Beau Jackson

Earlier this week Allena lost her mind saw a bargain and jumped on it, to the tune of a couple of bottle calves.  So now we have two new additions to the ranch.  I think we’re going to name them “Rib Eye” and “Rump Roast”, which will give you an indication as to why they were purchased.  Actually, it was a pretty good deal and they should be reasonably innexpensive to bottle feed, since we have excess goat milk anyway.  Not enough to just feed them that, but enough to reduce the cost of milk replacer significantly.  These two guys were purchased from our friends the Wicks who keep some Shetland sheep like we do, but are primarily dairy farmers.

So yesterday we went over to pick them up, and while we were there a semi-load of hay showed up (early).  Dominic and I tagged along with Stefan to help unload.  Turns out these big round bales were destined to become silage.  Have you ever seen a field with something like this in it:

Silage

Well, that’s silage.  Silage is just hay that still has a lot of moisture in it.  By wrapping it up in plastic, that moisture causes the hay to ferment.  As I understand it, this fermented hay is more palatable (tastes better) to the animals, and actually has a higher nutritional content.  I had always wondered how they got them wrapped up.  Yesterday I got to help with that process.  We used a piece of equipment that looks like this:

Bale Wrapper

This is a bale wrapper, and I gotta say it’s a pretty neat piece of equipment.  As you can see in the picture, a tractor picks up an unwrapped bale and sticks it on end of the wrapper.  Then an hydrolic ram pushes it into the circular part which spins around the bale and wraps it in plastic film.  This kind makes long tubes of hay like in the first picture.  There are some that will wrap an individual bale so that they can be stacked - they end up looking like giant marshmallows.

After the hay was all wrapped up, we ordered some pizza and ate dinner with the Wicks.  Stefan asked if Dominic and I wanted to tag along while he milked, so we did.  Stefan milks about 90 head of cattle, and has a nice setup (in my opinion - not that I’ve seen many other dairy farms).  He’s set up to milk 10 cows at a time.  His parlor looks something like this (only not so big):

Milking Parlor

Ten cows come in on one side and you hook up the milkers.  These suck the milk out of the udders and deliver the milk straight to the holding tank.  While the first ten are getting milked, you bring another ten in on the other side.  As the first ten get finished, you move the milker to the cow on the other side of the aisle.  When all of the first ten are done, you let them out and bring another ten in to replace them and repeat the process.  It took about a while to milk 90 cows, but it sure was faster than milking them by hand would be! ;)

All in all an interesting day - I learned how to make silage and how to milk cows.