infamous here), will need its radiator repaired if we expect to use it. We also have a torn belt on our baler that will have to be patched or replaced within the next couple of days.
The only other haying I foresee the season is a few acres of sudex we'll probably cut and harvest as baleage next week. After that, all of our field work will probably be focused on our fall-planted, spring-harvested cool season forage crops.
If you would like to watch me talk about this week's haying instead of just reading it above, click "play" on our latest MooTube Minute below.
As you can see by Accuweather.com's forecast on the left, it's going to be another HOT one here on our dairy farm. Looking at the extended forecast, we're not going to get much of a break, either. We should cool down to the mid-90's (yeah, BIG change) by the end of the week, and right now we have small window in which we might get some rain either Friday or Saturday.
Regardless of the terrible heat, dairy farming is a 365 day a year job so we'll be right out there in it doing the best we can. Our cows, fortunately, have been getting enough relief from the fans and sprinklers in our barns to keep from showing too many ill-effects of the heat. Sure, their milk production has dropped, but we have yet to see any health problems we can attribute directly to the heat. We are sending a half-dozen cows to the stockyard this morning (dairy cows provide beef, too!) and should be milking 194 this afternoon.
Our corn silage harvest continues and is hopefully nearing completion. We'll be servicing our harvesting equipment first thing this morning before moving it to the final 22-acre field remaining to be cut. A field that size could be harvested in just a few hours with the right equipment, but it'll take our 2-row chopper close to two full days to harvest the terraced, contoured field. Hopefully the old thing will hold together so we can be finish sometime tomorrow afternoon. Once we've finished with the corn we'll jump right into 50+ acres of bermudagrass that's ready to be made into hay.
If you would like to see our silage chopper in action, check out our latest MooTube Minute. Try to stay cool, and prayers for rain would be greatly appreciated!
This morning I took a tractor for a spin through a cornfield, driving down the rows while spraying glyphosate (RoundUp) to kill weeds. We have broadleaf signalgrass pretty much everywhere, with spots of johnsongrass, cucklebur, and morning glory scattered here and there. All of these weeds compete for the same moisture and nutrients that our corn needs, so by killing them we expect our corn to be more productive and ultimately provide more nutrition for our cows.
Our method of spraying our corn isn't terribly fast or efficient. We're using a three-point hitch sprayer assembly with a 200 gallon tank and a 12 foot (4 row) boom. We have a spray wagon with a 300 gallon tank and 30 foot-wide coverage that we typically use for all other applications, but its tires are likely to down an unacceptable amount of corn as we pull it across our curvy, terraced fields. It sure would be nice to have a high-boy sprayer, but I don't our less-than-200 acres of cropland is quite enough to justify buying one of those babies!
If you'd like to take a look at our fields and see the contrast between where we got partial and no control with our pre-emerge application, you can do so in our latest MooTube Minute.
I took a few minutes this evening to film a new MooTube Minute, which takes a look at our corn and bermudagrass hay fields. Also, my son makes his video debut in a supporting role.
We filled up a silage pit last week with about 63 acres worth of chopped rye, and so this week we prepared another pit and set out to harvest our remaining 17 acres.
We started mowing the rye down on Tuesday afternoon and put the chopper in the field late Wednesday morning. After only about 3 acres, my father (who was operating the chopper) started noticing an out-of-place squeaking noise. After investigating, he found that we had a bearing on the verge of going out. To remedy the situation, he poked a hole in the bearing's seal and injected oil into it with a syringe and needle after every couple of loads. That seemed to do the job, and he was able to keep the chopper going the rest of the day.
We weren't quite as lucky on Thursday. After three acres with five more to go, a different bearing locked up and ended our chopping for the day. We decided to hook up the hay baler and the wrapper so we could harvest the remaining rye as baleage.
