Saturday, June 23, 2007

This post is unofficially sponosored by Carhartt, because today Anna and I drove an hour to St. Albans, VT, to go to Lenny's Apparel and Shoes, possibly the only store that carries women's Carhartts. Carhartt is the unofficial uniform of farmers. They even have their own color: Carhartt brown, and now they make a clothing line specifically for women. I bought two pairs of pants, which I will consider my first vet school expense, because my justification for buying two pairs was that, eventually, I will be a vet student and will wear them a lot then as well as this summer.

Anna and I also found a produce stand that had fresh strawberries. They are delicious! After I got home and had dinner, Christina, Claire, Roxanne, Eric, and I went to the Plattsburgh mall and hung out. We were going to see a movie but we didn't leave soon enough. I got a few other things on sale at Gap and Old Navy, and some bargain books from Borders. It's really nice to hang out with everyone, especially since none of us work together so it's not like we're bored with each other's company by the end of the day.

It turned out that by going to the mall, we missed one of the mares foaling. We drove to the barn to check on her, and her foal was mostly dry and standing up on VERY wobbly legs. It's a little chestnut filly and they are calling her Annie, because we all stopped at Auntie Anne's Pretzels before we left the mall. She has a very long face and is a little funny-looking, but we all think she will grow into herself. It was pretty cool to see such a new foal. Her tongue was bright red and she tried to suck on my fingers.

Friday, June 22, 2007

Tomatoes! I still stand by my prediction that we'll have ripe tomatoes by the end of June, especially at the rate these guys are growing!

I don’t have too much to say about Crops. I merged on Tuesday and Wednesday, and helped with the Ag-Bagger. We got the last of the first cut hay chopped and bagged on Thursday, and second cut starts Monday! It should not take 3 days to get 15 acres of hay chopped and bagged, but that’s what happens when it rains.
Front of the chopper.

Back of the chopper. It even says Miner Institute on the side but it's a little hard to see in this picture. We got most of it mowed and merged on Tuesday, but then it rained, so Wednesday was spent using the merger to flip over the stuff that was already on the ground so it could dry out again, and we didn’t finish chopping until Thursday afternoon.
Front of the merger.
Back of the merger, see where it says HayBuddy?
In the downtime, the guys worked on fixing the new merger, and I did odd jobs like greasing all the equipment with the grease gun, which is mildly fun, and sweeping the whole shop and washing all the tractor windows, which are not that fun. Today, I spent the whole morning sitting in the tractor attached to the manure agitator. Luckily there’s a radio or I would have been bored out of my mind.

At lunch, Steve Mooney talked about some research he’s presenting at a conference later this summer, and the only parts I understood were when he said, “The acid donates a hydrogen.” Thank you, Dr. Creegan.

The weather here continues to amaze me. The past 3 days have had highs in the 70s and it was cool enough this morning that I had hot chocolate at breakfast. It’s supposed to get down to the 40s tonight. I have milking at 4:30 am next week, which may make a coffee drinker out of me at last.

MoCo the mower.
The big, new, fancy tractor that no one likes because it doesn't shift smoothly. But I can drive it!
The tractor that used to have the merger hooked up to it but now it has the manure agitator.

Monday, June 18, 2007

Beautiful corn! Above, sun going down, looking southwest toward the horse barns. Compare the picture below to the one from last week! I promise they are only 7 days apart.
I started the Crops rotation today. We had 20 acres left of timothy-clover hay to mow, merge, chop, and bag. We don’t bale any of the hay here; it all gets turned into haylage. Instead of being preserved by drying, like baled hay, haylage is preserved by fermentation. It either gets packed into a bunk like the one I helped cover last week, or into an Ag-Bag, which is a huge long tube of plastic, probably 10 feet in diameter, and as long as you need it to be. I learned to mow and merge today. The mower is called MoCo and the merger is called HayBuddy. I mean, they actually have these names painted on them. They are the actual names of the equipment. We mowed all 20 acres before lunch, and merged them all after lunch. Merging is when one windrow (row of mowed hay) is picked up and piled onto the next one. It’s done so the chopper doesn’t have to make as many trips around the field. To mow, first you do 6 circles around the perimeter or the field, working your way in. Then you just go back and forth. You have to swing the mower from one side of the tractor to the other each time you switch directions, but you do that with a lever inside the air-conditioned cab of the tractor while you’re listening to the radio. :o) The merger follows directly behind the tractor (an older model, with a clutch!) You just drive straight down the center of a windrow; the merger picks it up and places it on a conveyor belt, which shoots it onto the windrow to your left. I got to do merging all by myself, which including stopping to unclog it every so often. You have to keep a constant watch to make sure it doesn’t get clogged, because if you catch it early, you don’t have to get out of the tractor. If you watch straight ahead and don’t check the merger for one second too long, it will have a huge clog that requires you to turn everything off and get out of the tractor and pull armloads of hay off the conveyor belt. The best thing about these jobs is how quickly time passes. I’m sure having the radio helps out a lot with that. Anyway, it was a very productive day and I feel very accomplished.

