November 13th – November 20th

The egg-mobiles are parked for the winter.

This year’s rented bull went through the loading chute and into a waiting trailer on Friday, and he has made the trip back to his home farm. Though he did try to jump the wall of the chute and was super stubborn and difficult through most of the process, the loading went pretty well and we sent him off with thanks and praise. Now we’ll mix in a good deal of hope, and start day-dreaming about a nice big healthy group of spring calves in 2023. The bull, the same we used last fall, was a mellow moderate sized animal with great conformation who never showed me any aggression or interest. He could certainly eat, and I know that he gained weight here with us over the past couple of months, but his offspring from last year’s breeding are certainly strong healthy calves and we hope for more of the same this time around. 

The dairy herd in their winter yard.

The dairy herd has grazed their last paddock for the 2022 growing season and we have moved them into their winter quarters behind the dairy barn. They have their usual water trough, mineral and kelp feeder, square metal dry hay feeder and black plastic round bale feeder. We refreshed their wood-chip pad so they are on pretty fresh ground, though that won’t stay nice for very long with them out there eating and pooping full time. Work has continued on taking down all of the paddock lines, roadways and gates that comprise the dairy herd’s grazing rotation system, and that work should be completed in the next two weeks or so. It is a big system to put up and take down every year, but the supplies that make it up certainly do better coming in for the winter, the winter landscape looks much nicer without those lines out there, and every spring we make small changes and improvements as we rebuild the whole thing. Similar work is going on in the veggie fields as we retract all of the infrastructure deployed to support the work of the growing season and we mirror the growth and die-back cycles of the seasons. Areas of the farm, once so busy and crowded with the work of production, are now emptied and abandoned to the weather and the passing seasons, but we will be back in the spring. 

We also loaded the two large dairy steers into the trailer Monday and moved them into their pen in the front of the beef barn. I had planned to wait on this move until Pickle was loaded out, but with some pretty nasty weather Tuesday night and into Wednesday, we had to find comfortable indoor accommodations for everyone on the farm, and moving these boys early made the most sense. They seem pretty happy in their new home, and I have observed a lot of sniffing, licking and talking over the fence with the beef animals. We’ll keep them in their pen for a few weeks to really get to know everyone in the beef herd and for those animals to grow fully comfortable with the steers before we release them to join the herd. I have noticed that the dairy yearlings that we moved from the dairy barn to the beef barn last year are being pretty regularly excluded from the hay feeder, so I think it will also help to have removed the five large cows from the herd for processing to make more room at the feeder before we introduce two more small animals to the group. 

A compost pile in Flat Field.

One of our 2022 buckling goats got sick this week, and after a quick visit from Dr. Locitzer, he seems to be on the mend. Investigation revealed a diagnosis of nightshade poisoning. After some quick forensics, we determined that, when the goat was accidentally released from his pen early in the week, he made a quick visit to a night-shade plant near the pen and filled his belly. He exhibited lethargy, shivering, loss of appetite, a reduced temperature, and massively dilated pupils. The vet pumped him full of fluids, administered charcoal to soak up the toxins, and put him on a strong course of steroids and vitamins. He moped around the dairy barn for a few days getting lots of love from the visiting students and being generally sad, but he has slowly perked up and has improved daily since Thursday. I think that he’ll be able to rejoin the goats when his three-times-per-day injections are done to start next week. 

Winter tolerant greens, under Remay and ready for harvest.

The veggie team also spent the week bringing in all of their equipment and supplies for this winter, and they have transitioned the wash/pack house into storage space for their supplies since harvest cleaning and packing is done. Their work now is directed mostly at the hoop-houses and at storage crops, and this week we cleared the remaining tomato and pepper plants from inside the hoop-house called Junior, and moved the storage crops to the old creamery room at 80 Athol Rd. The veggie team also worked to winterize compost piles, weeded and double-covered the winter greens beds, and harvested shiitake and wine-cap mushrooms. 

