I am sure everyone is just dying to know what I have been up to while Brittany has been back in the US. Well I have been quit busy, taking on some new responsibilities and ending some others. The herd that I was running got put back into the main herd as mating is soon to come to an end. Because I no longer have a herd I was put in charge of all the heifers that we calved this spring. So now I have 250 heifers to take care of and a 75 acre farm across the road where we are raising them. I am going to be responsible to keep the heifers fed so they hit their growth targets, and vaccinated along with a few other animal health requirements. I will be doing the feed planning and making sure that silage is cut at the right time to keep the quality of the grass as high as possible. I am really excited for this opportunity since it will give me the experience of doing the decision making and grass management while still having our farm manager to help me out when I need it along the way. 

I have also slowly begun learning how to operate our different types of irrigation on the farm. This has been pretty slow since we have been blessed with timely rains and cooler than normal weather, both of which is making the grass growth higher than normal for this time of year. 

 I am very excited for my wonderful wife to come back again. Tarzan has been keeping me company, but he doesn't come close to Brittany. I know she has really enjoyed going back home for the month though. I will try to keep everyone updated on how my new responsibilities are going in the future. God Bless, Paul.

Last week Wednesday was the first day we irrigated on the farm. We started up one of the irrigators called a roto-rainer. It is basically a big lawn sprinkler that waters an area 300 feet wide and travels up to 1900 feet in a run. This weekend while I was off they also started up the K-Line irrigation which is made up of a sprinkler head in a pod, attached to a long water line. It is moved around with the quad bike and attached to water outlets at the ends of the paddocks. We have a total of 7 different types of irrigation on our farm. We will be working on getting them all up and running this week as things are drying out quickly with warm sunny weather. 

Here is a picture of the roto-rainer in action next to our house.

Also we ended up getting almost 500 bales (3' x 4' x 6') of silage off the farm and where we winter the cows. Below is a picture of one of the ways we store the bales so they don't go bad. It is called a bale stack and these stacks are two bales high, five bales wide, and 15 bales long. It saves a lot of many on plastic doing it this way versus individually wrapping the bales in plastic.