Ninja Cow Farm LLC

December 18, 2013December 19, 2013

Milking update

Today Dottie was waiting for us at the fence wanting to be milked. That’s about as good as it gets. Day four and she is in the routine. We got a little less than 2 gallons of milk today which is still in line with her expected production considering all the factors like stage of lactation and season, etc.

Above you see the milk mobile. This is the Goldbergs golf cart that they bring every day rain or shine for morning milking. They debated taking the golf bag holders off originally but they worked out perfectly to hold the milk buckets every day. Plus they occasionally hold a child or two for a ride around the farm.

Today we began a new milk distribution system where instead of splitting each days milk, one family takes the milk one day, the other takes it the next day. So today we got the whole two gallons plus the gallons we already have in the fridge.

Looks like its time for yogurt and butter at the Ninja house.

December 17, 2013

Merry Christmas

And so it begins.

Spork and Bok Bok putting their favorite ornaments on the tree. And when I say tree, I mean redwood because SWMBO picked a 14′ tree. Now I know what you are thinking. Why in the world did she get a 14′ tree?! It’s simple really. It is because they didn’t have 20′ trees.

The kids are having a large time getting in the spirit for Christmas, which really takes no prompting. Your author, who is known as Scrooge, doesn’t get there quite as quickly.

December 17, 2013

Milking, day 3

Dottie, post milking and returned to the pasture. The black cow in the black of pre-dawn is challenging for a picture. This was the best of the lot.

Dottie was fantastic again today, meeting is in the pasture ready to milk and allowing herself to be halter led from pasture a all the way to the milking stanchion. She still balks at entering the stanchion but that will pass quickly as she learns it’s where the food and milking happen.

We got about 2 gallons of milk this morning so all in all things are progressing very nicely.

The inmates were both here this morning and are moving the cows to a new paddock and setting up the weeks paddocks. We still have a lot of logging to do and hopefully we will get some extra time this week to get a few more trees ready to send to the mill.

December 16, 2013

Milking, day 2. And a new name.

Today we had our second day of milking the new cow. Unlike yesterday where she was in the barn, this morning we had her out in the pasture with the other cows. You never know how that’s going to go but she came right up to is and was very interested in the food bucket. After a few munches I was able to walk her by halter to the milk parlor where she only balked for a few seconds before going in to be milked. 2 1/2 gallons of sweet Jersey milk later and she was done.

Pictured here you see Spork out this morning at 6am. He is part of the morning crew but what made this even more impressive is that he and a bunch of of the rest of us went out to see The Hobbit last night and didn’t get to bed till after 11pm. Not a complaint from the boy this morning. He jumped right on his chores. The girls, not so much.

So we made an executive decision this morning and the new milk cow will be named Dottie. I don’t know if we need to have a renaming ceremony like you do with a boat. After the issues we had with Maggie, I think its sounding like a better and better idea.

December 15, 2013

A new cow

Today we had our first milking from our new milk cow. Despite the black coat, she is another Jersey. Here you can see the last milking being done at the previous owners place. This is the same guy, Mike, who we bought Maggie from. This was his last milk cow and as you can see by his 5 year old son sitting atop her, she is another gentle cow.

Here is another shot of her previous situation. She was a little fussy over the new people being involved but overall she seems to be a good cow.

Luckily Mike is just down the road on Penny Road so it was only a 15 minute ride home for our new cow. She is already bred back to an Angus so she shouldn’t get too much attention from Benjamin. Plus she has been bull bred rather than AI so she more used to a bulls attention. She is 3 years old so hopefully we should have many years together Lord willing.

This morning milking in our milking parlor. Just a few minutes work and she went right into the gate. All things considered milking went well and the reports on the milk quality range from “Fantastic!” to “Mmm that’s like drinking ice cream.”

We have yet to name this cow. I have heard a few suggestions go by, Dottie and Dolly being two suggestions. We’ll have to have a quorum and decide on a final name. I actually like Dottie of the suggestions so far. I am sure that there will be a name soon.

December 14, 2013December 15, 2013

Just take a little off the top

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.

December 14, 2013December 15, 2013

Just take a little off the top

Here is a bit of John on the skidder.

December 12, 2013December 19, 2013

Tree trimming and dirt

We are doing a little pruning on the farm. We are reestablishing a perimeter fence that was old when I moved here. It’s now down and broken in most areas and we are going to just replace with new high tensile wire. Since trees and whatnot have grown up over the years we needed to do a bit of trimming back. While I have an axe and a machete I figured I would go Tim Taylor and get 100 hp of diesel grinding death. Other than getting the machine stuck once, the whole job only took about 2 hours instead of two days so that worked out great. And now we have a 6 foot wide strip that looks like a park where everything is ground and mulched.

One interesting opportunity that came out of this grinder is that there were some piles of old wood that had been dumped into the woods.

I needed to grind up these piles just to clear the way. It’s sometimes confusing to understand how organic materials (trees and leaves) can become dirt. Well through the magic if horsepower we were able to shortcut the process by several years. We went in about 20 seconds from what you see above to this.

This is nearly perfect material, produced naturally except for the final grind which only sped the process up. This is how you make healthy soil. No magic, just lots of organic material.

What the pile and the dirt looked like after the machine was finished. If this was out in the open it would be ready to plant a garden. As it is its in the woods so it will cover back up with leaves and continue to build soil depth.

December 12, 2013December 19, 2013

Great online free video series on grazing

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.

December 11, 2013

You can take the kid out of the farm…

But you can’t take the farm out of the kid. My crowd, Spork, The Princess, and Bok Bok in Nashville haming it up. Of course dear ol’ dad stayed home to take care of the farm and work.

And with it being 24 degrees this morning, work I did. Pushing 800 pound bales of hay did warm me up nicely though and the cows were surely appreciative of some grub this morning to help with the cold. They also appreciated the section of woods they could get in to keep the frost off of them. We will leave that section open to them this entire rotation so they have some shelter from the winter wind and weather.

This morning I may have secured our new bull. I have been trying to buy a lowline Angus bull from a friend for a while. It looks like I may finally succeed here in a month or two. This will work perfectly as I can sell Benjamin while he had plenty of calves yet to produce and I can start working the lowline genetics into my herd. Plus with the new milk cow coming, I have to sell Benjamin before she goes into heat after she delivers her calf in about 5 months. I don’t want to loose another cow to Benjamin’s huge body. He is fine for angus but just too big for a Jersey. If anyone wants a beautiful bull, let me know. He eats out of my hand and has been perfect since day one.