All told, we averaged harvesting seven tons of rye per acre (at 68% moisture). The silage is sealed up in both pits and should be ready to be fed to our cows once our sorghum silage from last Fall runs out in 3-4 weeks. I think we should have plenty of rye silage to last until we have harvested our corn and it is ready to feed early this Fall.
If you'd like to see what our recently planted cornfields are looking like and hear a little more about our rye harvest, you can check out this GDF MooTube Minute below:
There are few things in this world that are non-debatable...God loves us, the sun rises in the east, and things will happen that cause your field work to run behind schedule. Monday morning I thought we would be finished planting corn on Wednesday, giving us enough of a window to begin harvesting our rye by the end of the week.
Ain't gonna happen.
From needed supplies not arriving as early as expected to a couple of mechanical problems, we were not able to begin planting until Tuesday evening. If all goes well today, though, we'll be cleaning and unhitching the planter on Friday morning. That won't give us enough time to start our rye harvest before the weekend, but by Monday we should be ready to go.
You can hear me talk about our corn planting this spring in the latest edition of the Gilmer Dairy Farm MooTube Minute:
Today is St. Patrick's Day, and to celebrate I decided to highlight one of our "green" farming practices...I applied some "Water 'n Poo".
We collected soil samples from around our farm a few weeks ago. The testing results we received listed the soil nutrient levels in each field and pasture we sampled, as well as the recommended amount of fertilizer we will need to apply to sufficiently grow our crops. Based on those results, it looks like our captured dairy manure will provide the right amount of phosphorus and potassium in several different places this spring.
You can learn a little more by watching this "GDF MooTube Minute" I filmed while applying the home-raised, cow-generated fertilizer today.
It is not supposed to be this cold in northwest Alabama!
Tonight will be our second straight dip down into the mid 'teens, and after tomorrow's "warm-up" (high of 40, low of 25) the temperatures fill fall even more on Thursday. Once those temps drop below freezing Thursday afternoon they won't break the 32 degree mark until Sunday afternoon, and we're expected to see single-digit lows at least twice during that streak.
Now, I realize that this weather would be a welcomed relief to many of you up North who have much colder weather on a regular basis. You're used to it, and your farms were probably designed to handle prolonged cold weather. Our dairy farm, like most in the south, are designed to provide optimal cooling during the summer months. Unfortunately, what's good for the summer isn't too great for the winter.
So, we'll keep the ice busted off the tops of our water troughs and thaw out our milking equipment twice a day until a more typical winter returns next week. And if you're wondering about how our cows are doing in this weather, they're happy as long as it's dry and they have plenty of feed and water. You can learn more by watching our latest MooTube Minute below.
If you ever took notice of the dairy industry this past year, I'm sure you know that it has been quite a rough one for farmers. Really rough! Read some of my blog entries from 2009 and you'll begin to understand what I mean. But, that year is gone and 2010 is sure to present us with both challenges and opportunities.
For dairy farmers, we're still left with the question of how to end...or at least manage...the price volatility cycles that seem to get more extreme and severe every few years. Many different plans for doing so were discussed over the past year and continue to be debated among dairy farmers. None of these plans are perfect or will satisfy every dairyman, but we're smart enough to realize that a "perfect plan" is unrealistic given the vast regional differences in our production and markets. As our milk price continues to improve as it has for the last couple of months, it will be critical that our dairy farmer leaders keep working towards crafting an acceptable plan so we can minimize the next inevitable downturn.
Focusing more on our farm, we also face some early challenges to begin the year. A wet fall meant a short harvest, which means we've had to buy more commercial feed and may also have to buy forages from other farmers by the time our own spring forages are ready to harvest. Buying feed and forages is expensive, and coming off a year like 2009 it really handicaps you from being able to attend to other projects. There will be other challenges as well, ranging from the weather to the costly impact potential legislation and regulations would have on our farm and every farm.
