Farm Photo Friday, 8/15/14

I would like to start doing a weekly feature on my blog entitled "Farm Photo Friday". I post several farm pictures a week to my Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts, and each Friday I plan on selecting one or two of them and provide more of the back-story/context than a simple caption will allow. Let's start this edition off with a sunrise...

I took this photo of the sun rising over the sorghum field east of my house on Wednesday morning after Dad and I had finished milking our cows. I've been taking quite a few sunrise photos lately, and this one has been one of the more popular ones across my SM channels. The sorghum in the foreground is only about knee-high and shouldn't be ready to harvest until October, so I'll probably get another shot or two from this location.

We spent mid-morning working through a big group of dry cows and pregnant heifers. Our goal was to sort out all the ones due to calve before Labor Day and move them to the maternity pasture. Instead of using corral panels, we deployed in a 2-1-2 formation with the cow dog acting as a rover. Dad and Jeff were up front sending the ones we didn't need while trying to keep the ones to move in front of them. I was in the middle keeping the "stay" group moving back while cutting off any "movers" that slipped by them, and JD & Doug were in the back as our last line of defense against cows that didn't want to go where we wanted them to go. After some running back-and-forth and perhaps a choice word or two, the nine cows and one heifer we needed were successfully sorted out from the rest of the herd.

Let me know if this Farm Photo Friday feature is something you find interesting, and by all means tell me if you see me post a photo elsewhere that you would like a little more information about. Thanks for reading, and y'all have a "dairy" good weekend!

This week's farm photos

I'll never be mistaken for a photographer, but I enjoy snapping a few farm photos with my phone's camera every now and then. I've been playing around with the Instagram app on my phone lately and have posted some of those photos below. There's no rhyme or reason to why I used the filters I did, I just thought they looked good on my screen at the time. And since I'm a farmer and not a photographer, the accompanying descriptions are about the photo subjects instead of the photos themselves.

We bred (via artificial insemination) a group of 35 heifers over the course of the first two days of December. This was our first foray into the world of sexed semen, which we used on 80% of the group. The heifers that did not conceive after breeding should be coming back into estrus this coming week, so we'll have a second chance to AI them before pasturing them with a bull after the first of the year. 

They, like all of our heifers, are getting a steady diet of bermudagrass hay and mineral blocks to supplement the pelleted feed we're giving them each day.

When I published this photo of two dry cows over my Twitter account, I captioned it "Hanging out in the maternity pasture". I got a couple of responses from people who told me they didn't realize there was such a thing. Many farmers have barns for their cows to calve in, but we have enough pasture space (and suitable weather) to allow our cows to comfortably and safely give birth outdoors.

We currently have seven dry cows and pregnant heifers in the maternity pasture and will be adding more from another pasture on Monday.

Emergency Surgery in the Cow Pasture

This morning's after-breakfast "to do" list included feeding the heifers and dry cows, moving seven cows from the milking herd to the dry pasture, and replacing a small but crucial piece of equipment (a pulsator) in the milking barn.

Performing an emergency c-section wasn't on the list.

One of our dry cows didn't show up at the feed trough this morning. After searching for her for nearly an hour, we found her on the ground with rear leg paralysis. We helped her up with a front-end loader, but she could not stand under her own power. After working with her for a while, we all agreed that she had very little chance of recovery. She was in obvious distress and pain, and we decided the most humane course of action was to euthanize her.

our newly delivered calf enjoying its hay bed

The cow had been only three weeks away from her due date, so we quickly attempted a c-section.  We didn't have any equipment except for a utility knife, but that would prove to be good enough. My dad made the incisions, our two farmhands and I pulled, and in a matter of minutes we were loading a living, breathing calf into the back of the pickup truck. We got it back to the dairy, cleaned it up, laid it in a bed of hay, and fed it a half-gallon of colostrum milk. By the time we finished working today, it was doing as well as we would expect any newborn calf to be doing.

There are times you have to make decisions you would rather not have to make, and this morning was a prime example of that. But this time, at least, there was a silver lining in an otherwise dark cloud.

my dad looks down at the calf he delivered via c-section

GDF "Vocowbulary"

I often forget that some people may not fully understand some of the words or phrases I use when talking about my family's dairy farm. With that in mind, I've decided to start a new video feature on our farm's YouTube channel: GDF Vocowbulary. I plan on making this a weekly series, and I hope it will help explain some of the terminology we use when talking about our farm or industry.

For the first lesson, I chose to explain what "dry cows" are. I've got a whole list of words and phrases I can focus on in upcoming lessons, but I really want to choose the terms that you are most interested in learning more about. If there is something that you would like to have defined or explained, please let me know via this blog, my Twitter account, or our Facebook page and I'll make sure to prioritize it for a future video.

So sit back, hit the "play" button, and learn a little bit more about dry cows. I hope it's helpful, and please share it with your friends!