November 6th – November 13th

We undertook some significant fall changes in our livestock operations at the end of this week as we move more and more into our winter setups. On Friday, we pulled all of the egg-mobiles down to the barnyard, culled and processed the older and unproductive layers, and moved everyone else into their winter coop. We ended up culling all of last year’s new laying hens, who have never really started laying eggs at all, and we kept thirty of the older Barred Rocks who I hope can still lay some eggs. This year’s pullets, who had been living in their own mobile coop, have also moved into the winter coop, so we have our chicken community all put together and moved in for the winter. It is tough to count live chickens, but I think that we have somewhere around seventy-five hens out there, which is a pretty big reduction for us. We’ll get new chicks in the spring, and hope to get the flock back up over a hundred with those new additions. 

Eclipse, Phlox, Penelope and Parsnip (nursing).

The beef herd also moved into their winter quarters on Friday, and they made the walk over a big hay field and into their winter yard just before the heavy rain started Friday afternoon. We are scheduled to take six beef animals in for processing this fall, and the bull still has to get picked up by his owner, so that group will get a good deal smaller before we are down to our final winter community. We will also be adding a couple of 2022 steers from the dairy to the beef herd this fall, and the pen inside the beef barn has been set up to receive them. When Pickle is loaded out next weekend, we’ll break up the group that she has been running with all summer and fall, move her heifer calf into the barn for some training, and move the steers down to join the beef herd. These changes will mark a turning point in our beef herd as we process the last of the older matriarch cows out of that herd and build around a younger generation of cows and heifers. We have had the privilege of hosting some truly remarkable older boss cows in the beef herd for many many years, and while it will be sad to see them finally gone from the farm, their daughters, grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters will carry on here. 

The dairy herd still has a couple more grazable areas around the farm to pass over before they also move into their winter housing, and we are looking to have them switched over to their winter area before snow flies here Tuesday night. We’ll have to do some shuffling with the animals that have been around the dairy barn this summer, but I think we have space to put everyone where they’ll have shelter to get out of the weather. The forecast is calling for three inches of snow Tuesday night, a bit of rain Wednesday, and then pretty chilly weather after that for a bit. This seems like a strong sign that the time has come to move everyone in for the winter, so we’ll work to get that all finished up, if we can, before the snow. 

The winter laying flock has moved into the winter hen house at the dairy farm.

The tail of a late season hurricane has been controlling the weather here on the farm to end the week, and we got some pretty heavy rain and strong wind Friday afternoon and through the day Saturday. The warm sun came out for a while on Saturday afternoon, but the long arc of the storm’s tail swung back over us Sunday morning for a bit more rain. The warm wet weather of this tropical storm was certainly a marked departure from the dry cold air that we are used to in November, and temperatures Saturday were well up above sixty degrees again. This has been a fall of tumultuous weather with very quick swings to the extremes of conditions, and if we truly get snow Tuesday night, this pattern of wild swings will be strengthened further. Though snow in November is not unheard of, we do not typically have any snow of real accumulation until the middle or end of December, and even snow before Christmas has grown more and more unusual these days. 

The veggie season is truly nearing its end now, but this was a good week or harvest despite the late date on the calendar. We brought in all of our parsnips, and it looks like that crop totaled nearly four hundred pounds. There was a little more work done on the large veggie beds, mowing in old crops and harvesting the last of the lettuce, jalapeños and kohlrabi ahead of the real cold weather, but the bulk of the work has shifted into the hoop-houses for the remainder of the season. There is quite a bit of cold hearty greens planted in the hoop-houses, and tending those crops will be the focus of the fall and winter.

