January 23rd – January 31st

The log skidding road

We had a nice little snow storm pass through the area on Tuesday night, and this weekend we’re hosting by far the coldest air of the winter, so conditions outside have taken a pretty dramatic turn toward the Arctic these days. There are four or five inches of snow on the ground, so the landscape is solidly white again, and most of the rough edges have been smoothed over. Our cow yards and lanes are a creamy white with the meandering cow paths criss crossing from gate to water to feed and back, and both herds have been spending much more time in their indoor lounging spaces than usual. The ten-day forecast is calling for another more significant snow storm Monday night of next week, so it looks like we are going to be in a wintery stretch here as we head into February. So far, this has been a pretty dry winter with temperatures a bit above what we are used to around here, so I am happy to get a bit more classic New England winter weather, as long as we don’t get any rain. 

The beef herd taking it easy on a cold morning

We have planned to have our whole staff on the farm for the last week of every month through the winter so that we can all meet and keep the planning and organizing work going. This past week was the last week of January, so we had a pretty busy meeting schedule throughout the week. We had meetings to plan how to best run summer programming, how to develop a food production and distribution partnership with the Mission Hill School, where our budget stands in these challenging times without programming, how to further develop the staff/board relationship, and our regular small group meetings to talk about racial equity. These were all great meetings, and the busy schedule was a wonderful antidote to the quiet weeks since Christmas when folks have been off the farm and we have been mostly working alone. There are a lot of exciting opportunities and thorny challenges coming down the line over the next few months, but I don’t think that we are alone in harboring the start of some optimism that we could be back in action some time in 2021. The Mission Hill School food meeting was a highlight, and it was galvanizing to hear about both the real and present food need that exists in that community, as well as the passion and commitment that parents and teachers have to address the issue. We are striving to partner with their school community to put our food production capabilities to use in helping get our high quality food into the hands of folks who need the support, with a focus on growing a project built collaboratively. We heard some wonderful ideas and some real challenges in this meeting, and we all got plenty of homework to get after before our next meeting at the end of next week. 

Our two John Deere tractors, ready for winter work

Our larger tractor, which was carted off to the service center about ten days ago, was returned to the farm this week, and we put it right to work. Brad put the loader arms back on the front, I hooked up the hydraulic bale grabber, and we set up the round bale yards for the beef herd again. We have some hard frozen ground around the farm with the nice cold weather we’ve been having, so I was eager to get the herd back out in their pasture bale feeding area while these conditions last. The pasture area gets too soft and muddy when we have warm weather, so it is great to use these areas as much as we can while they are frozen solid. The larger tractor picks up and moves the large wrapped round bales that we use for this type of winter feeding system, and we were unable to restock the feeding yards while the machine was off the farm. I can set up about fourteen bales at a time to fill the two five-bale lanes and the smaller four-bale auxiliary feeding area, and it takes the cows about three weeks to consume all of that hay. Of course, the tractor developed a problem that needed immediate attention, so I was unable to fully restock our bale yards before the machine left the farm. Luckily, the cows ate their last set up bale the day before the tractor’s triumphant return, so we did not have much of a hiccup in our winter feeding routine. 

Brad has been collecting logs at the sawmill.

In a last minute plot twist, we got word late Friday afternoon that a grant application submitted months ago to the state has been approved. We applied to a program distributing money to farmers to help them enhance their ability to feed local and food insecure communities in Massachusetts, and our grant application included money for a new refrigerated van for food transport, another Flat Field hoop house to expand our shoulder season growing, and a milk bottle capping machine to help us meet state guidelines for milk bottling for retail. We were approved for all three components of our application, and all of these parts will work together to profoundly expand our food production and distribution. With these tools, for example, we’ll be able to bottle milk following state standards and transport it to market or distribution following state guidelines for dairy transport. We’ll be able to pack the van with milk, eggs, meat and veggies, and deliver throughout the state to partnering organizations and communities. The hoop house will give us the space to really boost our off-season growing so that we are able to supply communities in need with fresh veggies throughout the year. The success of this application has the potential to be a transformative moment in the food production and sharing program that we are working to develop, and I think that we will spend a while understanding the ramifications of this turn of events. I’ll let you know how it all goes!