Also, I forgot to say last week that I mastered driving the old Massey-Ferguson tractor, and that I got my first bloody nose ever! The Massey is at least 30 years old and has a standard transmission. I can drive it anywhere now, and use the manure spreader. I got the bloody nose when we were weighing cows. There is a gate attached to the scale that forms a chute the cattle walk through to the scale. Well, there was a cow who didn’t want to go on the scale and she swung her hips into the gate, and I was standing right on the other side of it and the top rail hit me right in the nose, really hard. First time for everything, right?

Here is some of the wildlife I have seen so far:

A turtle Chad brought into the break room at the dairy barn.
A cedar waxwing that apparently flew into a window and was collecting itself on the ledge below the window. I had never seen a bird like this before but I showed my roommate the picture and she knew immediately. She said when they migrate south they stop in Burlington, eat all the berries on their campus, and leave.

Sunday, June 17, 2007: A whole week's worth of news!

Last Sunday, Claire, Christina and I went to Burlington. Claire needed to look for a job (she goes to school at UVM) and Christina and I wanted to go somewhere other than Plattsburgh. Burlington is a great place. It is hippie paradise! Claire says none of her friends from school eat meat, and she said every restaurant in Burlington caters to the vegan lifestyle. We went to the awesome grocery store, City Market, to get sandwiches from their deli. Right next to the deli is the tofu and hummus, in the labeled “Hippie Cooler.” Also near the deli was the bread section. I’ve never seen so much organic and natural and wonderful looking bread in my life! The whole store was like that. I could have spent an hour just wandering around looking at what they had. I wish we had something like that in Chestertown. After lunch, we walked up and down Church Street. Church Street is pedestrian only and it has cobblestones. We went to Ben and Jerry’s and the Discovery Channel store. It is similar to Main Street in downtown Annapolis, but a little smaller. It was the Jazz Festival, so there was live music at almost every restaurant, and all the restaurants have outdoor seating. Finally, we went to North Beach Park, a little beach on Lake Champlain. It was starting to get overcast by the time we got there but we still sat on our beach towels in our swim suits for an hour or so.

An update on the corn: it is still growing and seems like it grows faster every week. The picture above was taken Monday and by Wednesday I bet you could tell the difference (if I took a picture on Wednesday). It will be knee high this week (well before the 4th of July, as the saying goes). I love how you can look right down the rows.

These are 3 yearling horses that ran over to the fence to act startled by my bike.
This week I had the Calves rotation. The two main jobs are feeding the calves and cleaning the barns. The youngest calves live in hutches, like giant doghouses. They have to live by themselves because this reduces disease transmission (were one of them to get sick—right now all of ours are healthy!). They all get milk replacer twice a day plus grain. Right now the oldest one is being weaned off the milk replacer, and she’s not happy about it. She starts mooing when she sees the farm truck pull up, and doesn’t quit until we leave. There were three calves born Sunday night, two heifers and a bull. Two were twins but the two heifers were born in the pen so they weren’t sure whether they were twins or whether it was a heifer and a bull. This was a problem because when there is a heifer-bull pair of twins, the hormones of the male twin circulate through the female twin’s placenta and this causes her to be sterile, and she is called a freemartin. It doesn’t do any good to have a sterile heifer on a dairy farm, so we had to find out so we didn’t send the wrong heifer to the sale.