October 30th – November 6th

The strange warm weather that swirled over the farm last week continued off and on again this week, and the thermometer is up over seventy degrees in our region this weekend. The ten day forecast implies that a bit more wintery weather should arrive on the scene at the end of next week, but this has certainly been a strange fall so far. The nice weather has slowed our plans to get the cows into winter quarters, and although the pastures have stopped growing, the cows are still quite comfortable being outside all day and night. We had plans to get the beef herd into their barn this past week, but we will push that back by a week and feed them some round bales out on pasture for a bit instead. Every week spent out on pasture is a week that they don’t have to spend in their winter barn and yard, so we’ll take this opportunity to keep them out while we can. This mix of leafless trees, dormant bright green pasture, and warm sunny days, does not really fit any seasonal pattern that I know, and sometimes it feels like spring, sometimes fall, and sometimes like something else entirely. I have seen mosquitoes flying over the past few days, and the flies are re-emerging around the dairy barn under the warm sunshine. The climate is changing, old patterns are eroding, and I think we’ll all have to get used to new things. 

The pullets are on pasture below the hoop-houses.

We pulled the pullet house out of the dairy cow’s winter yard where it had been setup inside a netting fence for a couple of months, and moved the whole operation down to the pasture below the greenhouse. I spread a fresh layer of wood chips on the cow’s yard, and we’ll work to get that area all ready for the cows to start using in the next couple of weeks. I think that the dairy herd has about a week or ten days of grazing ahead of them before we’ll have to get them moved off of the pastures and into their winter housing. The pullets will stay out on pasture for as long as the weather permits, and we are working now to get their winter house all put back together and ready for them. They will move into that house with the remaining older laying hens, and we are putting together plans to cull the majority of those birds this week before moving everyone else into the winter house. 

Three winter piglets

I picked up our three winter piglets this week, and they have been moved into the piglet pen in the barnyard near the greenhouse. They came from the same breeder as this summer’s wonderful group of pigs, so I have high hopes that they will grow to be big beautiful pigs by the end of the winter. We have had great success raising winter pigs, and with a deep bed in their little house for snuggling, and plenty of milk from the dairy, they seem to do really well despite the challenging weather. We also made some changes with the goats this week, sending the five big boys off for processing, sending the breeding buck on to his next opportunity, and moving everyone else into the winter house. This summer’s four buck kids are on one side of the yard, and the does and Rubble are on the other, and both have their own house, feeders and water. This division will allow us to get the growing bucks all the food they need to keep growing well while controlling the intake of the does who’s diet needs careful adjustment as their pregnancies develop. We want to feed them as little as we can now as they start growing their babies, and steadily ramp up the richness of their diets as the babies get larger and more demanding, and the space in their digestive systems gets more and more restricted. Too much food to start will grow babies that are hard to birth, and too little food will put the mother at risk.

The weather was just right this week for fall manure spreading, and I was able to get the spreader into working order and to spread about half of our windrowed pile onto hay fields and some dairy pastures. We try to focus our manure application on the hay fields which experience the most extractive management, but I also like to add some manure to our best grazing paddocks just to make sure that they can sustain a really high level of production. I am always tempted to apply tons of manure to the poorer areas of pasture with the thought of bringing their performance up to a higher level, and while we certainly do some of that, it seems like we get more bang for our buck by strengthening already strong areas. These superior areas of pasture just seem more receptive to enhancement and respond more vigorously to manure application because they are starting from a strong position and can utilize the added nutrients easily. I am focussed on sustaining the best pasture at a high level, knowing that these areas are serving as the strong and essential foundation to our grazing rotation. 

Fresh plastic has been stretched over the hardening-off house.

We finished up our storage carrot harvest this week, and it looks like we have about two thousand pounds of carrots put by. This is a lot of food, and I think we’ll all be eating a lot of carrots this winter. We also finished up garlic planting this week, and covered those beds with winter row-cover to keep everything sheltered and safe until spring. Harvest rolled on this week, and we got the last of the good hoop-house tomatoes into the kitchen for a huge batch of farm salsa. This nice warm weather was also just about perfect for putting new plastic on the hardening-off house, and that project went really well with many hands Friday afternoon. The warm weather also made collecting and storing the irrigation system much more pleasant that it could have been, and the majority of that equipment has been cleared from the fields.