January 17th – January 23rd

I think that we’ve found the hay we’ll need to get the cows through winter until the grass returns, and nicely, it is coming through existing relationships that we have with reliable suppliers. Clover Hill Farm in Hardwick, where we buy our dairy hay, pig feed and chicken feed, has sixteen more round wrapped bales of this year’s third cut hay that we can buy, and our straw supplier in Gill has 250 first cut square bales to add to that. I am optimistic that these two additions will get us where we need to be for winter feed, and I am relieved to have found these bales so quickly and so locally. We don’t really want much extra hay in the barn after grazing starts in May, but we certainly cannot tolerate running out of hay before the cows start eating grass, so we are aiming for a pretty fine target in terms of how much hay to buy. The ever evolving livestock community here on the farm certainly also adds some turbulence to these calculations. We have found that drier wrapped bales keep pretty well for use the next fall, and dry square bales in the hay loft are okay too, but we’d rather avoid this type of holdover if possible. 

Inside one of the greenhouses. There is delicious spinach under the row cover.

Phoenix and Rio went through their hormone injection treatments this week to induce heats, and both cows have been bred. We will not know if these breedings were successful for a bit, but I am hoping that both cows can start growing the next generation of milk cows here on the farm. We will look for heats in about twenty days, and if either cow cycles, we’ll know that she is not bred. Neither cow was demonstrating heats that we detected before the vet determined that they were in fact open, so I do not have much confidence in our capacity to see heats consistently in these two cows. Noticing a cow in heat can be really easy, or it can be a very subtle thing, and it requires spending ample time observing the behavior of the herd, knowing the cows well enough to notice unique behavior, and watching the calendar well enough to know when to look. A cow entering heat will start by acting ‘bully’, when she is a bit more assertive and active, is interested in every other cow’s back-end, and might try mounting her herd-mates. This stage of the cycle will develop in her own ‘standing heat’, when the tables will turn, the other cows will become interested in her back-end, and some will try to mount her. If she ‘stands’ for this behavior, she is in ‘standing heat’ and ready for breeding. All of this ardor will be focussed mostly between other cows in or near heat. In a small herd like ours near the end of the breeding season, there can simply not be enough other cows near their own heats for this interaction to be clearly evident or to take place at all, and this can make the detection of heats for the last few cows left to breed really challenging. Friday was also the conclusion of an eight day mastitis treatment for Pickle that I described a bit last week. The treatments went well, and I we’ll start testing Pickle’s milk next week so see if it seems like she has cleared this infection. Her mastitis strain typically goes through cycles of activity and dormancy, so we won’t have 100% confidence in these results until her next lactation in the spring. 

A view of the farm-yard

Our larger tractor is back in the shop again, and without our primary round bale moving machine, we’ve had to improvise a bit for feeding the cows. We can use the classic bucket-hook and chain technique to move the smaller dairy bales, and since we’re only moving one bale each feeding, this feels a little sketchy but workable. The beef herd eats much larger bales, and we typically set up ten bales at a time in two long lines so that we have them in place for a few weeks of feeding. This work does not feel possible with the smaller tractor, so the beef herd is now eating the bales we had set up in their barn-yard for when their pasture feeding yard is unusable. Right now, with this cold dry weather, we actually have pretty nice conditions out in their pasture yard for the cows, so it is a shame to not be out there feeding while we have this opportunity. Once the yard bales are gone, we’ll be feeding just square bales in the dry-hay feeder, unless the tractor comes back sooner than I expect it. This tractor seems to have been in and out of the shop pretty regularly throughout its life, and while that has been a definite frustration and challenge, I think that we are getting close to having replaced nearly the entire machine by this point, so maybe we’re in for years of reliability sometime soon.  

Mocha has grown up into a big, handsome, stinky buck.

Dave and the Chicken Coop students orchestrated a goat shuffle on Friday afternoon, moving Mocha and his friend Rubble down to the dairy farm, and the bred does down to Maggie’s to join last year’s kids. We plan to set up a nice kidding system, similar to what we’ve used for lambing, down at Maggie’s, and to enlist the Chicken Coop students to help in the management of this process in April. We’ll build kidding jugs for each doe to use once she’s delivered her babies, and add some strategic gates so that we can isolate groups as needed through the process. The bred does will need an ever increasing level of nutritional support as their babies develop in utero, so we will also have to set up a feeding system that allows us to give them extra grain while excluding the other goats. We had three does in with the buck for the past couple of months, and we hope to get a nice little group of baby kids out of them this spring. I’ll let you know how it goes.

January 10th – January 17th

Straw stacked in the loft

We were finally able to get our straw delivered this week, and we worked Monday morning to load four hundred and fifty square bales up into the hay loft of the beef winter barn. Luckily, straw bales are much lighter than hay bales, so although this was quite a load of bales, the work was pretty easy. We also had the help of the Chicken Coop students who are back in school now, and they pitched in moving and stacking for about an hour to get the job finished. We’ll use the straw primarily for bedding with the two cow herds, and we’ve found that cow manure mixed with straw makes some really great compost. Hay bedding seems to develop into a nearly impenetrable mat that we have had real trouble digging out and moving, and that composts really slowly because of its density. The straw however, because of its more rigid stem structure, seems to maintain more loft and looseness, remains workable with hand tools, and composts really nicely. Straw is getting more and more difficult to find in our region, and again this year, the straw in our loft was trucked here from Canada. 

