Rainy Monday

     Even though it was a rainy day there is still plenty to do when you have livestock.  Brent and Dad spent the day feeding cows and moving cows and heifers between pens.  This morning they took 5 cows out of the parlor that had calved last week and put in the robot group.  This afternoon they moved about 8 heifers that are getting close to calving from the bred heifer pen into the dry cow pen.  Philip and Jon took the truck apart in the shop because because the head gasket blew this weekend.  I spent most of my day in the office updating cow records and looking at our options when the weather cooperates again.  It's May 20th and we have only had 7 days that have been fit to plant so far this year.  As of noon today we've had 3 inches of rain since Friday night and the forcast is for more the next couple of days.  In addition to working in the office I also took a load of cull cows to Perham Stockyards today.  This is the activity that I'll explain today.
     At some point every cow has to leave the milking herd.  It is common for a dairy farm to sell(cull) 30% of their cows every year.  Some herds have a higher cull rate and some have a lower cull rate.  We have been able to be very selective in our culling the last year because we have plenty of replacement heifers.  We are going to have to sell many heifers this year in addition to our normal culling or we will be milking way more cows than we want to.
     Every Monday Perham Stockyards has a sale and once or twice a month we will bring cows to sell if we fill our trailer we can haul 7 cows at a time.  Every month we sort the cows by profitability based on how much milk they produce.  We use this along with an estimated milk price and current feed cost to see which cows we should sell.  Today we sold four cows.  Three of them were sold because they weren't profitable enough and one was sold because she had a high somatic cell count which is an indication of milk quality.
    Because Pelican normally doesn't have school on Mondays Madi usually goes with because she loves watching the calves sell.  Today however Pelican had school so Madi will have to wait for a couple more weeks.