Colonel's Blog, Earthdate 25 Jan 2023...
Hey Y'all!!
Good morning and happy Wednesday from Free Missouri! We went to bed with the snow just beginning to stick on the ground. The power flickered all night but thankfully stayed on; nevertheless, Hank the Bluetick was quite concerned with the flickering and he didn't want to go back to bed. So, we were awake a bit throughout the night. We awoke to temps around 33 degrees and about 4-5" of snow on everything. It is that really heavy wet snow that slushes under the tires. The snow is sticky enough that the poly-wires around the sheep and hogs were coated and heavy enough to be on the ground. That is always a concern this time of year and we were not surprised to see the lines down. It took us a while to walk all of the perimeters removing the snow from the lines and standing the poles back upright. Thankfully, the hogs and sheep were all still in their respective paddocks with the hogs cozily sleeping in their straw under their shelter. The sheep were out moving the snow to get to the hay and had spent the night in their shelters on the straw. The beef cows were out and starting to move the snow so they could get to the hay also. The ducks love the cold wet weather and were making quite the joyous ruckus. Yesterday we made a gallon and a half of yogurt, 2 1/2 pounds of cheese, and worked some more on tax prep. Today we will do more things with milk and mostly stay inside.
This morning we took a poultry brooder heat lamp out and put it on the milking machine in order to allow it to warm while we did the other rounds. Our intention was to allow it to warm for a half hour or so and then the machine would be good to go by the time we were ready to milk. Well, it took us more like an hour plus to get all of the rounds done due to the poly lines being down. By the time we got back to start the milking, the power went out...all the way out. So, we loaded a generator into the side-by-side so we could run the milking machine but realized that we didn't have enough water to get everything clean afterwords. Thus, we took two buckets out and hand milked. It took us about 4 times longer than normal but we got it done. Happy seems to prefer to be hand milked and Betty is just so relieved to get some of the milk gone that she doesn't care how she is milked. We brought the milk inside and got it strained and put into jars and at that moment the power came back on...just in time to wash up our hand-milking buckets. We have a couple of generators as back up for power outages. We have 11 chest deep freezers full of meat and we have a plan to rotate the generator between the freezers so that nothing thaws in the case of a power outage. Although, it would take a long time to thaw this time of year, we always want to be prepared. We can also take a generator up to the pump house to run the water well to ensure all of the animals have water. Thankfully, we didn't have to do that today.
The top pic is Toezer smiling for the camera. He often smiles at us whenever he is happy to see us. No, it's not like a pit bull smile, Toezer's is actually a smile of joy. He is such a cool dog! The next two pics are the beef cows eating hay before and after snow. The bottom pic is the poly-wire around the sheep drooping to the ground under the weight of the heavy snow. We were very happy both the sheep and dogs were still in the paddock!
Daily Farm Report for 24 Jan 2023:
Harvest:
27 Chicken eggs
6 Duck eggs
4 3/4 Gallons of milk
Sales:
3 Gallons of milk
4 Dozen chicken eggs
2 Dozen duck eggs
Cheers! Rich & SHelley
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