The young goats

Though our weather degraded slowly through the week, our stretch of dry conditions continued for the most part. We got a tiny bit of snow on Wednesday, but our yards and farm roads have stayed dry and firm since the Christmas Eve storm that nearly washed us all away. These two weeks of dry cold weather have been a wonderful respite from the wet conditions we’ve grown accustomed to around here in the winter, and the consistency of the weather has been a real benefit out on the farm. Ice on the ponds firmed up enough for skating over this stretch as well, so we’ve been out on the ice quite a bit while the nice skating lasts. There is a grey mix of rain and wet snow falling Saturday morning however, with about an inch of slushy mess already on the ground, so it seems like the nice weather is gone for now. 

The beef herd enjoying a bale of second cut hay.

Since we used up so much hay to supplement the beef herd’s grazing during the dry weather this summer, and the slaughterhouse has been pushing back our processing dates weeks at a time this winter, it looks like our hay supply is not going to last until grazing starts again in May. We got word this week that we do not in fact qualify for state drought emergency aid, but we are still going to have to purchase some feed to get us through the winter. By my count, we are about thirty round bales, or about three hundred and fifty square bales short right now, and we could make either type of hay work. My quick survey of the supply available seems to show that there is really not much hay for sale in New England right now, so I am anticipating a bit of search to find enough quality feed for our herds. Hay availability seems to fluctuate year to year, mostly dictated by the haying weather from the previous growing season, but this year additional turbulence has been added to the system by pandemic uncertainty and livestock processing challenges. 

Brad and Kristen are nearly finished processing all of the logs that we had piled up at the firewood yard, and they are just splitting the last few rounds before moving on to other log piles and other projects. Brad has been pulling logs to the sawmill this week as well, starting to move the big stack out near the cabins up to the farm for processing into lumber. We had pretty nice skidding conditions with the well frozen ground and a tiny bit of snow, but this weekend’s rainy mess might really impede that work for a few days until things can firm up again. 

The cow board after the vet visit this week.

Dr. Locitzer from Green Mt. Bovine Clinic was on the farm Monday afternoon to do pregnancy tests on the cows we’ve tried to breed, and to trim up Eclipse’s overgrown hooves as well. We found that Eclipse, Pickle, Penguin, Evangeline and Purple Rain are successfully bred, with Phoenix and Rio unfortunately still open, and Indigo looking for a new destiny off our farm. Both Rio and Phoenix are strong parts of our operation, so we have started the injection cycle to induce heats at the end of next week for another breeding attempt. A cow bred in the third week of January can be expected to deliver a calf right around Halloween this coming fall, and I feel pretty comfortable with that timing. We really try to avoid cold winter weather calving, hoping to stay away from the added challenges of sustaining a calf in sub-freezing temperatures, but October and November feel workable to me. Penguin was bred by the rented bull that we had in with the beef herd this fall, and Dr. Locitzer said it looks like she was bred pretty quickly when she went in with the bull on October 26th. This will be Penguin’s second calf, and the second time that she has been bred by a beef bull after we were unable to breed her in the barn. This is a challenging pattern for her management since we would need her in with the bull in the midst of her lactation next summer if we want her bred on schedule, and that would certainly be an impediment to her twice-daily milking. She just skipped a year of breeding and calving this time, and while that seems to work well for her, it does not make much financial sense in a dairy operation. Dr. Locitzer also trimmed Eclipse’s hooves while she was on the farm, and the cow’s feet look much better and she is moving around the barn smoothly again. We also sent Dr. Locitzer back to her office with a milk sample from Pickle after she had tested poorly on the CMT test a few days earlier. The vet’s office tested the milk further, and came back with an unfortunate Staph Aureus strain result. Staph Aureus is a really difficult type of mastitis to eradicate, but we have started an eight day course of treatment that we hope will clear the issue. I have written about the difficulty in treating this type of mastitis before, but since Pickle is a first calf heifer and we detected this infection pretty early, there is some hope that we might be able to beat it. I will let you know how it’s going next week. 

