Blue skies. Green grass. Black and white beauties. All the makings of a great photo.
Friday, August 20, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Farm kids
I can't even recount how many times I've been asked, "What do you do with the children when you're in the barn?"
My answer is always the same: "They come out to the barn, too."
Life on our farm for a toddler means lots of time spent in confinement, for safety's sake. Monika either naps in her stroller or plays in the front of the barn, fenced in by a stock tank and two bales of hay.
Dan has graduated from containment and now entertains himself while we do chores.
He spends most of his time rough-housing with Skippy, our dog, digging in the sand pile and playing in mud puddles.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
On the wrong side of the odds
It seems like the past couple weeks were one big run of bad luck — rained on hay, sick cows, you name it.
Two of our unlucky events really stung:
The first stroke of bad luck involved Dancer, a heifer we'd been trying to get bred who wasn't showing heats. She'd been bred a couple times, but her pregnancy test back open after the last service. So, Glen started Dancer and two other heifers who were falling behind schedule on a synch program. All three heifers came into heat, just like they should. When Glen was breeding Dancer, though, her uterus didn't feel right.
The next morning, the neighbor who houses our breeding-age heifers called to say Dancer was still standing, so we decided to breed her again. This time, when Glen palpated her, he found placental membranes.
So, Dancer had been pregnant the whole time we were fretting about her not being bred. The bioPRYN test we use to check for most pregnancies has a very low margin of error in detecting open animals (from the fine print on the test — if a sample's result falls in the open range, 99.9% of animals are not pregnant in confirmatory testing). But, Dancer proved that false negatives do occur.
We were reminded of a bit of advice from our former farm business management instructor: Never give a dose of prostaglandin to a cow or heifer with a previous service unless you are 100% sure she's open.
Bitsy, a cow of ours, delivered the second stoke of bad luck. To start, the calf she was trying to deliver presented with its head turned backward. Since she was bred using a unit of sexed semen, our anxiety level was a wee bit elevated while we worked to get the calf out. Upon delivery of a live calf, the situation went from bad to worse. It was a bull calf. Our very first sexed semen bull calf (out of 14 calves).
Glen was seriously bummed. We haven't used very much sexed semen in the past 18 months, and we've only had 15 heifer calves out of 45 calvings so far this year, so Glen was really looking forward to this heifer calf. Plus, this was the only conception out of that half-rack of semen, making it, as Glen said, "the most expensive bull calf ever." What's even worse, is that in five lactations now, this was only Bitsy's second bull calf. We might have had better luck just using conventional semen.
After moping around for awhile, though, Glen said that these two events weren't really bad luck, instead they were simply part of the odds. 99.9% of the time, Dancer really would have been open. And 95% of the time, Bitsy's calf would have been a heifer. We were just on the wrong side of the odds.
I still think it was bad luck. But I do think our luck is changing. Why?
This morning I was walking out of the house when a strange car pulled into the yard. An unfamiliar man stepped out of the car and asked me, "Is your dad around?"
"Are you looking for Glen?" I asked.
"Yeah," the man replied.
It made my day. (Maybe even my week.)
Two of our unlucky events really stung:
The first stroke of bad luck involved Dancer, a heifer we'd been trying to get bred who wasn't showing heats. She'd been bred a couple times, but her pregnancy test back open after the last service. So, Glen started Dancer and two other heifers who were falling behind schedule on a synch program. All three heifers came into heat, just like they should. When Glen was breeding Dancer, though, her uterus didn't feel right.
The next morning, the neighbor who houses our breeding-age heifers called to say Dancer was still standing, so we decided to breed her again. This time, when Glen palpated her, he found placental membranes.
So, Dancer had been pregnant the whole time we were fretting about her not being bred. The bioPRYN test we use to check for most pregnancies has a very low margin of error in detecting open animals (from the fine print on the test — if a sample's result falls in the open range, 99.9% of animals are not pregnant in confirmatory testing). But, Dancer proved that false negatives do occur.
We were reminded of a bit of advice from our former farm business management instructor: Never give a dose of prostaglandin to a cow or heifer with a previous service unless you are 100% sure she's open.
Bitsy, a cow of ours, delivered the second stoke of bad luck. To start, the calf she was trying to deliver presented with its head turned backward. Since she was bred using a unit of sexed semen, our anxiety level was a wee bit elevated while we worked to get the calf out. Upon delivery of a live calf, the situation went from bad to worse. It was a bull calf. Our very first sexed semen bull calf (out of 14 calves).
Glen was seriously bummed. We haven't used very much sexed semen in the past 18 months, and we've only had 15 heifer calves out of 45 calvings so far this year, so Glen was really looking forward to this heifer calf. Plus, this was the only conception out of that half-rack of semen, making it, as Glen said, "the most expensive bull calf ever." What's even worse, is that in five lactations now, this was only Bitsy's second bull calf. We might have had better luck just using conventional semen.
After moping around for awhile, though, Glen said that these two events weren't really bad luck, instead they were simply part of the odds. 99.9% of the time, Dancer really would have been open. And 95% of the time, Bitsy's calf would have been a heifer. We were just on the wrong side of the odds.
I still think it was bad luck. But I do think our luck is changing. Why?
This morning I was walking out of the house when a strange car pulled into the yard. An unfamiliar man stepped out of the car and asked me, "Is your dad around?"
"Are you looking for Glen?" I asked.
"Yeah," the man replied.
It made my day. (Maybe even my week.)
Friday, August 6, 2010
Photo of the week: Bootprints in the sand
The inch of rain we got on Sunday was bad news for our last field of third crop, but it made for great footprint conditions in the soft gravel down by the hay shed. There's something about seeing Dan's little bootprints all around the farm that just melts my heart.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Recipe for a bad morning
One sick child
Two missed alarms
Three sick cows
Four hours of sleep
Five loads of straw sitting in the yard yet when it starts to rain
Six hours to do chores, clean up and make it to the fair on time
Seven bottle calves to feed
Eight acres of third crop getting doused by the deluge
(On the bright side, this was last Sunday. Things have since improved, but I'm still not convinced our luck has changed.)
(The other good news is that, after a week in the shop, I finally have my computer back. The first time I checked email after getting it back, I saw that there were 37 new messages coming in, so I got up to go do dishes while they downloaded. Before I even made it to the door, the computer's you've-got-mail chime sounded. Zoikes! That was fast. Maybe if I took a week off to get upgraded I could work that fast when I came back, too!)
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