Northern Farmer

When raising livestock and crops, it seems like there is always something new to figure out. In the last few days I talked with a neighbor, who is a semi-retired dairy farmer, about the continuous learning that farming seems to involve. He complained that, since getting rid of some of his haying equipment, he has had to relearn how to make hay. He has had to cut hay with a sickle mower and then wait longer for the hay to dry. The last cutting of hay he waited too long, resulting in the hay getting too dry and a loss of some of the leaves. I asked this dairy farmer if the learning ever ends – to which he replied that there is always some new problem that must be solved and more things to learn. Lately I feel like I have been dragged through a set of new things to learn.

First and foremost, I am learning how to deal with drought. Seems that drought reduces the margin for error. For example, around a year ago a friend gave me a Jersey heifer that had injured its shoulder. I figured I would see if she would recover some and that maybe we could get enough weight on her to make it worthwhile to send her to the butcher. But she is still very thin. She does not compete well in a grazing situation. So now I am trying to get a neighbor to take her, hoping that if he confines her and feeds some grain, she might actually get to a weight where processing her is worthwhile. With the current drought I cannot afford to feed an animal like her. I have also had to adjust my management of our pastures. The orchard grass is growing some in our pastures, the clover is growing very little and the ragweed is growing fairly well. I could graze our pastures more than I am, but I am concerned that the cows and sheep will graze the clover to the ground and ultimately kill it. It would be nice to get the sheep to eat the ragweed, but not at the cost of killing the clover.

The other thing that I am being forced to learn is how to prevent mastitis. We keep a neighbor’s dairy cow. Last winter she had some mastitis, which cleared once I fed her high levels or copper. I backed-off of the copper once the mastitis cleared and the copper started flavoring the milk (a bitter, metallic taste). Now I guess I am seeing that she probably has a higher copper need than my other cows. This cow just calved a couple of weeks ago. The calving went very well, without us having to intervene. The last time she calved at the neighbors, they had a terrible time getting the calf out and then could not get this cow to let the calf suckle. They had wanted to leave the calf on the cow, but ended up bottle feeding because the cow would not accept the calf. So I felt a little smug when at our place this cow calved unassisted and also did a very good job of mothering its calf. When this cow’s milk came in and mastitis developed, I realized that I had not given this cow enough copper through the last few months – and any thought that I really new what I was doing was banished from my mind.

I buy hay from a number of neighbors. The closest neighbor usually is able to bale good, high quality alfalfa. This year he has seems to be baling his hay too wet, resulting in the hay heating and getting moldy. On his second cutting of hay, he started baling when the hay was a little too wet. He, his father (a lifelong dairy farmer) and I, all talked trying to decide if he should continue baling. Rain was predicted for that night, so if possible we wanted to get the hay baled. We finally decided that the hay would dry if I stacked it loosely. This was a big mistake! A few days later I ended up cutting open most of the bales because they were hot. I had visions of barn fires as we broke the bales open to get them dry and cool. This neighbor just baled third crop (which was very small due to the drought). In spite of the dry weather, he managed to bale the hay when it was too wet. So once again we cut open a bunch of bales. This neighbor postponed baling until early evening because he thought the hay was too dry, but unfortunately he started too late in the evening and baled when the dew had started to form. As a result these small square bales must weigh about 70 pounds each due to the moisture in them.

I have come to the conclusion that we should have our best and brightest people farming, especially if we are going to have high quality food and good stewardship of the land. In general, our society seems to think that farming requires very little intelligence. In reality, authentic, effective farming requires a lot of thought and knowledge.

Jim V

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Jim V. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.