Three Years Later

You know when you have a great idea, you get everything in place to make it happen... and then do nothing with your project?

Yeah, that's pretty much been the theme of this blog.

Besides, what farmer really has time to blog? If a farmer has time to blog, he probably isn't farming. Because every minute of every day could be consumed by all of the farm chores. Milking cows, bedding the livestock, fixing fences and other broken things, mixing feed, chasing loose livestock, fixing more fences... and so on. Oh, and somehow a farmer is supposed to squeeze food, family and checking the weather in between all of the usual chaos.

Really, when a farmer says he is going to blog, what that actually means is that this farmer wants a blog and he wants his daughter to do all of the blog maintenance for him. And create the layout. And pretty much be the farmer's professional, unpaid, genius ghost-writer.

That would be me, the daughter, finally getting around to updating the farmer's blog. In between milking the cows and trying to maintain a blog of my own. It only took me two years to hack back into this blog... after a million failed attempts at guessing the farmers blog password, which he'd also forgotten.

Somehow, I need to find a way to teach, convince or trick the rest of the family (including the farmer) into updating this blog as well, so that I'm not the solo writer on this webpage. ...and if I'm the main author, well.... you might as well read my blog instead. ;)

So here's to another attempt at keeping a real farm blog. 2nd time around, 3 years later, and dairy farming organically instead of conventionally... but I'll save that story for another post (and maybe another author)

Duck Dynasty & Finding A Wife

It's courtship season in our house as kid number 6 is out trying to get himself a wife.  Thankfully there are some good Biblical guidelines out there and if a young person seeking marriage follows a few basic guidelines he's setting himself up for better success than most.
Still, finding a wife is serious work. Here are two things we can be sure of: 

1. Duck Dynasty is pretty funny.
2. Marriage is serious business. 

In light of these truths, we thought we'd share Phil Robertson's wise, yet pretty humorous words:

"Don't marry some yuppie girl, you know what I'm sayin'? Find you a meek, kind, gentle spirited, country girl. If she knows how to cook, and she carries her bible and lives by it and she loves to eat bull frogs, now there's a woman. See what I'm sayin'?

You see, the first prerequisite for marryin' a woman in my opinion; Can. She. Cook. You gonna be there for 50 years and you don't even know whether she can cook or not? What kind of thinkin' is that?! "Well, we'll just live off love." Not really. You'll starve to death.

She doesn't have to be a pretty girl. Just 'cause she looks a little homely, that's alright. It's hard to get a pretty one to cook and carry a Bible anymore. Pass me another frog."

Moving Calves

A little grain for bait.

A lot of coaxing is necessary with such stubborn animals.

...and after all that, there goes the grain!

Patrick found the whole deal rather amusing!

...backing up is usually safer with rear-view mirrors, to avoid pitfalls like this.

Grinding corn

http://magissues.farmprogress.com/WSA/WA06Jun10/wsa004.pdf

This guy has an excellent idea! I've found that most of the animal nutritionists that I've come across don't seem to understand the benefits of grinding corn vs rolling corn. 5-7 lbs. per cow per day of increased production using less corn makes a lot of sense, especially with corn prices up in the $6-$7.00 a bushel range. I have personally seen a 5 lb increase in my herd of Jerseys.

What can brown do for you?

Thanks to GE we farmers are going to save the world a billion, with just a little dung. 

We are considering building a small scale manure digester to produce our farm electricity.