We had a reality check on a couple things first thing this morning. First, there is very little sleep time between 1:30 a.m. and a 5:30 a.m. alarm. Following that was the reality that winter has definitely arrived with a temperature of 6 degrees.
We had people all over the place this morning. Joe came and helped me milk. Domenic came with intention to do the feeding for us but he had to wait for Bruce. Bruce had intentions to be done with the cow feeding in a short period of time but he also knew the silo unloader had run out of door last night. He got the feed he needed, 150 lbs., out of the bag so we could get going last night but this morning he had to let the silo unloader door down, trip 1 up the silo. The problems continued from there. The second trip up the silo was because the unloader dug itself down. Sometimes when you change it down a door it changes the balance and the unloader will hang up . The third trip up the silo was to release a paddle that had wedged. Bruce knew it would take about an hour to fix this problem, and he hasn't had time to do it. He said he does believe that he has spent 3 hours releasing it all the time so this afternoon he did fix the problem, so that was trip #4. We have 35 feet of haylage in that silo so it could have been worse. Full is 60 ft. While we were milking Domenic was waiting so he did some sweeping, got bedding down, bedded some cows and basically spent time waiting. Ed came and discussed how we needed to figure out what we owe him for combining corn. For Mike, this was all good since he managed to get a good scratching out of everyone involved : ) Bruce managed to get done feeding just as Joe and I had everyone milked except the heifer that is still deciding if she likes us or not. Bruce is still giving her heifer calm so he milked her. I gave him a hard time that he couldn't really claim he milked cows this morning based on one cow.
Eventually Domenic was able to feed but first the roller mill wouldn't start because it had just a little bit of corn in it. Then when he went to run the corn in the mixer he turned on the wrong switch,got distracted because the weight on the cart scale fell off and being new, didn't realize protein was going in instead of the corn. Since the calves and steers don't get protein Bruce had to climb into the mixer with a pail and scoop out 240 lbs. Eventually Domenic was able to get the feeding done.
Vicky came and got our goat buck when she came to get Joe. Evidently she has purchased a buck that has no clue that he is to breed the does. I did not think that was possible but she evidently has a dysfunctional goat buck! I am sure our goat buck will be willing to help her out!
It was just darned cold out today. Bruce had spent the last couple days working outside and was worn out so he spent part of the day in the house basically doing nothing. Doing nothing is an extremely unusual event for Bruce but today it was a good thing.
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