Saturday and Sunday, August 4-5, 2007

Saturday I went out on the boat with Cory, his friend Keith, and Katy. It was a fabulous day, sunny, breezy, and clear. We put the boat in at Point Au Roche, about midway between Plattsburgh and Chazy, and then we took it to the Plattsburgh City Beach, anchored, and walked on the beach a little bit. Saturday night I went to Field Days again, this time with Anna, to see the tractor pulls. There was plenty to see other than tractors, too, like this corn that towered over my head. This little 4H heifer was named Mystery for the question mark on her face.
These were a team of Holstein steers named Teeny and Tiny. They were the biggest cattle I've ever seen! Each one weighs at least a ton and they aren't even finished growing yet. This picture really doesn't do justice to their size.
This tractor pull was much better than the one at Clinton County Fair, because the tractors were actual farm tractors, not souped up so much you couldn’t even tell they were tractors. Some of the tractors at Franklin County looked like they drove in straight from the fields.

Sunday I went to the Almanzo Wilder Homestead in Malone, NY. It was very cool to see the farm in real life, even though it had been years since I’d last read Farmer Boy, the story of Almanzo Wilder’s childhood. I bought a copy of the book at the gift shop and so far have enjoyed reading it with the images of the real farm in my head.

The Trout River where Almanzo fished and where sheep were washed.
Damselfly enjoying the beautiful weather.
Pumphouse. The
The original home of the Wilder's.
This tree is old enough to have been there when Almanzo was growing up.
The barns.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

I was on equine today. In the morning we feed and much stalls. We finished pretty quickly so Christina and I took Sara driving.
I got to drive, too, which was really cool. Since you can’t use your legs to make the horse go faster, you have to use your voice (and the horse has to be trained to listen to you voice). Sara even knows the difference between “trot” and “trot UP” which means faster. In the afternoon I rode Reggie again.
This evening was Sean Stebbins’ farewell cookout, because he’s been working at Rover’s all summer but Wednesday is his last day there and then he goes home to VT. I made peach-blueberry cobbler again and everybody loved it!

Saturday-Monday, July 28-30, 2007

This morning I went with Roxanne to Cha-Liz farm, where they are conducting a study on the effect of diet during the dry period on health after calving. This involves taking blood samples from 20-25 cows every day. It’s actually very simple, because we draw blood from the tail vein. It’s harder to miss the vein than it is to find it, and the cows don’t need more restraint than just standing in the stall provides. When we got back to Miner, Anna said we had a cow that had suddenly gone blind. It turns out she has the cow version of pink eye. Part of the treatment included giving her a sulfanomide antibiotic in her vein, and I got to place the IV. The interesting thing about sulfanomide drugs is that they are secreted from the body in the tears, among other routes, so we know the drug will attack the infection in her eyes. I went up to the hutches to say hi to the calves and here is a picture of our C-section calf, who is making good progress.


Sunday morning, I did fresh check by myself. It was pretty straightforward. The most exciting part was when I listened to 1144. She’s been on glycol all week and was still not making very much milk. We had expected her to have a DA but she had good rumen movement. We’ve listened to her everyday, just in case. I was telling Ralph about her, and decided I better listen to her just in case. Well, sure enough she had a DA, finally!

I milked Monday morning, and then we had a meeting with Wanda about our management project. She went over how to score the hocks and then we printed a list from Dairy Comp of all the cows. We split up the dairy barn and also did far dry and close up. That took most of the morning.

Here is a tomato update:
Ripe!

Friday, July 27, 2007

The usual with Anna in the morning, then Ag Seminar at lunch. After lunch, Rick Grant met with the farm management students to go over the observational study we’re going to be conducting in our last three weeks. The goal is to come up with some recommendations about the freestalls. We will score the knees and hocks of the cows, and possibly score lameness for a few cows out of each pen. The scoring is based on the condition of the joins, whether they have rubs or sores from laying in the stalls or not. The lameness score is based on the ease or difficulty with which the cow moves. Then we will measure the amount of sawdust in the stalls at different distances from the fans at different times (e.g. immediately before new bedding is put in, immediately after new bedding is put in, and several hours after new bedding is put in). This is to determine the amount of sawdust blown away by the fans. Based on the condition of the hocks and the amount of bedding loss, we are supposed to recommend changes that will improve the condition of the hocks (we already know there are too many cows with sores or swelling).

