Digging out

Yesterday morning, blown shut

Opened up with neighbors truck off the road

Snow from the east creates all kinds of challenges

Just like in the city, Bruce made a windrow of snow to blow

Opening up the driveway to the silage bag

Finding the bag and making room to work.

The day started with a silo that needed to be let down a door so Bruce could mix feed.  We have 2 concrete stave silo's that are 20'x60'.  One holds corn silage and one holds haylage. As of this morning  we have 42 ft of corn silage left. We won't harvest corn silage again until sometime in Oct. so having that much left is a good thing. While the feed was mixing Bruce thought he would try using a leaf blower to get the snow off of everything in the feed room.  Our minerals come in plastic lined paper bags so having all the snow melt would compromise them.  He was thrilled that it worked better than he even expected.  Today the cow the vet saw yesterday is slow but doing OK.  When they were here they did a blood draw to check for calcium and phosphorous levels which came back fine.  The cow that had her calf yesterday is doing great.  The calf with the belly ache is not impressed with me cutting back her feed.  I am glad all she had was a belly ache.  As a general rule, if you get calves past 7-10 days they rarely give you trouble.  This one is old enough that she just had me confused.  The snow clean up continued today.  Bruce used the skid steer to pull the snow out from where he couldn't get it with the snow blower and then proceeded to use the blower to add it to the pile.  We now have a snow pile that is easily 10 ft high and 50 ft long.  In past years it has taken until mid June before it was all melted.  The size of this pile is well on its way to take that long to melt also. This storm has  taken  many hours of Bruce's time with 7 hours on the snow blower tractor alone in the last two days. Along with silo's we store our feed in silage bags.  As a general rule they are 9'diameter x 250' long.  We put the best quality feed in the upright silo's so its available for the dairy cows and the rest of the feed is stored in bags.  Years ago we baled a lot of dry hay but its really hard to get weather cooperation to do that anymore.  We use the bagged feed for the goats and also to fill feed boxes when its too windy to get feed out of the silo at Ed's.   We are trying to get the silo at Ed's empty so we have room to store this summers feed harvest.  Bags cost $965 each so the more we get in silos the cheaper our storage is.

Bruce started feeding early with great hopes of getting in the house at a more reasonable hour.  First there was a lump that came down from the corn storage bin and plugged the tube that feeds the roller mill that grinds the corn.  He ended up taking it apart and cleaning it out.  Next the corn silage unloader dug itself down so he had to climb the silo and fix that.  His only explanation for why it did that was it must have missed him and wanted him to come visit.  Neither milk sample passed the drug test so we still have 3 special needs cows to milk at the end.  When Bruce went up to milk the one the vet saw yesterday she had something coming out that we thought was potentially her uterus.  Bruce called the vet and tried to describe it and then asked her if he could send her a picture via cell phone.  She proceeded to laugh and then gave him her number.  He sent a picture and she called back and said it was a cervical prolapse.  It is something that they will need to come and deal with but it could wait til tomorrow morning.  She recommended another bottle of calcium under the skin, given her medical history thus far.  She is not eating which means her medical list will probably be longer tomorrow.