Colonel's Blog, Earthdate 26 April 2023...
Hey Y'all!
Good Wednesday morning from Air2Ground Farms! It was a cool start to the day but quickly warmed enough to remove our hoodies. We're looking forward to some rain over the next couple of days, starting this evening. The animals are very good this morning. We got folks on the move early today. Last night, we shut the two groups of laying hens, with their roosters into their shaws. That allowed us to take down nets and set up new ones this morning with the chickens contained. Once we got new areas established, we first moved the lambs to their new paddock, then we moved the shaws, chickens inside, to their new area--the old lamb area. We released both groups of chickens into the same area. They have never been together before. The roosters are fighting; the hens are fighting. They will quickly establish a new 'pecking order.' (When we first got chickens, we were amazed at how many colloquialisms are obviously from observing chickens.) We are going to move the female dogs in a bit to the border with the lambs. We plan to also put the brooder chicks outside with the last batch of incubated chicks. Later this afternoon, we will move the flerd to the pasture near the house. We have a few more days with the flerd intact. Then when we get them to the top of the hill above our house, we are going to separate them and hold the sheep in place to prepare for lambing. We will move the cows on and leave the sheep behind. There are a few pens at the top of the hill that we can use to contain ewes with their lambs if necessary. Once separated, we will give the ewes some alfalfa, in a technique called flushing. It is an effort to give them a boost of nutrition just prior to lambing, hoping to increase their odds of success. We also need to get the garden ready to transplant our plant starts soon. Oh, and Shelley is on her way to town to deliver some pork.
The pics today are Stella, the Jersey calf. Her with darker coloring is just after she was born in January and the lighter coloring was yesterday. We're not sure what color she is going to be when grown. Happy is a normal Jersey coloring, with tan body and black/white markings on her face. Stella's mom, Betty, is very dark, mostly black. At first we thought Stella was going to stay a fawn color, but as she gets older, her coloring is changing. You can see her getting the Jersey white ring around her nose, so we think that will stay. Stella is a visual reminder of how much things change on a farm. Much change is driven by the seasons and the requirements of each. The green grass is an obvious visual indicator of seasonal change. Some change is cyclical, like the piglets growing into hogs and then into pork, only to bring in more piglets. Although change is constant on a farm, there is also stability and routine. Morning and evening rounds are generally the same each day, beginning and ending with the milk cows. It is a good balance of enough stuff staying the same to provide the stability we all desire in our lives and enough stuff changing to keep us from ever getting bored. All in all, we still really enjoy this life and look forward to each new day. I truly hope you can say the same about your life.
We put up a new YouTube Short of Shelley carefully placing the milking cups on Betty's sore teats. We used background music provided by YouTube. Within 2 hours, YouTube notified us that we had a copyright claim to our video, meaning the computer identified copyrighted material in the video. Not sure why it did that, but we deleted it. Maybe we will put it back up with some different background sounds.
Local Farm Report for 25 April 2023:
Harvest:
20 Chicken eggs
16 Duck eggs
1 Goose egg
0 Guinea eggs
5 3/4 Gallons of milk
Cheers! Psycho & Shelley
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