I don’t particularly enjoy cold weather but I can imagine insect and other pests like fungi etc would be harder to deal with when there is no killing frost.
An interesting overview. World BuzzFeed People Are Sharing The Things The U.S. Has That Europe Lacks, And I'm Suddenly Feeling Proud To Be American "As a European who visited the America 16 years ago, I am still thinking about it."View Entire Post ›
Sounds similar to our growing zone. We're less tropical (and do get to below zero celcius), but crops are the same. My herbs also go nuts all year round, except for basil.
I had thriving basil plants, but they got blight. I followed all known treatments, even replaced the dirt. I’m not allowed to have basil anymore. Every plant since gets blight. It’s our favorite fresh herb, too.
People like you are what makes this country move. Farming is hard work. I help my farming friends quite a lot. Installed pivots, worked on their electrical components be it circuit boards for feeders, to electrical motors all for free just to help a friend out. In return he will call me when the geese start landing in his corn fields. I think it’s a good trade. What really bugs me about farming is all these city dwellers want to regulate everything from their land to their water without knowing a dang thing about it.
Agreed. The problem is that the clowns in DC have no desire for expertise in any way. Insanity, really.
So one of my “enterprises” as an agricultural producer is beef production. Specifically, a cow/calf operation where we breed cows, calve them out in March, run pairs (cow with her calf) over the summer on pasture, and then wean the calves in October and feed them (called backgrounding) hay and corn silage until they are sold (to feedlots) in January or February. This means you work at calving, vaccinating, branding, doctoring, feeding, checking, fixing fence, managing predators, putting up hay, growing corn for silage, and many other tasks for 365 days a year for a single payday when calves are sold. Well, the eagle flew yesterday so I thought I’d share a few pictures of the day. Calves up at the load out chute at 7:45 a.m. We started getting calves in from the feedlot pens at daylight. Truck (pot) ready to load. Loaded trucks ready to head to the sale barn. Today’s semis typically haul around 70 calves weighing in the 725-825 pound range. Calves being counted into the sale ring to be weighed. The entire ring is on weigh bars so as soon as the pen of cattle are counted onto the scale a total weight for the pen as well as an average weight per animal on the scale is displayed for buyers and sellers. The auctioneer takes bids in real time from buyers in the sale barn as well as buyers bidding remotely over the internet. Most all sales are now live-streamed so any registered bidder can buy from anywhere on earth.
Did you get a good price? Must be a bit of a shock for them to go from open pasture to feedlots. Have you ever been to the feedlots to see how they are treated?
Without looking up the paperwork again I think the steers averaged about $1345 per head and the heifers around $1100 per head. I’m pretty happy I guess. Cash markets loosely follow the board (futures) and futures prices were strong last week. Some years you end up selling into a weak futures market. In general you consign calves to a sale about two weeks ahead of actual sale date. This gives the sale barn time to advertise to potential buyers and gives sellers time to line up trucking. This means the market can move quite a bit from the time you decide to sell and consign and the actual sale date. So sometimes you win that lottery and sometimes you lose. The cattle “cycle” is moving into a state of profitability now. The last few years have been break even type years. The cattle cycle is based mostly on cow numbers. When prices are low most producers cut mother cow numbers to cut costs. This results in fewer calves in the beef supply chain leading to higher prices. As calf prices rise, people retain and breed more heifers further depleting animals on feed for slaughter and exacerbating the price rise. Of course eventually all those retained heifers end up having calves which results in an oversupply of animals destined for slaughter, prices fall, and the cycle begins again. It’s not always possible because of rainfall patterns and general economic impacts on other inputs, but the secret to money in the cow/calf business is to be building your herd when everyone else is liquidating and liquidating breeding animals for profit when everyone else is growing their herd. Our critters come off pasture in October anyway when the grass stops growing. Calves go into lots on corn silage and hay rations and the cows go to harvested corn fields to forage crop residue. Cows/calves like to eat grass but in this part of the world they would all starve to death if left in the pasture. Cows actually LOVE to come in to corn fields from short fall pasture to clean up dropped ears of corn etc. Our calves also do well coming off grass because they get feed they are familiar with from when they were month old calves picking at feed their mothers are fed during and after