Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 27 June 2023…
Hey Y’all!
Good evening and happy Tuesday from Air2Ground Farms! It was another hot dry day today but there is a 50% chance of showers or thunderstorms tonight, we certainly hope for some rain. By Thursday, the forecast is for highs of 104 with potentially record highs Thursday and Friday. I sure hope we get some rain to start this heat wave! The top pic is Shelley and I this evening as we rode around discussing where the ruminants will go next. We think we will get the flerd back together and put them in the pasture in the last pic. It needs to be grazed but we are so nervous from the drought last summer. We want them to graze it but also want the cover on the ground. It is a fine balance between stimulating the grass and overgrazing. We plan to bring the flerd together tomorrow and put them at the end of that pasture. We will only give them a portion and see how the grass is doing by evening. We will then adjust the size of the paddock we give them Thursday. The other two pics are the new bull calf resting. He is still at the stage where the herd moves about and he stays put, wherever his mom left him. He is doing very well and so is mom. We moved the sheep into a new paddock basically doubling the size of their area. It will hold them until we can get them moved to join the beef herd. The bottle lambs are doing well! We had to order some rubber replacement nipples for the bucket feeder because the latex ones that came with the system started leaking from them chewing on them. They are grazing, eating soaked alfalfa pellets, and keeping their bellies full of awesome raw Jersey milk. The beef chicks are good as are the bigger beef chickens. We plan to process the bigger bunch somewhere around the 9th or 10th of July. We are going to let them go about half a week longer than the last batch. We had about 7-8 birds last time that were just under 4 pounds and we would like them all over 4. We spent the afternoon working on the side-by-side. It has been sitting in time-out, with the old Ford, for a few days. We had narrowed it down to an electrical issue near the fuze container as it was smoking from that area the last time I tried to start it. So we took the entire electrical system apart and cranked it to see where it would smoke. Of course, it just cranked. No smoke, no issues. Upon further investigation, we found a melted ground wire. We tried to find the purpose of the specific wire, but from what we can tell, it is a redundant wire that was chaffed and making contact with things it wasn’t supposed to. So we removed it. After a lengthy test drive, to include multiple shut offs and starts, it seems to be working well.
We wanted to move the beef herd to a new pasture today. By that statement, you can obviously tell that something went awry. As you know, we have them on the other side of the creek. We opened a 1-2 acre pasture we call the boomerang due to its shape and called the herd to come to the new pasture. Like normal, they paused, moo’d, looked at us, thought about it, moo’d some more, and then decided to start moving our direction. About 25-30 feet before the gate, they paused. Not abnormal, we clapped and called, encouraging them to follow us, like they always do. They began to move along. Then the bull decided that he didn’t want to go and didn’t want anyone else to go either. He singlehandedly deterred the entire herd from following us into the new pasture. He ran back and forth pushing all of them in the other direction. Now, I’m not saying I’m a control freak, but I do like it when things go the way I have planned them to go…and this was NOT going the way I planned it to go. Now the entire herd was convinced that they shouldn’t go that direction. It didn’t matter what we did, they didn’t want to go. At one point, I don’t remember exactly what I was doing, Shelley advised that it wasn’t the best plan for me to stand off with the bull over where the herd was going. As she normally does, Shelley had correctly assessed the situation and I begrudgingly decided to leave. So, the herd didn’t get new grass today and I didn’t engage in a battle of the wills with the bull. Sometimes retreat is the best option!
Local Farm Report for 26 June 2023:
Harvest:
21 Chicken eggs
0 Duck eggs
0 Goose eggs
6 Gallons of milk
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
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