But with challenge comes opportunity, and that gives us hope for a better year even if our recovery process may seem slow and painful at times. From experimenting with rotational grazing to planting new varieties of silage crops, from more effectively telling our farm's story to to laying the groundwork for possibly one day processing and marketing our own milk and dairy products, the future is bright for Gilmer Dairy Farm. My family's been milking cows in Lamar County, Alabama, for over 55 years, and with hard work and a little luck that streak won't be coming to an end anytime soon!
Have a Happy New Year, everyone! I'll leave you with our final GDF MooTube Minute of 2009 which takes a quick look back at that year and also thanks you for allowing us to share our story with you.
I hope you all have had a Merry Christmas and that you are enjoying any time off work that you might have. I know that many businesses close for several days before and after Christmas, but a dairy farm is one business that doesn't have that luxury. Whether it's Christmas, Easter, Independence Day, or any holiday, the cows have to be milked, fed, and attended to.
My father has worked every Christmas day as far back as I can remember, and I've been right there as well since I was about 15. It can keep you from traveling to the in-laws if they have their gatherings on Christmas instead of before (like mine) or after, but all the Gilmer family gatherings happen here on the farm. It's really not that bad of a deal, either. We typically work a "weekend" schedule on holidays and take care of chores before breakfast and then again after lunch. Our milkhand usually likes to work the early shift on holidays, and did so again yesterday. Dad and I were also joined by another employee yesterday afternoon who decided he needed a few hours away from his in-laws.
So whether you're enjoying a holiday feast or just snacking any other day of the year, savor it happily and know that a farmer's commitment to care for his animals and to provide you with quality food never takes a day off!
And in closing, here is a new episode of our MooTube Minute in which I give you a quick tour of our "milk room". Enjoy!
It's going to be a full-throttle Monday here on the farm to kick-off Christmas week. Luckily we're going to have good weather today, so we are going to accomplish as much as we possible can.
Our cows have already been milked and fed once and will be again this afternoon. The heifers, dry cows, and calves are being fed right now, and in about half an hour we'll begin trying to catch some of our youngest stock and move them into a new pasture. After that, things will really start picking up. We have 7-8 calves that need to be vaccinated and moved into a weaning pasture. Several bales of hay need to be distributed to pastures around the farm and at least two loads of baleage need to be hauled from the stackyard to have on hand for grinding in our feed wagon. Throw in some "cleaning up" chores and the inevitable Monday surprise, and we'll have plenty to keep us busy today.
I'll "tweet" about our activities as I get time (and my cold fingers allow), so if you don't have a Twitter account you can simply look over on the sidebar to find my posts. Meanwhile, you can check out our newest MooTube Minute and get a quick tour of our milking parlor.
Both my father and I spent a couple of nervous nights off the farm a few days ago while we attended the Alabama Farmers Federation's Annual Meeting in Mobile. Even though we have good, capable employees who we know can handle all the chores when we're both gone, it's always a little nerve-wracking worrying about the things that could go wrong on the farm while you're away. I'm happy to report that the farm was still here and functioning properly when we got home.
My return home was delayed a little on Tuesday as I stopped by the Precision Agriculture & Field Crops Conference in Atmore to speak to the attendees about using social media to proactively tell the story of agriculture. One of the things I shared with them is how taking the time to tell our stories is much like paying the insurance premiums for our farm policies. You can read more about what I mean on the FB Blog.
Back on the farm, we had around 6 inches of rain fall on Tuesday, mostly from late afternoon through the night. Yesterday was beautiful but very windy, and the forecast for today and tomorrow call for clear skies and cold temperatures. As always, we'll find plenty to do to keep us busy. We now have 23 breeding-age heifers we have pastured next to our barn and will be observing them each for signs of estrus. We also have a Select Sires representative coming this afternoon to look over a group of 30 first-lactation cows. He'll look at their physical traits and genetics and will then recommend which bulls' semen we should use to AI each of them.
As it is getting colder we're also feeding alot more hay to our drycows and heifers. You can learn a little more about that in our latest GDF MooTube Minute. Y'all have a "dairy" good day!
