7125 Old Stage Road Raleigh NC 919-322-0197
Everything green growing on the farm
The off and on again warm weather brings fog. Thanks to Miguel we got this different perspective of the cows in the mist. You can see the hay bales staged into the next paddocks ready for the cows moves.
Although we are moving the cows every other day, the high traffic areas are getting muddy and sloppy with all this rain. Its inevitable but I sure do dislike this part if winter. I’m longing for green grass and sunshine.
We started a bit of tree trimming here at the farm. And by a bit we only started with 7 acres and by trimming I mean we are clearing out about 60% of the trees. In other words it’s a pretty major job. John, Miguel, and I got a few hours of work in before the rain drove us out of the woods. We put about 20 trees on the deck and cleaned out an old road that well use to skid our logs out to the deck to then load onto trailers and take to the saw mill. The end result will be our first silvopasture paddock which will hopefully give us summer forage of high quality grass and the ability to graze our cows in the shade during the heat of the summer. If this experiment is successful, then I may end up planting a grove in some of our existing pasture which would give us high value trees and keeping the ability to graze thereby doubling our production on the same land. It’s an experiment for now. Next summer well see what type of forage comes up. I already know the cows will love it. The greatly prefer being in the woods.
Here is a bit of John on the skidder.
We started a bit of tree trimming here at the farm. And by a bit we only started with 7 acres and by trimming I mean we are clearing out about 60% of the trees. In other words it’s a pretty major job. John, Miguel, and I got a few hours of work in before the rain drove us out of the woods. We put about 20 trees on the deck and cleaned out an old road that well use to skid our logs out to the deck to then load onto trailers and take to the saw mill. The end result will be our first silvopasture paddock which will hopefully give us summer forage of high quality grass and the ability to graze our cows in the shade during the heat of the summer. If this experiment is successful, then I may end up planting a grove in some of our existing pasture which would give us high value trees and keeping the ability to graze thereby doubling our production on the same land. It’s an experiment for now. Next summer well see what type of forage comes up. I already know the cows will love it. The greatly prefer being in the woods.
Here is a bit of John on the skidder.
I paid a lot of money and spent a lot of time attending a class taught by Ian Mitchell-Innes to learn about grazing. Living Web Farms has recorded a very similar class in Florida and published the entire thing on youtube for free. If you’re reading our blog and interested in cattle, watch this video series. It will save you quite a bit of money and time over what I had to do. You can go to the first video in the series here.
This isn’t your typical 8 minute youtube video. There are hours and hours of classroom and field time documented. I can’t believe that they are putting this out for free. For a grazer, this is valuable information.
I came home after work to discover that we had a calf who had gotten separated from her mom and was on the wrong side of the fence. Unlike goats, cows after making their great escape immediately want to get back to the herd so I happened across this calf pacing the fence and bellowing to her mom. We had about 15 minutes of daylight left and I had two Princesses playing on the front steps of the house. No interns, no Miguel, even Spork was at a sleep over. To make matters worse Bok Bok at 5 had never really worked cows before. Then to top it all off, this was a ninja calf. Admittedly not one that had caused any issues before but it was out so there you go. About 30 seconds in I realized I should video rather than instruct because as you can hear, The Princess immediately took over instruction after I had given them the game plan. I had to stop filming because I was needed to get the cow going but the rest of the event looked like this.
I had to run and back up the girls one time because Bok Bok didn’t quite get what her job was and the calf ran right by her. I stopped it and turned her back. Then The Princess pushed the calf along the fence, past the corner, down the fence, around the open gate, into the barn yard and then closed the gate. All in her pajamas and all while instructing Bok Bok on what to do. I helped a tiny bit and then she didn’t need me anymore. Also all while taking on a cow that outweighed her by 300 pounds with no fear.
Yeah, I was proud.
Today I had The Princess for my helper and you can see her unrolling an eight hundred pound hay bail before sunrise. Two points from these pictures.
One, for you boys out there, despite a cute outward appearance a farm girl will break you. Don’t mess with her.
Two, I may have helped her a little bit. For you boys out there. A farm girl has a dad that can do all that she wants done to a boy who broke her heart and is adept at making sausage from most any meat and will serve it to the nice police officers who stopped by to inquire as to your whereabouts.
The takeaway here is don’t mess with farm girls.
We tinker with all kinds of things here on the farm but I never thought I would be hot rodding my mineral feeder.
We managed to bend the axle on our second set if tires and break one of the tires to boot. The fix seems like it will be permanent but I wasn’t planning on putting such large tires on this thing. It looks like when you hot rod a car and put big tires under the back end.
The fix involved getting a piece of cast iron pipe and modifying it to accept wheels and tires from Agri supply. These are solid tires so there is no chance of a flat one morning early when we are moving cows. The rigid cast iron carries the weight very well with zero flex. It took a big grinder and a lathe to get everything to fit but now this thing should be good to use for 10 years.
This is the first bail of hay fed this winter. The cows didn’t even know what it was at first but I quickly showed them and they fell into the hay like hyenas.
Looks like we are back to hay till spring. As previously discussed, we will place the hay on our worst areas to try and recover them. I have seen this done before and it worked well. Hopefully it will work for is.
The cows in their new frosty paddock. They have one paddock left before they go into the pond for a day.
Today was the best day yet for a Spunky. We walked out to get her and she was already up and nursing. I wasn’t too pleased because the calf gets the rest of the day to nurse, we only get that mornings milking. However we were able to get Spunky out of the paddock and heading towards the barn before the other cows had even reached the wire. This let us have Spunky to the barn without moving the cows into their new paddock. This keeps Spunky from being conflicted because she wants to be in the new paddock but also she wants to go milk. Today she was able to do both as we held the beef cows in the old paddock till Spunky got back. A few more weeks and this will go like clockwork.
So back to the calf nursing. Today we got 2 full gallons of milk which is what Spunky was giving before we dried her off. Based on the milk mustache I know the Ninja calf got some too. We are still 60 days away from her maximum production so I feel good that we will get back in the swing of things and be making cheese and butter soon.
Well drilling number 1
Yesterday we had an old well redrilled as part of our pasture recovery plan. I already mentioned the needs of cows and their drinking requirements. This is a lot of water to produce each day, combined with the water needs of four families all drinking off of one well that supplies the entire farm. So with all that in mind we hired NW Poole Well Company to come onsite and recommission an old well that was abandoned before We moved here in 1980. In looking at the well it looked like the last pump installed was in 1975 but who knows how old the well itself was.
Ryan with NW Poole thought it would be no big deal to drill out some obstructions and get this old well up to the 10 gallons per minute that we wanted. Turns out that wasn’t quite the way it went. The old well had some sort of flexible plastic pipe that was still intact from about 15 feet down to the bottom of the 150 foot well. It was seriously tough stuff and took FOREVER.
well drilling – 3
This is about 6 hours late, still drilling out the pipe. The well itself was wide open. At 30 gallons per hour for diesel burn that’s a lot of diesel just to remove plastic.
And the end result. At 150 feet, the well was producing about 2 gallons per minute. Ahh yes, now I see why they abandoned it. Duh! Nothing to do but to keep drilling. We went to 205 feet and still only had 7 gallons per minute. But 7 gallons per minute gives us 3900 gallons in a 10 hour solar day which is plenty for winter and we get much more sun in the summer when we might need more water. Plus I am going to install a 1500 gallon cistern inline so that will give us reserve capacity. That’s not part of the engineered plan but it works for the system and is an enhancement to the overall project so I think it should be ok.