calving. Cattle palates are a product of familiarity. They can learn to eat and enjoy most anything they are exposed to at a young age. I’ve purchased cows years ago out of the Sandhills north of us that never ate anything but grass, grass hay, and soybean meal based protein supplement. You could turn them out on a cornfield and they wouldn’t touch an ear of corn. They wouldn’t eat corn silage or even Alfala hay well either. But if you throw noxious weeds like musk thistle in the feed bunk for breeding heifers being fed a mixed ration, they will start eating them and learn to seek them out for feed in the pasture the rest of their life. On feedlots things get complicated. Yes I’m very familiar with them. Two neighbors run small feedlot operations. My whole home place was a feedlot back in the late 1970’s when my father in law fed cattle. We have retained ownership of calves and had them custom fed in feedlots before. In a perfect world I would prefer meat be raised in silvopasture systems. But that won’t happen until Americans are willing to modify their dietary habits. It would be better environmentally and from a food quality perspective. Perhaps from an animal welfare perspective as well but that’s debatable. The thing many people fail to realize is that NO animal will be productive if they are “unhappy” or stressed. Apologies for the anthropomorphism with “happy”, but I believe animals do have states of happiness and unhappiness. Not everyone agrees with that. My point is if animals in a feedlot were under undo stress or were in a state of unhappiness they would be chronically ill with respiratory and other diseases, they would not eat well, and there would be no weight gains or feed conversion of feedstuffs to pounds of beef. To a human a feedlot looks unappealing compared to an idyllic landscape of hills, grass, and trees. To a steer, a bunk full of endless delicious food and a nearby tank of clean unlimited water looks pretty good. In a pasture, cattle will take the shortest route from the best forage to water and back to forage. They are all about taking the easiest path and avoiding inconvenience. Not much different than people. Ninety-nine percent of people who look at a feedlot and see abuse live in a city in close proximity to other people with very little “nature”. They use grocery stores as analogues of feed bunks and watering troughs where someone supplies them with what they WANT, not necessarily what’s best. In the perfect idyllic view where cows live in a pasture all year, grass gets short and nutrition suffers out of season. When it’s icy a cow falls down a hill and breaks a hip and a pack of coyotes eats her alive that night. Her sister falls through ice on a pond looking for water and freezes to death over a 12 hour period. Etc, etc. Are they happier with these risks than in a corn field where they are moved to fresh forage as needed and they don’t have to traverse dangerous terrain to forage? I don’t know! I’m not saying I have all the answers. There is no perfect answer and the actual practical answers from an animal welfare, environmental, and nutritional benefit to society perspective are (and should be) up for debate. As vegetarians you and I probably have a different view than others. But if one views things from an evolutionary perspective alone, anthropomorphic considerations and even animal welfare are completely illogical. Would love to hear your thoughts.
I've only seen pictures of feedlots. As far as I know we don't really have them in the UK. Growth hormones and anti-biotics are not permitted unless the anti-biotics are necessary due to illness. However, our cows spend the winters in cramped cowsheds instead to protect them from the weather and to preserve the pastures. If the cows were kept out in our wet winters the ground would get churned into horrific mud baths in no time and probably need re-seeding every year. On this farm they get fed haylage from the meadows and the 4m wide strips which are left fallow around every crop field. They also get clover, ground wheat, oats and oat straw and some beans. One big advantage of the cowsheds is the good organic muck which goes onto the wheat fields but muck heaps are very regulated here. Heaps have to be a certain distance from any water courses, drainage ditches etc, they have to be covered to reduce rain leaching ammonia and nitrates into the water table and must be moved every year. In normal times we also have the contents of our composting toilets from the summer camps to add to the heaps. Our soil is only about 8 inches deep and sits on clay so drainage rather than irrigation is our big problem. Anything that can add soil to the fields is a big help. Are the cows ''happier'' in dark cowsheds standing in their own muck all winter than they would be on concrete feedlots? I don't know really but they are very content on the grass during the rest of the year. Our herd is very small so we only butcher a few calves every year in the spring before they are turned out onto the meadows. I always think it's a bit sad that they go to the slaughterhouse when the rest of the herd goes outside to eat fresh grass and bask in the sun.