January 4th – January 10th

Oak logs and rounds

We’ve had a nice stretch of cold dry weather this week, and the ground is frozen solid without too much ice. These are pretty nice conditions for our livestock, and once they have worn paths for travel around their winter enclosures, I believe that they can be relatively comfortable. We keep their shelters as clean and well bedded as we can so that everyone has a place to lie down out of the weather, their feeders are full of high-quality feed, the water is fresh and full, and we’re all looking forward to the grass growing again in a few months. Though I am a vocal and enthusiastic supporter of rain nearly all of the time, dry weather in the winter is really a blessing for the farm and our livestock, and this dry stretch has been great. Our snow cover is nearly all gone with afternoon temperatures getting just above freezing and some nice sun, so this has been a nice opportunity to get out around the farm to see where things stand. This has also been great weather for working outside, and the annual firewood effort has been grinding along all week. Like I’ve mentioned before, we had a massive pile of logs at the firewood yard and many more out in various piles around the farm from the big fall storm last year. Brad, Kristen and other farmers have been toiling away out there, bucking up the logs, splitting rounds, loading the dump truck, and dumping loads at cabins, houses, or stacking areas. We also have an enormous pile of sawmill logs from trees knocked down in the same storm, and Brad has plans to try to get those logs milled this winter too before they start to rot. We have dreams of building a new larger goat house down in the goat area at the dairy farm, so my hope is that we can get Brad a cut list for the lumber we’ll need for that project, and he can start making those boards as he works his way through the logs. 

The beef herd resting at sunrise.

We were scheduled to take quite a few more cows in for processing at the end of January, but we got word this week that the slaughter house has delayed our date for two more weeks. This is not the first time we’ve had processing dates delayed this fall and winter, and it is a frustrating situation for us to be in. We buy the amount of hay that we anticipate needing for the winter, specifically targeted at the number of mouths we have to feed and number of days we’ll have to feed them. This two week delay means that we have two additional weeks with nine more big cows to feed, rather than the eight cows that we anticipated. For these two weeks, the herd will be eating about twice what we had planned for, probably something like ten round bales rather than five. Luckily, we have applied for some drought relief funding with the state, and I am hopeful that they might give us some financial support since we ended up using so much hay through the summer when we had to suspend grazing. Once our county was declared a drought disaster area, this opportunity became an option, and I am thankful that we might receive this support. If we can find available hay, I expect that we’ll have to purchase additional bales to get the herd through until pastures are ready for grazing again. 

Parts of the stone foundation under the Horsebarn collapsed when we had flooding on Christmas Eve.

We had the veterinarian scheduled for a visit to the dairy on Friday of this past week, but because of other emergencies that they had to attend to, we have rescheduled for this coming Monday. They will be checking all breeding cows to see who is bred and who is not, and also trimming some lengthy looking hoofs. We are still on the hunt for a hoof trimmer who will give our cows regular service, and since we have such a small operation, this has been a challenging service to secure. Cow’s hooves grow all the time, and we count on regular wear and tear to keep them worn down and under control. However, Eclipse has grown hooves too long, and her gait is showing that she is not comfortable or balanced, and we need to address the situation. Jersey feet and legs can be notoriously troublesome, and they are a frequent source of trouble for this breed of cow, so we need to keep a special eye on this area.  Mobility is one of the most important considerations when we evaluate the viability of a milk cow in our operation, and it is an issue that has an effect on nearly every aspect of a cow’s life. Many cows have had to be culled because they were determined to be unable to successfully navigate their environment, so this is an issue we try to keep front of mind. The vet will also be doing pregnancy checks to confirm the calving season that we can anticipate starting in a couple of months. Any cow found not to be bred will either be bred right away, slated for culling in a few weeks, or, if she is a cow we really treasure, kept open until breeding season starts again this summer. The vet will use a hand-held cow-side ultrasound machine to detect the presence of growing fetuses in each cow. 

Tools of the trade

We are also expecting a large delivery of square bales of straw Monday morning, and we’ll load these into the beef winter barn hay loft. They’ll be used for re-bedding both the beef barn and the dairy stalls. This delivery has been a long time in coming to the farm, and we have been buying little loads of straw to keep us supplied while we’ve been waiting for this delivery. 

We got our finalized AWA certification paperwork in the mail last week, completing that yearly application until next winter. I am hopeful that we will be able to add our dairy operation to this certification next time we have an inspector out on the farm for a visit. 

New Year, 2021

Most of the work of the farm is put on pause for a bit around Christmas and the turn of the year, and things have been really quiet and empty over the past two weeks. Livestock chores and the upkeep that sustains the farm’s vital systems have continued of course, but this has been a little break in the action while folks stay home to rest and relax.

I will write again at the end of next week to let you know what we’ve been up to, and some of the things we have in the works for the coming year.

Happy New Year!