Fall preview

I went out early this morning and the temperature was a cool, dry 57 degrees. It looks as if maybe summer's on its way out as our lows are supposed to stay in the 50's and our highs will be in the low 80's. The change should let us spot-graze our milking herd a little more in the mornings without worrying about them getting too hot 'round about 10:30.

On the agenda for today, we'll have a concrete crew resurfacing one of our silage pits (and another tomorrow) while we replace half of the belts on our hay baler. If we can take care of that pretty quick, we should be able to get back to cutting crabgrass. I could see us cutting and green-baling 8 acres worth today and then wrapping it tomorrow.

Overall, here's what we're facing. It's funny how everything kind of stacks up and needs doing a the same time.

• Our forage sorghum is ready to cut. Before we can, we have to have our silage pits resurfaced (they should be ready to go by next week), our dump wagon re-plated (the plates are ready, the machine shop just has to come out and weld them on), our dump truck fixed (or hire/rent another truck), and the ground in the bottomland has to be dry enough to run on. With any luck we'll be able to start in about next Tuesday, but it's too soon to know that for sure.
• We planted 20 acres of BMR sudex which is ready to harvest. We can either chop it and pack it into a pit like our forage sorghum or we can green bale and wrap it.
  
• We've got roughly 45 acres of bermudagrass that will be cut for hay this season. 10 acres is ready, another 25 should be in about 10 days, and the rest in about three weeks.
• 40 acres worth of oats and ryegrass is ready to be drilled in right now. We plan on strip grazing our milking herd on it late this fall and then again in the spring.
• Roughly 50 acres of crabgrass will have to be removed (cut & baled, maybe wrapped) to drill in our other crops.

We've got our work cut out for us over the next couple of weeks!