On Tuesday, I helped pull another calf, a big white bull. He was almost 2 weeks early, and for the first couple days was really unsteady on his feet. That made it really difficult to train him to drink from a bucket because his balance and strength weren’t good enough for him to stand up and drink the whole bucket at once! He’s a pro at it n

Wednesday was Kristy's birthday and we had a surprise cookout for her. She had no idea we were planning it. Here is the whole bunch of us. Top row: Eric, Monique, Christina, Blake, Steven Mooney, Kristy. Bottom row: Claire (my roommate), Lindsay, me, Roxanne, Melisa, Katy, Anna.
On Thursday, I picked out one of my show heifers. Here she is:
I had a list of names like Clover and Daisy, but she seemed spunkier than that. Then she jumped out of her pen. The next day I thought of Firefly, and then I thought, she's more like a grasshopper than a firefly, and then I thought of crickets, so Cricket it is. She's Cricket the cow. Also, I went to bed at 8:30 so I could get enough sleep to function on Friday after doing cow watch at 4 am.
There is no better way to get to know cows than to just watch them for a few hours at a time. I think I have already mentioned that I think they are more like dogs than they are like horses. Lindsay said they have great senses of humor and I think these pictures demonstrate that well:
Resting her head on her neighbor...

Fell asleep and her tongue is falling out of her mouth...Rolling her tongue...
Sleeping all curled up...
The other cool thing about being up on the catwalk from 4-5 am is that you get to see into the feed truck:
Friday there was an open house for the grand opening of a new exhibit at the farm museum, of antique vehicles. There was a barbecue and everyone who works at Miner was there. The vehicles were cool, too. There were 2 carriages and 2 sleighs, a horse-drawn school bus, and a sprinkler wagon. After that, the crops guys needed help covering the feed bunk they’ve been filling with first cut haylage. That involved dragging huge pieces of plastic up the hill of chopped hay and weighting it down, first with 50-pound gravel bags at the top and sides and then with old tires every where else. We all got really dirty from the tires—there’s no way to store a tire that it won’t get rainwater inside, and these tires were really gross! I will definitely need new sneakers now…

Saturday and today (Sunday) I only had to work in the morning, and yesterday was really sunny and hot, so Blake, Christina and I went to the beach. It was another beach on Lake Champlain, on Isle La Motte at St. Anne's Shrine. We napped in the sun, swam in the lake, the ice cream truck came...it was a fun afternoon.

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Last night I went to Plattsburgh with Sean, Christina, and Monique. Sean is working as a lab tech in the environmental science labs here, and Christina and Monique are in the equine program. We went to a bar called Monopole, which is supposedly the oldest bar in Plattsburgh. It has an upstairs and a downstairs, each with a bar, and there are pool tables and darts. It reminded me a lot of Andy’s in Chestertown, without the free popcorn. There was a band playing upstairs. They are called Lucid and Sean had seen them a few times before (he goes to SUNY Plattsburgh). They were a jam band but they covered some songs too, like Van Morrison’s Into the Mystic. They were pretty good.

This morning I went to the Farmer’s Market in Plattsburgh. I bought a tomato plant. It is called Patio hybrid. It already has a few blossoms we should have tomatoes by the end of the month. I feel like Chestertown is just a few hours away from here. The landscape is so similar. There are the same farms and farmhouses and John Deere dealerships and tractors in fields and there are even Scenic Byway signs. For much of the way to Plattsburgh, if you take Route 9 (the back way) there are gorgeous views of Lake Champlain. On my way back, I stopped to look at Point Au Roche State Park. I told the girl at the gate I just wanted to look around and she didn’t charge me the admission price. There are tons of picnic tables and grills, and there are indoor restrooms, but the beach is small and obviously manmade. I think I will go a few times this summer when I need a beach fix.

Friday, June 8, 2007

Today I watched a cow give birth to her calf! I'd never seen anything being born before. When she came out her eyes fluttered a little and she snorted a couple times and then she was awake. It was like watching her come to life. Incredible. We just happened to walk the dry cow barn, where the cows close to calving live, first thing today. The cow had already laid down in the middle of the aisle in the pen, so we moved her to a calving pen (much cleaner) and went to do the fresh cow (cows that have just calved) check. We came back 45 minutes later and the feet were out.

You can just see the calf's nose above the feet. It looks purple because the amniotic sack is still covering it. We ended up helping the cow out by pulling the calf, because we could see its tongue and it was starting to turn purple. Here is the newborn heifer (female) calf!



I really have nothing else to say except that it was just incredible to witness the whole thing.


The feed guy, Russ, comes on Fridays to discuss any adjustments to the diet. It's called Friday Therapy because all the farm employees vent about how the research scientists complicate their routines. One thing Russ does is take samples of the different components of feed to check protein levels, among other things. Here he is taking a sample from an alfalfa bale. I tried to do it to but the bales are packed really tightly and I couldn't get the corer to go in!

