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I was looking up a reference for a different post and stumbled across the following link on PBS. It’s some learned people debating fat, low fat, and the American diet. I thought there was some good reading on this page so I thought I’d share it here with everyone.
Here is the link to the page.
The arctic weather that is hitting everyone is making it’s way here today. It was 61 degrees this morning and windy. I wore pants and a shirt to milk and was a little warm. By 10am it’s supposed to be 40 and by tonight it’s 12 to 8 degrees depending on who’s forecast you watch. 8 degrees is Wisconsin cold. It’s cold that I don’t like to see. It’s hard on the animals and hard on the facilities. We’ve managed to not have any issues with the cow waterer this winter, even with the freezes. The water hose freezes at night, but then thaws during the day and the cows get all their water like normal. However tonight it’s going to freeze hard, then not get above freezing all day tomorrow so there is no opportunity for the cows to get their water. It looks like we’ll be unhooking the water hose and draining it, then hooking it up to fill the trough, then unhooking and draining again. A lot of labor for water. This is all if we can even drain it properly. If not, it’ll be buckets of water to fill the water trough, meaning even more labor. Fortunately trough itself doesn’t freeze so we can water throughout the day.
Speaking of freezing, the pig waterer froze Saturday and broke in two places. We’ve switched to an alternate waterer. Pigs don’t drink much water anyway, especially since they have two pallets of watermelons to eat. That should keep them well hydrated through this cold spell.
Looks like it’ll be a day and night of stoking the boiler to keep the heat going. 8 degrees is a new low for the boiler so this should be a good test. I know the boiler will keep up. The question is will the wood and the stoker.
The Princess, finishing up her school project. This is the base for the hanging garden of Babylon. After the paint dries, its time for the greenery and then the report writing starts. In case you think she didn’t do her own work…
Thanks to the generosity of one of my employees, we were able to get two deer this year, field dressed and delivered to the cooler. It doesn’t get much better than that.
Also for Christmas Spork received a knife that I had made for him. He has been awful proud of wearing a knife and has been itching to have something to cut. Its a big moment in a boys life when he is responsible enough to have a real knife and Spork is justifiably proud. With two deer on the hook, he had just the opportunity to try out the new blade. There was much discussion between he and I as we worked on skinning the first deer. You see at 9 he has never skinned a deer, or even been close to one. A cow, yes. He’s even skinned a pig, but never a deer. So we spent some quality father son time over the deer and he worked his side like a champ. He was truly a joy to work with, and I told him so. He even managed not to throw up, which was in question there off and on. Overall I was tickled we were able to share this experience and look forward to doing it again when its time to butcher the deer next weekend. It will be good to have some deer sausage because SWMBO informs me that we are running low on ground pork. These hams aren’t going to be done soon enough!
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’ve finally hit the big time and bought an honest to goodness milk pail. Hamby Dairy Supply had a scratch and dent sale and had their milk pails marked half off. I bit the bullet and bought the pail you see and couldn’t be happier with it. It is neither scratched nor dented and appears perfect in all ways. It’s quite an improvement over the plastic pails we were using because it has a handle and takes up less space. At half off, it cost four times more than the pails we were using so it better be better!
Today I am working for The Princess on a school project. We are building the hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the ancient wonders of the world. We are doing it to scale so no big framing work today however we had to make an ancient water lift system to pump the water to the plants.
While this is a collaborative effort, The Princess handles all the critical jobs and design efforts. She is also in charge of all the math. I provide dumb labor and hit things with hammers.
The Princess is in charge of MIG welding while I have to handle TIG. At 7 she is not quite ready for TIG yet.
After a few hours of work, we did have to take a break to feed the pigs. Tomatoes, baby carrots, and bananas. Not a bad breakfast if you are a pig.
We will work the rest of the day on the gardens, then tonight we will be processing 4 deer that are showing up. A gift from a friend at the end of deer season. Looks like the room we made in the freezer lately from pork is getting replaced by venison. Spork and The Princess will of course be in the thick of any meat processing, as always.
So apparently there is an end of year report on WordPress for how your blog is doing. Being a masochist, or is that sadist, I can never remember which it is I figured I’d go through and see what’s going on. If you are interested, you can see the report here.
Who is bacon.org? I need to know something with that cool of a website.
Of course, as a fan of despair.com I was immediately reminded of the demotivational poster pictured above while reading the report. However, I intended to post a post every day, 7 days a week for the time I was blogging. Some days I don’t get one in but some days I post two so with 160 posts in part of 2013 overall I met my goal. I also have the best journal of farming I’ve ever kept, which isn’t saying much since I rarely keep records.
Overall it’s been a good 2013 and I hope to continue the blog into 2014. In the meantime, I do hope it helps some of you if for nothing else than amusement.
Today we resalted the hams and put them back in the cooler for their time till its smoking time. We continue to pour off lots of liquid and the hams are looking like they are on their way.
The inmates did a good job and got everything salted and rotated. Unfortunately inmate Brian has some sort of crud like I do. My Ebola has progressed into pneumonia so I still am not getting too much done, which is very frustrating. I keep saying that maybe tomorrow I will feel better. Tomorrow will come, right?
That’s of course a Cow, lettuce, and tomato. Here is one of the many bucket fulls of veggies going to the cows today. With all the surplus I was able to hold off feeding a bail of hay today which is 15 dollars saved. The cows don’t mind because they would rather have the veggies anyway so this is actually a treat day for them. The warm weather doesn’t hurt their mood either.