Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Wednesday Stuff

Today was a busy day.  Ed was back with the hose for the tractor about the time we were done milking.  This hose is approximately 2 ft long and $159! By the time Bruce was ready to put it back on the tractor he realized the O ring had disappeared.  This meant that I made a parts run, 35 miles, for a 96 cent part!  By feeding time Bruce had everything back together and was able to chop.  Ed cut the rest of our third crop hay down.  Within a couple days we should be able to top off the silo and let the unloader down.  We have SO much to do yet this fall, it will be nice to be done with hay.

We had 2 more cows to breed today.  We are finally seeing heats on some cows that we need to get pregnant soon.With the cooler weather their fertility improves because when it's hot that affects the quality of their eggs.  As soon as Bruce has time we need to do 10 blood draws for pregnancy checks.  Vicky was here today and was super glad to see we had bred so many cows.  She was getting kind of nervous since the breeding reports on our milk testing sheets weren't showing any breedings  or pregnancies.  As it turned out, I hadn't reported them when we tested milk for longer than I realized. Once we updated our records our reports looked much better!  Vicky was concerned as to how our cows were doing after the recent hot weather so she and Bruce walked out to the pasture to check on them.  She was quite pleased to see that their body condition was good,  not too thin as cows in some other herds that had lost a lot of weight due to the heat stress. She said those cows actually lost muscle mass instead of fat so that really puts them in a hole healthwise.  Tonight Bruce started a hormone therapy on the last of the cows that we are really struggling with to get  pregnant.  Thankfully the list isn't very long.

Today was another absolutely spectacular weather day in Wisconsin : )

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