It has been a while since we last updated this part of our blog. We are down to less than 40 cows left to calve out of 800, so Brittany is almost done with her maternal duties. Yesterday we herd tested, which means we took milk samples from all the cows so each cow can be analyzed on the milk they are producing. We also started the first part of mating by painting the tails of the cows to so we can see when they are cycling. That means the busy time of mating is only one month away! Tomorrow we are going to a discussion group with a bunch of area dairy farmers and going over mating plans and ideas, it should be a great time!
 
We have been making a lot of improvements to the farm over the last couple weeks. The new effluent ponds are almost finished. We had a long part of the track that we walk the cows down redone so it is much smoother now. We had a new lateral overhead irrigation system put up on part of the farm, I will take some pictures of it because it is really cool! We have also been repairing driveways and pasture entries with loads of gravel. And one job that I have been enjoying the opportunity to do is heavy rolling. What we do is go over a pasture with a giant lawn roller that is 6 or 8 feet wide and 5 feet tall. This is done on areas of the pastures that the cows might have damaged because the ground was too wet then they were grazing it.

To finish up here are some pictures of the view from our back window this past week. I love living on a farm!

I never know where to post things, under my section or here....well, these two videos are directly related to Dairying sooo....DIARY OF A DAIRY WINS!  These are just a couple of videos with the calves. Two of the oldest sheds got let outside the other day and they LOVE IT! There are 45 heifers in each shed. They are the funniest most curious creatures. They just love walking around, chasing each other (or birds), eating grass...and  trees, and attempting to eat fences...their little tongue will find it all!!!! The first video is just of them playing in the paddock and me talking to them....not that cool, but cute :) The second video is with Steph, the farm manager here, feeding them with the GIANT feeder. That thing is so cool, and they are fed in about 5 min! Crazy. She has taken over doing these two sheds which has helped me out alot! I love watching them eat with their little tails whirling around and around. It's adorable and really funny. Whats even funnier is when she has to take off and all the cows are chasing her, good thing her dogs are so smart and well trained, they (attempt) to keep them all in the fence....it doesn't always work, I'll try to catch that on video sometime.:) Enjoy the videos!!! ~Britt

I am sure most of you are wondering how or why someone would measure grass, but on a grazing dairy farm it is one of the most important daily tasks. Measuring the grass tells us how much pasture we can feed the cows everyday and if we need to give them hay so they are not under fed. There are three ways to measure the amount of grass in the pasture, otherwise known as the pasture cover. 
   1. A plate-meter - a handheld stick with a disk at the bottom, and a little computer that measures how far up the stick the disk goes when you drop it (I will take a picture to show you).
   2. A C-Dax machine - A fancy, relatively new invention that someone pulls behind a quad. It uses lasers to measure the height of the grass as you drive through the paddock. A monitor, which sits on the quad computes and stores the numbers for the amount of grass in each paddock.
   3. Eyeing it - After using the other two methods long enough your eye gets trained to tell how much grass is in a paddock. This can actually be quite accurate and it is also very quick.

I have been using the plate-meter over the past couple weeks to measure pasture covers but today I used the C-Dax machine for the first time. I measured all the grass on the whole farm, it took about two hours. It was really neat to be able to see the entire farm today, especially the areas I have rarely been in yet. So that was my big excitement for the day! I also have been working on getting my eye trained to read pasture covers and I am starting to get pretty accurate. 

We are down to about 100 cows that still need to calve out of 800 so we are on the home stretch, yay! (that's the excitement from Brittany) That's all for now! -Paul