I Like Longer Days

Tonight I walked to the house and the moon was barely a slit.  Very neat to see.  We are in an amazing time of year.  The days are noticeably longer.  Tonight its -6 but most of next week they are talking nearly 40 degrees.  As Bruce says, 2 months til grass.  Hard to believe with the snow so deep at this point.

Today we had the herd analyst here to look at our cows and pick out the bulls for their next pregnancies.  The bulls we use are tested for certain genetic markers that are heritable.  These include things like fertility, milk production, calving ease, size, longevity, legs, udders, teats, and disposition.  We have our cattle pedigrees back 4 generations on paper but many of them go back much much further.  For many years before I came here the calves all got names.  They were always done alphabetically and I think they used every category from food to flowers to animals.  By the time I took over naming them there were so many "Anna's" and "Susie's" etc that it was hard to know which one was which.  We started putting in eartags starting with 1 and the latest calf is 893!  The numbers certainly keep information clearer.  Many of the cows still get names...... : )

We picked up our meat today and judging by the size of our animal we can definately sell some more.  We would have sold some Monday but the gates in the pen we use to sort are frozen down.  It is definately time for a thaw here!  The county worked on opening our road today, a full week after the storm.  To this point there was barely room to meet a car but today they had a big end loader and bucketed it off the road.  If we get another blowing snow it will be 12 feet deep when it fills in.  Counting the days til spring.....