Oh A Busy Fall!!

Wow, has this been a crazy, as usual, Fall. Over the past couple of weeks, my blog has suffered from lack of attention. It's not that I haven't wanted to post, it's just that one thing has lead to another and another and, you guessed it, another!
With chopping of haylage going full steam into corn silage and the wet weather to contend with every day, not to mention getting ready for the county fair-whew! Life's been full!
This week I have started a blog post, but unfortunately, it's not finished and I find myself juggling many apples. When the guys (employees) are hard at work trying to get the crops in either in the Spring or Fall, it's my job to feed them. So sack lunches and good nutritious dinners with DAIRY products is what they eat this time of year. Then in between, I work in the office, take care of the horses, and pet-goat, Gomez. Oh yea, right now I'm off to chase steers in the corn field-AGAIN!!
Sorry to cut this short, but there's no time to waste when the cattle run through the corn!!

Until next time,

Corral your cattle!!

There's More To Making Hay Than You Know!

It's beginning to feel like Fall around the dairy farm. The mornings are cool and the afternoons are toasty warm. I've noticed a few leaves beginning to fall and a couple trees to turn a yellowish-orange color. Boy do I love Fall!
It's also one of the busiest times of the year for us here at the dairy. We planted our crops in the Spring and now it's harvest time. We have been working on chopping and baling hay. The first process is to mow, or cut, the hay. We use two mowers to do this-it is just quicker for us. This time of the year, the faster you can cut, or mow it, the faster it will have time to dry.

We then rake one row, or in our case "invert" (flip) it, onto another row so there is more hay for the Chopper to pick up.

This is the "Inverter"

The hay that we chop is called hay silage, or "haylage".

It is dumped from the trucks in a pile and then is pushed up and onto a pile on the ground-on a cement pad. We have three different locations where we store haylage and corn silage. This is a smaller area:

Thanks for seeing how we chop hay for good quality forage for our cows. To produce milk, the cows need good food, and this is just one example of how it's done!

Next, we'll be looking at chopping corn for corn silage, so check back again to see some exciting videos on that.

Until next time,

Buy dairy products.

Liquid Sunshine!

This week we are blessed with liquid sunshine-rain! Because we didn't get the rain earlier in the growing season for our crops, we have had to run our irrigation pivots. Pivots are like a giant sprinkler for your fields, that rotate around the field from a specific point. They are hooked up to power and some type of water resource. The larger ones have wheels and automatically rotate around the field, either partially or fully.




This is a new pivot we started using this year, on a soybean field across from our house. It moves very slowly to get the right amount of water on the beans.


Farmers use various forms of technology every day. An irrigation pivot is a tool that we use to help ensure that we will have enough of a crop to feed our cows. Too little rain, and we could have a poor crop year. Because we grow the majority of our cow feed, the weather plays a very important role in the cows diet. With enough rain this week, we might not have to run the pivot for several days-that would be good!


There's plenty to do on a rainy day. There's always something that needs fixed, so the farm shop is usually a busy place on a day like today. We are working on our chopper. This is a machine that "chops" the crops for feed. We will be chopping hay, called "haylage", in about a week. Look back for pictures on that.

My husband and I sometimes need to spend more time in the office. We have a 1930's Sears and Roebuck house that we lived in when we first got married. We had 2 children in this one bedroom house-let's just say, it was full! In December of 1991, we moved to the main farm and my husband's parents moved into a new house. That next Spring, we brought our little house to the farm and made an office out of it. With a little remodeling, it works perfect!! And remember, farming is a business too, and just like any other business, office work is always there waiting for someone to do it! That's my main job at the farm, along with many others.

So a rainy day is a perfect day to catch up on all those little things you put off doing when the sun is shining.