Christmas Day at Soaring Eagle in many ways is just like every other day. Since it feel on a Sunday this year, it meant that there weren't a ton of scheduled chores needing to be done and for me the day went from 4 am - 10:30 am. Just enough morning left to clean up and get to Christmas Dinner!!
Here are some videos of what Brittany and I were taking care of this morning. This first video shows us cleaning the dry cow pen. We clean the beds, scrape the alleys and then sort out any of the moms we think will have their calves in the next day or two.
Here's an up close look at the two moms delivering calves this morning.
Two Christmas bull calves were born during our shift.
Merry Christmas Everyone!! Enjoy the holidays with family and friends and God Bless all for 2012!!
Thank You to Merck Animal Health for putting together this video. It does a great job showing how todays dairy farmers are "Doing More with Less". Please click on the link below and Enjoy!
This winter, I plan to spend more time posting video and information on cows and what my sisters and I do on a daily basis in the barns. Please keep checking back and if you want to see something particular or just like what you see, feel free to comment.
It is that time of year again for us to take pause and be grateful for all the Good Lord has blessed us with. Family and friends top my list and I always try to ask for help being responsible with all God's blessings. I hope you have the opportunity to enjoy a Thanksgiving Feast with family.
If you have moment, I ask that you read something I recently came across in one of my farm magazines, Progressive Forage Grower. The author is Baxter Black, an American cowboy, poet, philosopher, former large-animal veterinarian, and radio commentator. His works include writing a column titled On the Edge of Common Sense and I found this writing fits that bill. Here goes:
Baxter Black: Thanksgiving thoughts
Not everyone has a car, owns a home, carries a cell phone, can swim, knows the 18th president and can hum “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain.”
But everyone in this country — rich or homeless, conservative, liberal, gray, green, black, white, brown or yellow — eats what we in agriculture produce; everyone, no exceptions.
Do those of you who farm and ranch think about the lives you touch? Steve Jobs invented Apple computers, Oprah Winfrey had a talk show that reached 7.4 million people five days a week, J.K. Rowling sold 450 million Harry Potter books, and 111 million watched Superbowl XLV. Talk about reaching out.
But every day, every person eats something you produce. Your contribution to their well being exceeds Hollywood, the Nobel Prize or their psychiatrist. The public’s dependence on your ability to keep them fed is deeper than their need to text, jog, work, play golf or go to school.
You are more essential to their lives than their bookie, their broker, their drug dealer, their teacher, their boss or even their best friend.
This week we celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s still a real holiday — you can tell because most of the work force gets the day off. I think of it as a time when we thank God for the blessings we have been given. Usually the Thanksgiving table is covered with food — food that we in agriculture produced.
Even the needy in soup kitchens, home-alone bachelors, single mothers, on-duty soldiers and orbiting astronauts will eat something we grew; a piece of ham, canned peas, a drumstick, a Happy Meal or pumpkin pie. Regardless of what is on their plate, it started in some farmer’s pasture or plowed field.
I don’t mean to be boastful. I don’t even expect the average urban Thanksgiving diner to remember the farmer’s contribution to their day. Many praises will fall upon the one who cooked the meal.
That is due, but without mentioning the farmers who grow it is like praising the painter of the bridge while the man who designed and constructed it, stands in the shadows.
It is common to hear that farming is a “noble calling.” That is flattering but its importance is much more profound. I agree that what we who work the land do is noble, but more, it is as vital to their lives as air and water.
What they eat is the gift of our labors, and somewhere down deep as they sit down to Thanksgiving dinner Thursday, they might conjure up a picture of a farmer leaning on a hoe or a cowboy on a horse. That thought might just be the connection that helps them understand where their food comes from: real people.
Happy Thanksgiving to all! May the tryptophan in the turkey not cause you to dose off while the Packers are beating the Lions on their way to 11-0! Go Pack Go!!
As Thanksgiving approaches it seems appropriate to share a great video regarding food production! Thank you Paul Harvey for the kind words. It sums of the pride I have to be part of creating healthy, wholesome food for the world!!
The past 30 days have been SUPER busy. I'm so very happy to say that on Tuesday, October 25th we tossed the last of the tires on a feed pile, covering the high moisture corn which will be fed to the cows over the coming year. Here are some facts about our high moisture corn pile:
- We harvested 180 acres of corn for grain, using a combine to take just the kernels off the cob. The average yield early in the season was about 185 bushel to the acre, however some terrible winds dropped the yields in some fields to about 160 bushel per acre from corn stalks braking off, making it impossible for the combine to harvest.
- Taking an average yield of 160 bushel per acre, off of 180 acres, puts the total corn harvested and stored on farm at 28,800 bushel. Today, corn traded on the market at $6.50 per bushel. Not having a feed bill to the tune of $187,200 JUST FOR CORN, makes all the hard work of growing our own crops worth it. It also makes us grateful for being provided with a good growing season, allowing us to take some corn for grain. During a poor crop year, we don't have that luxury.
- There were 6 of us out pulling plastic and tossing tires on the pile on Tuesday. I challenged the group to come up with a guess to the number of kernels of corn on the pile. Guesses ranged from 4 billion to 6 trillion. Based on "Yahoo Answers", there are 72,800 kernels in a bushel of corn, so a rough estimate is that we combined, ground and stored 2,096,440,000 kernels of corn. That's a tough number to read - it's just over 2 billion kernels.
- When we plant corn, we plant about 39,000 seeds per acre. On the 180 acres of corn that we harvested for grain, we would have planted 7,020,000 seeds, with a return over 2 billion kernels or a return of nearly 300 kernels for every one planted! To bad the stock market can't provide that!!!
Anyway, here are some videos of the process we go through once all those seeds get back to the farm.
The weather the past weeks has been AMAZING!! We have had temps in the 70's which is unseasonably warm for us this time of the year. Last week one day, I had to take wheat seed to a field of ours about 7 miles from the farm. While it could be said that the tractor I had to drive was far from comfortable (it's a very old Farmall 350), the trip was enjoyable none-the-less. The views along the country roads were breathtaking with the sun shining and showing off the fall colors. Roundtrip it probably took me a solid hour to get to the field and back and that probably ranked right up there with one of the best hours of the week!
This year, we harvested about 750 acres of corn for silage. September was particularly busy since while we were filling our 2 existing bunkers, we were also pressing to get a new feed storage pad built. In addition to hiring an engineer to design the pad, we needed to submit our plans to the DNR and get their approval.
The above picture was taken on a Friday, September 16th. You can see the large earth movers on the left side of the mirror - they were working on building our vegetative treatment area. This is a 5 acre piece of land that will act as a buffer should any nutrients run off the feed storage area. The large rectangular piece to the right of the mirror is undergoing final grading and where 4" of asphalt was poured the following week.
This next video was taken the following week when the silage pad was complete. My nephew's Austin and Nate found this to be a great place to run with their RipSticks. Unfortunately, they only had a few days before we started putting silage on the pad.
This video was taken from the pack tractor as we were putting feed on the new silage pad.
The overall size of this pile is 120' x 275'. In all it holds about 5800 ton of corn silage off of 250 acres. It took this group (plus 4 others not pictured) about 2 hours to roll out the plastic and lay out about 2400 tires on the pile.
