Catching up to yesterday : )

I am a part time bookkeeper, so yesterday my farming day consisted of milking etc on both ends of the day.  Beyond that, my brain was pretty much fried with the details of year end.  Bruce, on the other hand, had a really good day. The temperature had gone up into the upper 20's so he took the opportunity to clean the pens in the back of the barn and get everyone bedded.  This manure/bedding combination gets spread out on the fields that will grow corn next year.  In a perfect world we would do that on the last frost in spring but in reality we don't have anywhere to store it until then and investing easily $50,000+ to create such a place is just not financially feasible on a farm this size.  The other part of the equation is if you pile it now, you have to load and haul it in spring, doubling the labor, fuel and wear and tear on equipment.  There is enough to do in a small window in spring.  With cropping, timing is everything.  What we do now we don't have to do later.  Bruce was also able to get milk cultures taken on our fresh cows.  We freeze these samples and then the vet clinic does cultures, looking for any types of infections they might have.  There is a staph aureus mastitis that is contagious and nearly impossible to cure so if any samples show up positive, those cows get moved in the barn to be milked last.  In the meantime they are in a sort of milking limbo and we have to sanitize the milkers with bleach water before they go on other cows.  Doing this for 1 isn't a big deal but having many more gets rather complicated so the sooner we have that information the better. Generally we have culture information back in 48 hrs.  By the way, pasteurizing kills all of these pathogens.  We drank raw milk and raised our kids on it until this mastitis showed up in the herd.  We believe it came in via our vets but of course, once its here thats irrelevant and we have to deal with it.  Its spread a number of ways but the most uncontrollable way is flies.  Bruce also had opportunity to talk to a vet and found that the drug information we found on the internet for our pneumonia goat was the drug of choice for our vet/sheep farmer.  The tricky thing is we need to treat for her at least 7 if not 10 days.  I do know she will be one spoiled goat with all that attention!  In the feeding process the silo "ran out of door" so Bruce had to take care of that also.  Hopefully at some point that can be explained but for this purpose running out of door just adds about 15-20 minutes to feeding.  He shouldn't have to do it again for few weeks.  We also do milk drug tests on every cow when she freshens before we ship her milk.  We do that as routine, regardless of whether we think  she was treated or not, just in case we have forgotten.  The sample sent in yesterday came back positive on a cow we are sure had not had drugs.  Either its a false positive or there was a sample mix up.  In any case, we hold her and run another sample to be sure.