Happy Spring!!
Spring you say? Well maybe that's wishful thinking, but today the weather was 44 degrees...that sure feels like Spring to us after many, many cold days of winter. And when Spring arrives, it brings lots of joy and hapiness with it. The sunshine glowing early in the morning and the moon rising on those clear and cold nights.
The Spring fever cleaning bug aways hits me hard, it didn't when I was young because my Mother was the Queen of Clean-ing (so I guess I didn't have to do the cleaning?) Our house and our farm were clean...all the time. Well, maybe not all the time! Oh, and yes I did have to do the cleaning too!
This Spring brings us to other issues on the farm. For a few months now, the cows have been a little over-crowded. This causes may issues, one of which is cow comfort. Now we pride ourselves on cow comfort. Comfortable cows are happy cows!
So for the last few months we have been discussing how to eliminate the over-crowding issue. We have two choices, sell cows or build a new barn. After the year of 2009, which brought us the lowest milk prices in 30 years, we are a bit cautious about selling cows. So we are pursuing the option of building a barn. Barns are not cheap, but we have another generation coming into the farm and we need to think about that.
My husband and son have been traveling around looking at different types of barns to give us an idea of some of the new improvements that have been made since the last time we built a cow barn. We need to think about air flow, and cow flow. Where to install waterers and where and how many freestalls to put in. The freestalls are the stalls that the cows lay in. They are "free" because they allow any cow to enter and exit at any time. We need to decide whether to lay out the barn East to West or North to South. We are currently laid out North to South.
With the addition of a new barn also comes the challenges of the overall farm lay-out. We need to really make some decisions on where the new barn should go and if in the future the next generation decides to increase in size, that this pre-planning will help with some of those decisions. We will continue to discuss these issues and more that will probably come up as we move forward.
So look for news to come this Spring and hopefully some pictures as the project progresses, as long as the decision is made to build! I'll keep you posted.
Until next time...
Wish us luck!!
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