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Today was the last Farm Day for Fifth Graders. We only had one group after lunch, as opposed to three on Tuesday and Wednesday, which was nice. We had another dead calf today, a bull this time. He was his mom's first calf and he was really big and she was really small, so they think maybe she got tired of pushing and he suffocated. The other calves are all doing great, though. Soon we'll separate the animals we're taking to the fair and we'll be able to work with them whenever we have a spare minute. They are also talking about giving the students night watches, so that if a heifer is having a hard time calving the calf doesn't suffocate. I certainly wouldn't mind doing that.

There is much to like about Chazy (shay-ZEE) and Miner. I'm feeling less like a stranger and more like someone who knows their way around the farm every day. Everyone here seems to get along. Last night a few of us grilled out, and even people who weren't cooking came and sat outside just to hang out. We were going to roast marshmallows but then we ran out of propane. We all sat outside until it got dark and the GIANT mosquitos drove us inside. Will Bruce called them MOOOOsquitos. :o) Sounds good to me. I like how many stars you can see. You can even see the Milky Way. I like how we can hear the train. I must not have noticed it the first couple of days but I think we hear it 5 or 6 times every day. It reminds me of the siren in Chestertown. We also have seagulls here, because we're just a few miles from Lake Champlain, and that reminds me of Chestertown, too.
My favorite thing that cows do is sleep all curled up, just like a cat or dog. Anna says when they sleep like that, they are in the REM sleep cycle, so I told all the fifth graders that the cows curled up that way are dreaming. The black cow whose side is in the foreground wouldn't move out of the way and kept trying to eat my camera.
Sometimes they can't get their heads all the way around and compromise by resting them on the stall dividers.


Tuesday, June 5, 2007

This week we have Farm Days for Fifth Graders, where kids from all over come to get a tour of the farm. The official name of the farm is Heart's Delight Farm at the William H. Miner Agricultural Research Institute. We tend just to call it the Miner Farm. There are 8 stations that the kids rotate through: Horse behavior, field equipment, 100 years ago, horse care, calves, feeds, dairy barn, and cannulated/fistulated cow. I was working the dairy barn station with Melisa, a research intern who actually has more farm experience than I do.

Melisa mostly talked about the milking parlor: it is a double-12 parallel parlor, meaning 24 cows can be milked at once; each cow produces 15-30 lbs of milk, on average, at each milking; the cows are milked three times a day at 4:30 am, 12:30 pm, and 8:30 pm; it takes about 5 hours to milk all 272 cows; we have 2 milk tanks that hold 2,000 gallons and 3,000 gallons; the milk truck comes one a day; the milk here is used to make cheese; a Holstein makes enough milk in one year to 54 families, assuming a gallon of milk per week; all the milk produced in the US goes to make 1 billion pounds of butter, 7 billion pounds of cheese, and 1 billion gallons of ice cream.

Then we took the kids to the dairy barn and showed the the stars of the show: our Holstein cows. Our barn has 272 free stalls; each stall is 52" wide, which is wider than the industry average and enables the cows to rest in a more natural posture; they rest from 12 to 14 hours per day because making milk takes a lot of energy; there are automatic insulated sidewall curtains that are raised when the temperature outside dips below 40°F; the temperature in the barn this winter never dipped below freezing; there are automatic aisle scrapers running continuously, which helps keep the flies down; there is a fan and sprinkler system used in the summer to keep the cows cool; all the cows wear a neck collar with a transponder that has a pedometer to track their activity and is also synched with the milking parlor to keep track of how much milk they produce.

This is the floor plan for the dairy barn. The top of the picture is the front of the barn. The milking parlor is on the right, just at the 'Y' joint towards the top (whminer.com). This picture was taken from the catwalk in the dairy barn and it shows the aisle scraper as well as several very happy cows (whminer.com).

Monday, June 4, 2007

Today turned out to be a very interesting day. I talked to Anna last night when we were all roasting marshmallows over the gas grill. She said that Mondays are usually quiet but that you never know what will come up. Well, today was one of those days. I got there are 7:30 and Anna said there were 2 heifers born last night, but both were dead. She said when it's a bull calf you don't mind as much (since it will leave the farm anyway-bull calves aren't much good for making milk), but when it's a heifer, it hurts. The first thing we did was move the 2 cows to the milking barn. The cow in the picture in Sunday's post was the mother of one of the dead calves. She had a really hard calving and the calf just didn't make it. She also had a very weird, very large mass in her uterus that she passed before the calf. The technical term is 'undifferentiated mass.' It's like a fetus that turned into a tumor. Very strange. The vet even said he'd never seen anything like it. They weren't expecting the other cow to calve for another 2 months because the vet had though she was pregnant off a 2nd breeding that was 60 days after the first. It turned out she was pregnant off of the 1st breeding and they moved her into a calving pen in the nick of time. We got the first cow loaded on the trailer to move her, and we were trying to load the other one, but she slipped out of the barn! Luckily there wasn't really anywhere she could go and in a few minutes we had her back in the pen. That was the first excitement of the day.

