Friday, March 5, 2010

Gettin' busy...finally!

We're starting to get a little bit busier on the farm now that Winter finally seems to be ending and Spring looks to be right around the corner.

This week we had fertilizer spread over 125 acres of spring forage (oats, wheat, & ryegrass) and hopefully will see some growth over the next couple of weeks. We've submitted soil samples for several other fields so we'll know what the nutrient and liming needs for our summer crops will be. We'll probably plant about 75 acres of corn in late March or early April, and an additional 45-50 acres in our bottomland IF it has dried out enough by early May. Otherwise, we will plant sorghum-sudangrass (sudex) in the bottomland along with the rest of our cropland in June.

On the cow front, we're currently milking 219 and they are averaging about 63 pounds of milk production per day. Our nutritionist has formulated a new ration for us based off the nutritional analysis of our sorghum silage. We'll begin feeding the new ration over the weekend and hope that we'll see a 2-3 pound per cow increase in milk after a week's time.

Amidst everything else that's happening on the farm, we're also breeding a group of 33 heifers. You can learn more about that project in our newest GDF MooTube Minute:

No comments: