Ah Hell

It's going to freeze here tonight. Had to cover the tomato plants,

Rbt spent the day getting the swather ready for me to swath grain tomorrow, while I worked at building my latest wood project. I will have photos soon, but I am excited about this one. It's small and I've wanted one for ages.

Lived through the whole horrendous preparations for a colonoscopy. Got a gold star from the surgeon
No Polyps, nothing at all, a very clean colon I was told., yay me. All that fibre pays off.

After Effects

Well weaning is done for another year. As we thought, the second day was full of glitches. The wrist being that when we had finished cutting the calves away from their mothers., we took a head count of them and there were only 28 calves ( there should have been29) and there were only 27 cows instead of 29.  I took the second trailer load home while Robt. rode the pasture looking for them, he found one cow lame and barely able to walk, with a broken hip and another cow dead. Half eaten, looks like maybe wolves or she died of illness and they found her after the fact.  Her calve, oddly enough was laying 300 feet away in the heavy spruce woods lame on two legs but alive. Robt. walked him over to the corral and he lame cow made it there on her own but did require help getting in the trailer. Robt gave her his shoulder on her ass and half lifted her into the back while I used a post to push her bad leg into the trailer.

At home, a 15 yr old cow ( that's old for cow) is enjoying her last days on earth sadly, she has been an awesome cow but has such bad arthritis that she can only shuffle her back legs to walk, she has lost condition and we have decided to have her put down.

That Time of the year

That time of the year again, dry dusty roads and the smell of grin dust in the air. The farm neighbours scrambling around to get the feed in the yard and the field work done. Things are a bit delayed this year due to the annoying little showers we had nearly every day. Never enough rain to do any good but enough to keep the hay from being baled. But we prevailed and have first and second cut hay in the yard green feed is ready to bale and we weaned the large group of calves yesterday, surprisingly without a hitch. That makes me worried about today's job, weaning the second group, all heifer calves we pastured separately with no bull. But I will remain optimistic that things will go well.

We trailered the calves home after sorting them from their mothers. Once they are all here then we run them over a Scale to get a weight. 69 steer calves averaged 697 lb. not bad over all. That includes the twin calves and April/may calves too.  The heaviest calf weaned 826 lb. and the lightest was 497.

The weight was down a bit from last year but we had less, beneficial rain this year and less grass. We started calving two weeks later as well so the calves are a bit younger, all in all we are Happy, now we just need the price to stay up.