Had a hypocalcemia case a couple days ago. It’s not uncommon in dairy cattle. Usually happens within 24 hours of calving so is often referred to as “milk fever”. Symptoms start as agitation, then un-coordination, stumbling, inability to stand, and will end in death as there is insufficient calcium to facilitate diaphragm and heart muscle function. Milk fever is one of the more satisfying conditions to treat. It’s easily diagnosed and the treatment is simple. Also, recovery is dramatic, almost miraculous. I’ve seen an animal down and barely breathing get up and start eating minutes after intravenous treatment with calcium gluconate. If caught early, I prefer to administer calcium into the abdominal cavity. It’s quicker and easier than intravenous administration and it eliminates the chance of inducing cardiac arrest. If the animal is down and having difficulty breathing intravenous administration is better because abdominal absorption may be too slow to prevent death. Here is me treating the cow the other day by abdominal cavity administration. A 2.5-3 inch 12 gauge needle is inserted straight into the abdominal cavity in the “hollow” directly in front of the hip bone. The right side is preferable because the rumen takes up most of the cavity on the left side.
When that first cold snap kills off the flies and you know you have a few months peace ahead of you. First day of meteorological spring today so it won't be long before they're back. Some of the birds are already nest building. The ground is still waterlogged though.
Oh yes! The first killing frost that gets the flies is always welcome. Your spring must come earlier than here. We had -10F temps last week. We are also very dry. We could put some of your excess rain to good use.I prefer it dry during calving season though. Rain, snow, and mud make everything more work and also make a lot of calf hood diseases more prevalent.
We've had storms but not too many frosts in the last 2 or 3 weeks. Polar vortex returning aside I think we're over the worst of winter now. Daytime temperatures around 10C most days. What we need now is some more sunshine and light winds to dry out the land. I expect we'll start threshing last season's straw in the next month or so. I know the thatchers are getting low, we took a ton to one regular last month and he want's about a quarter of what we produced last year and that's just one of the many thatchers we supply. I'm looking forward to it, I need the exercise and it's usually good fun.
Well Paul should do well on the wheat. Wheat is over $10/bushel on the board here. Up $0.75 again today. I never would have believed I would see $10/bushel wheat! A ton seems like quite a lot of bundled straw. How many square feet will that cover? Started the pivot on the rye cover crop this morning. It’s supposed to hit 24C today. Get that rye growing so my cows will have something to eat!
I don't think in bushels for wheat, It's all tons here, or more accurately tonnes. Bearing in mind our crop is all old varieties of winter wheat so very low yield and mostly feed quality I think it was about £140 for 1000kg last year. I don't know what it is now. Paul is growing about 5 acres of old variety (Atlee) wheat for a local bakery. They want the wheat threshed old style because it is harvested slightly green which retains more protein in the flour. The straw grows long enough for thatching but to my uneducated eye it doesn't look as strong as the Square Head Master variety we grow just for thatch. That wheat gets 3 times the usual price with a similar low yield (roughly a ton an acre). A ton of straw doesn't go very far. Remember that new ridge that went on a house near the farm? That used a ton. A whole roof could use more than 5 tons if you are laying it over old thatch or twice that if you stripped it to the rafters.
Just looked up the current price of wheat in the UK. £265 a tonne for feed grade. That's double last year's price. Paul will be happy. Normally the wheat just about covers the labour costs of the threshing. He'll actually have money left over this year.
If I didn’t make a math error that’s $5.20/bushel which is I think pretty close to what you would have been paid here last year. It’s hard for me to visualize a ton of wheat straw. When I weigh straw it’s usually in large round bales (a little over 5 ft. diameter). Two of them would be close to a tonne but they are very compressed compared to bundled straw. So if it takes 22,000 lbs. (10 tonnes) to thatch that size roof, it would be much heavier than other types of roof excluding possibly lead or tile? And the building would require a more robust structure?
Yep, about double is what we see here as well. Good time to ask for a raise for your threshing labor. LOL. Just kidding.
No, I think the upper limit is 30 months due to the risk of BSE. most likely went to the local hunt's dogs.
