Spraying, Round 1

Bruce has been less than pleased with the company we have hired the last few years to apply our chemicals and that is what motivated him to get recertified to spray our crops himself.  After a few attemps at reading the textbook so he could take the certification test, all of which resulted in a nap, it is now time to spray and he hasn't had the time to get certified.  A friend told us about someone he is hiring and they stopped in yesterday after Bruce called them.  Bruce was happy enough with what he learned to hire them to spray for us this year.  This morning they came to spray burn down herbicides on our hay fields that we want to no till corn into.  They use a mixture of glyphosate (generic roundup), 2-4-d and ammonium sulfate to do this. We plant corn a couple of different ways depending on what the crop was the prior year.  No till is planted on hay acres that need to be redone.  The vegitation gets sprayed and killed and the corn is planted directly into the ground without any tillage at all.  This eliminates the soil erosion issues you get with tillage and we won't have to use any fertilizer for the corn on his land since the decomposition of legumes provides the nitrogen the corn needs.  Another added benefit is the savings of time, fuel and equipment wear and tear since we eliminate tillage.  I am thrilled to have someone else spray because it is one less thing for Bruce to do!  In less time than it would take for Bruce to get our sprayer tuned up, we have 36 acres ready to plant in a few days. 

We were told this little piece of equipment costs about $225,000!  The ends of the booms drop foam  to mark where the edge was and the boom is raised or lowered to get the best application height based on the plant growth.  Note that he is coming back and has only part of the boom spraying to finish the edge.  Chemicals are expensive so we don't want to use any more than we have to or spray anything extra.

Today Bruce managed to get the fence checked and ready to go with the exception of flagging it.  We use masking tape and wrap pieces on the fence every few feet so it is more visible to the cattle. We like to use tape because it is very visible, inexpensive and biodegradable. This group hasn't been on pasture before so they need to learn not only where the fence is but what it is.  We will need to move them early in the day so they have time to get comfortable before dark.  Tomorrow we have a funeral to go to so the moving day might have to be Sunday.  We will see.

This morning I moved a few calves around in the hutches.  I now have all the heifer calves together on one end and the bull calves in a row on the other end.  Having them mixed together was getting a bit frustrating since I feed the bulls milk and the heifers milk replacer.  A couple times, when I was feeding and not paying attention, I fed the wrong ones.  This will make feeding much more straight forward.

We had 2 cows to breed today.  The cows have been on pasture just long enough that we should be seeing heats regularly now.  Our regular cow breeder knows we have cows on pasture so he needs to come late.  The substitute gal obviously wasn't informed of this and came twice before the cows were home.  We didn't get the impression she was pleased, and if we had known there was a sub we could have made different arrangements.  In the end the cows have been bred with the success or failure known in about 30 days.