After we got those 2 cows moved, I walked through the pen in the dairy barn that holds the cows that just calved. These cows are called 'fresh.' We check their temperatures and make sure they are doing well. In the same pen are cows that have to be on any drugs that would be present in the milk. Their milk does not get sold. These cows usually get one or two drugs, Naxcel and/or Banamine. Naxcel is an antibiotic and Banamine is a pain reliever. They are injected into the muscle, and I get to give those shots. Another condition cows can have is ketosis. This makes them very lethargic and is a result of the liver trying to break down more fat than it can handle. It can also happen to people who go on the Atkins diet. These cows get propylene glycol, which is basically straight carbohydrates to try and get their bodies to digest carbs instead of fat. There is a dosing gun and you squirt it right into their mouths, and I got to do that today too. All of that was before lunch!

After lunch, we went over to the greenhouse (where the younger calves are) and I watched Wanda (the program director) choose the calves that we could show. One that I really liked was approved for showing, so I think I will get to pick her. Her number is 1371. She has a dark face with a little patch of white. I will have pictures as soon as possible! I'm considering Clover for a name. It seems like a good cow name to me. After that, we went back to the dry barn, where the heifers and soon-to-calve cows are, and dissected the weird mass. It was basically a bunch of fluid filled sacks. The girl with the hat is Katy and the other girl that's not me is Melisa. After dissecting it, we had to take it to the compost pile. It's been raining off and on since last Thursday, so it was pretty muddy. Consequently, we got the truck stuck. We tried for almost an hour to get it out, and while we got it turned around, we just could not get it to budge any farther forward or backward, even though we thought we had it in 4-wheel drive. Katy is sitting on the hood and Kristy is in the blue shirt.
Finally, Anna came looking for us and we all tried to push while she drove, but it still wouldn't move. We rode back to the farm in Anna's truck to go get a tractor to pull it out. Mark, the guy who brought the tractor out to the compost pile, took one look at it, and turned these little knobs on the front tires that you have to turn to get it into 4-wheel drive. Then he got behind the wheel, and promptly drove out of the mud. The offending knob (you can only read LOCK and FREE because I wiped the dirt off):
When we got back to the barn I helped Anna finish ear-notching and vaccinating these heifers. They take a little piece of the ear and send it away to be sampled for something, but I didn't catch what. The vaccine was for rabies, and that's what I did. I'm getting pretty good at it, I think. It's a lot easier to push 2 mL of rabies vaccine into a thin-skinned heifer than to push 20 mL of Banamine or Naxcel into a big thick-skinned cow. There were a lot of heifers in that pen, and it felt like a very productive day when we finished.

Sunday, June 3, 2007

Last night for dinner we went to this place called the Country Corner. It was this teeny tiny “diner” about 10 minutes away (make a right at the first stop sign and it’s on the left at the next stop sign). We walked in and there was a counter with stools and one table with 2 chairs. There were 2 women working, one of whom was Chad’s mom. (Chad is another boy who works at the dairy.) So we all sat down at the counter. By the way, everything was purple. The counter was purple, the stools were purple, the menus were purple, the wallpaper had purple flowers. I can’t remember if the floor was purple. The cups the coleslaw came in were purple. It was funny. The food was good and we all cleaned our plates. Across from where I was sitting was a big fridge with a clear glass door and inside were pies. There was brownie peanut butter cup pie, éclair pie, rhubarb pie, 3-berry pie, blackberry pie, peanut butter pie, snicker doodle cheesecake, cherry cheesecake, banana split pie, banana walnut pie, chocolate pie, pumpkin pie, and custard pie. Whew. So that’s what I stared at the whole time I was eating dinner. Almost everyone got a different slice. I got banana split, even though it had pineapple chunks on top. It also had cherries and strawberries. The filling was banana pudding with slices of banana and the topping (under the pineapple) was whipped cream. Delicious!

I had milking again today but there's not much else to say about that. I took these pictures on my way there.

These are some hungry heifers.The calving pen. There will probably be a new calf by tomorrow morning.
Caught her in the middle of chewing her cud, aka ruminating if you want to be scientific.