As Long As It Stays In The Barn And Doesn't Come Into The House....

It was another one of those mornings.  Got to the barn to find our c-section cow laying over on her side, bloated and dead and then checked on the calves to find one that was born Saturday night dead also.  It feels like the grim reaper has moved in here.  Depressing and frustrating but they always say it comes in 3's so hopefully we are through that phase.  I was looking at the records tonight and the cow that died yesterday was one that had twins. It has been a long time since we lost a cow to random issues like this.  Hopefully we are now done and  it will be a long time again.  Bruce and I are still upright so I guess that's the important part.  With all that going on it was a good day for me to go to town to work.

While we were milking Ed came over to report the silo unloader was making a really loud noise so first thing on the agenda was taking care of that.  Bruce expected the noise to be a bearing out but when he got in the silo he found a piece of tin shield had fallen off and the unloader was trying to digest it.  Good news is there were no real damages and a cheap fix. As long as he was there he let the unloader down a door and can now get the augers in whenever they have time to replace them.  Today was a day to fill both feed boxes.  Lately Ed has been doing that for us but he was gone today so Bruce filled them and delivered them to the heifer yards.

Tonight we are down to 2 heifers out of the tank yet. The others are pretty well behaved but we still have to be extra cautious with them so they are a bit more time consuming than the rest of the cows.  Tonight Bruce treated the last 2 calves with antibiotics.  We think they are picking up an extremely quick pneumonia bug when they are born.  We also think it might be better to think "prevent" instead of "treat" at this point. On the bright side of all the negatives of late, the bulk tank numbers continue to go up with freshening cows.  That means the milk checks should improve in the next couple months.  Being the expensive time of year this is a good thing.