Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Corn, Milk, and Rain

I tried yesterday to cut down some of our hill corn. It's tasseled and about chest high, and really doesn't have enough growth potential left in it to justify waiting and harvesting it with a silage chopper. So I tried to use our hay cutter-conditioner on it and lay it in a windrow. The problem was that the clutch in the conditioner has about worn out over the years, and was just too weak to get the job done. So, I'm going to try this afternoon to cut it with a bush hog. Actually, I KNOW a bush hog will do the job, the question will be if we can get it raked into a good enough row to pick it up with the hay baler. Even if we can, I'm sure there will be a lot of dirt in it, but dirty feed is better than no feed, right?

Our cows seemingly hit a brick wall the end of last week. The heat and humidity have finally started showing up in their production, as our daily herd-wide production dropped one thousand pounds over the course of four days. Yesterday afternoon and this morning seemed to be a little better though, so maybe they'll gain a little of that back.

And we finally got a "big" rain yesterday evening. A thunderstorm came right over us and dumped around three-quarters of an inch over the course of about thirty minutes. It had literally been months since we had seen a rain like that.

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