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Today is dry off day, which means we stop milking the cows that are 60 days from calving so they can have a rest and get ready to calve. It also means Thursday is moving day, because the cows we dry off come from pen 5, the low-producing pen, so cows from the high producing pens move into pen 5 to replace the ones we dried off, and cows from the far dry pen (60-30 days from calving) move to the close-up dry pen (30-0 days from calving). The cows we put in far dry and close up all need to be weighed and get shots, so it makes for a pretty full morning at the very least.

In the afternoon, Wanda’s husband, Jerry, gave a talk on cow evaluation. He works for Select Sires, which is the company that provides semen to us. Part of their job is to evaluate and score cows and bulls on 17 traits so that cows can be inseminated with bulls whose traits will improve upon the traits of the cow. The 17 traits are stature, dairy character, strength, body depth, rump angle, legs-side view, foot angle, fore udder, front teat placement, front teat length, rear udder height, rear udder width, udder support, udder depth, pelvic width, legs-rear view, and rear teat placement. For some of the traits, a high score is desirable, such as for strength and dairy character, although these should be balanced. For other traits, like rump angle and fore udder, a moderate score is ideal. It was very interesting to see the power point Jerry had, with extremes and ideals of each trait, because after paying attention to all of it, I could really see the differences in cows once we went out in the barn. It’s just knowing what to look for. For instance, dairy character means the cow has sweeping, angled ribs, a long neck, and fine skin. I didn’t even notice that our cows ribs were angled (in comparison to beef cattle whose ribs are nearly perpendicular to the ground) until it was pointed out.

The image below is from the Canadian Holstein Association website and it is the closest thing I could find to the chart we looked at.

Wednesday, July 24, 2007

Wednesday is Dr. Henderson’s day to do pregnancy checks and check any other cows that need looked at by the vet. The big excitement of the morning came when he checked the heifer Anna bred last time I had herd health, and she was pregnant. Then we had vet discussion, and we talked about how cows that stay in the milking herd too long because they aren’t getting pregnant cost a lot of money. We figured this out by looking at the average days in milk. If the average is 210 and the goal is 180, it costs the farmer more than $170,000. This is because the longer a cow stays in milk, the less milk she tends to make, so the income from her milk probably doesn’t pay her bills at the farm.

In the afternoon, Ev took us on a driving tour of the Quebec mucklands. These are very flat, low-lying areas of soil that was deposited when the region was underwater. They are extremely fine, rich soils and they are used only for growing a handful of vegetables: onions, carrots, celery, and lettuce. It was very interesting to see those crops growing in big fields on the side of the road the same way you see corn and soybeans in most other rural areas (at least the ones
I’ve been in).

Baby lettuce.
Harvesting green onions.
Irrigation.
Lettuce field. If you look closely you'll see a lot of lettuces heads didn't make the cut to be sold in stores.
Carrots or celery, I forget which. They look pretty similar.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Yesterday Wanda let us pick what we wanted to do today because she hadn’t had time with the fair to make our schedules, so I picked herd health with Anna because I hadn’t had it since my second week. There wasn’t too much to do. One thing I did was spread predatory wasp eggs, as part of our fly control regimen. They are very small, about ¼ inch long, and do not pester people or animals. They lay their eggs in the same places pest flies do, and the predatory wasp larvae eat the pest fly larvae, stopping their development. They work extrememly well and are environmentally friendly. The company sends 2 quart size bags every Friday. We spread them in the places flies breed, which is anywhere moist, not just near manure. Also, we keep our manure liquefied in pits, and it is too wet for flies to breed there.

I stopped to visit Cricket on my way back and I think she's happy to have some friends.