This week's weather finally gave us a chance to dry out a little after two weeks of seemingly non-stop rain. And until a rain shower passed through early this morning, the weather has been absolutely beautiful. Sunshine, breeze, and cooler temperatures have been just what the doctor ordered. Our cows have also benefited because they have been able to graze full mornings without the worry of heat stress. They've also started milking a little better after bottoming-out last week, though they still have a way to go to get their production back up to where we want it.
We had hoped to be in the field chopping silage by now, but that hasn't happened. We do think we'll have our silage chopper maintenance completed by the end of the day and hope to get one of our dump trucks back from its tune-up. If weather permits (the forecast isn't great), we'll be running hard on Tuesday. We do know that we'll run out of our ryegrass silage before any sorghum silage we harvest is ready to feed, but we still have plenty of ryegrass and sudex baleage to feed the milking herd.
I most likely will not be directly involved in our silage harvest, or at least in the mornings. I figure I'll be spending my time getting some of our cool-season crops planted. We'll go with a mixture of ryegrass and oats on our grazing land (where our sudex was planted), and we'll follow our sorghum crop with ryegrass in some places and rye in others with both crops to be harvested as baleage or silage in the spring.
Finally, I have a couple of other items of interest. The first is an article by Dawn Kent that originally appeared in The Birmingham News this past Sunday. The article is about Alabama's dairy industry and features some of the management and promotion methods we use on our family farm.
The second has to do with nutrient management. Everything worked out mid-week to give us an opportunity to apply our captured dairy waste as fertilizer onto some of our pastures. The radio wasn't working in the tractor I was applying with I so I had to find ways to keep myself entertained. So, I decided to do something that might entertain YOU, and help you learn a little about nutrient management at the same time. Please enjoy my take on an old Stonewall Jackson classic, a little ditty I call "Water 'n Poo".
We had hoped to be in the field chopping silage by now, but that hasn't happened. We do think we'll have our silage chopper maintenance completed by the end of the day and hope to get one of our dump trucks back from its tune-up. If weather permits (the forecast isn't great), we'll be running hard on Tuesday. We do know that we'll run out of our ryegrass silage before any sorghum silage we harvest is ready to feed, but we still have plenty of ryegrass and sudex baleage to feed the milking herd.
I most likely will not be directly involved in our silage harvest, or at least in the mornings. I figure I'll be spending my time getting some of our cool-season crops planted. We'll go with a mixture of ryegrass and oats on our grazing land (where our sudex was planted), and we'll follow our sorghum crop with ryegrass in some places and rye in others with both crops to be harvested as baleage or silage in the spring.
Finally, I have a couple of other items of interest. The first is an article by Dawn Kent that originally appeared in The Birmingham News this past Sunday. The article is about Alabama's dairy industry and features some of the management and promotion methods we use on our family farm.
The second has to do with nutrient management. Everything worked out mid-week to give us an opportunity to apply our captured dairy waste as fertilizer onto some of our pastures. The radio wasn't working in the tractor I was applying with I so I had to find ways to keep myself entertained. So, I decided to do something that might entertain YOU, and help you learn a little about nutrient management at the same time. Please enjoy my take on an old Stonewall Jackson classic, a little ditty I call "Water 'n Poo".
1 comment:
This is excellent. I really look forward to more of your videos. I think you are doing an excellent job of educating the consumer, and even some of us beef guys!
www.cdycattle.blogspot.com
Post a Comment