A Day On the Farm
Someone asked what a day on the farm looks like so I thought it would be a fun blog to write! The days vary on the seasons. Winter most things are the same from day to day. In the spring and fall, every day is packed full on top of all the daily chores. Summer is busy too! Plus, we have what we call “dairy days” which are days when the cows or equipment or both decide that all our plans are not their plans. And they are our boss. But on average, our winter days look a lot like this:
0600 Milking
At this point on the farm, we milk just once a day. The cows have regulated to it! Most farms milk 2-3 times a day, but as a small herd share farm, we have no need to push our cows so hard. We have more milk than we need as it is. Any way, 6 AM is milking time! Our friend Mike and Arnie, our owner, do the milking. Mike brings the cows up from pasture while Arnie sanitizes and prepares for milking. They milk together so ensure quality and that no milkers fall or get kicked off. It’s guy time for them! They wrap up milking around 8 or 9 pending on cow many cows are in milk.
0800 Feed Calves, Pigs, and Horse
Weekdays, Sara takes on this! We generally have anywhere from 1-10 calves in hutches that need to be fed. Our calves get bottles for the first 3 feedings then we train them to drink from a pail. They continue to get milk for a couple months in addition to grain and water.
We also have a pasture pet: our horse Raven! We make sure she gets some feed in the winter and plenty of pets all year round.
When we have pigs, we feed them some of the extra milk! Our pigs mainly eat grass or some hay and milk! It makes the best pork!
0900 Feed Cows
Sara or Arnie move on to feeding. We mix up what they call a TMR (total mixed ratio) feed for the cattle. In the warmer weather, the cows mainly eat grass. But in these cold months, we need to supplement feed. We do give them a bit of TMR year round as well to assure that our cows are getting their exact needs met. Everything we feed them we grow ourselves. Right now, we are feeding two groups TMR. Our milk cows get it year round, and our heifers and dry cows get it in the winter. It’s important we keep our pregnant moms (heifers and dry cows) in the right feed to ward of milk fever when they calve. Their health and needs are a top priority for us.
1100 Scrape
We daily clean the milk cow’s barn. We clean any manure out of their bedding. Then we use a skid loader or a tractor (pending on how frozen the manure is and what is or isn’t broken) to clean the areas they walk and eat out. Keeping the barn and barnyard clean is key to clean cows which are key to clean milk.
1200 Bedding and/or Feeding Hay Bales
This one isn’t daily, but it does happen once or more a week. In the winter or in the summer if the grass stops growing due to drought, we feed hay bales to some of our cattle groups. Our young stock, heifers and dry cows, and steers need hay bales. We also in the winter bed these cattle’s barns with straw. We bed our milk cows with sand as it more sanitary. It doesn’t grow bacteria the way that straw can. Sand therefore keeps our cow and their udders more healthy.
1300 Lunch
We break for lunch which gives us time to be together as a family and go over what we’re doing in the afternoon.
1400 Catching Up, Fixing, Overflow
Afternoons vairy! We do what we didn’t have time to do in the mornings. The things we have been doing lately in the afternoons include cutting and splitting wood for our outdoor boilers, fixing tractors, pulling apart and cleaning milkers, sometimes bottling milk, preparing for planting, and so much more! Afternoons unlike mornings are not always the same. Sometimes we bottle milk in the afternoons too, but often it gets done more in the evening.
Evening (Whatever time we get to it) Feed Calves, Bottle Milk, Clean the Bulk Tank
We feed the calves one last time. Then we bottle milk so that it’s ready for the next day’s pick up. After washing the bottles, we sanitize them and fill them with fresh, unprocessed, whole milk. Every other day, we dump the remainder of the milk in tank. At this time, what we don’t have going out for herd shares gets dumped down the drain. So tell your friends about us so we can stop dumping milk!! We then wash the tank and sanitize it so that it is ready for fresh milk in the morning!
This is a basic overview but there’s so much more that goes into every little thing. I didn’t even fully touch on all that Devin does on the farm which is SO MUCH. Nor all the pots that Arnie has irons in. And we didn’t get into all the nuances of running the herd shares nor the business end of things. It’s busy. It’s hard. It keeps us out of trouble. But, golly, we sure love it here. Thank YOU for making this life possible.
