Hail Damage

     Last Thursday night June 20th we got hit hard with hail.  Two-thirds of our beans were damaged very badly.  Most of the beans that Farm Rescue Planted are gone.  Also gone are the beans that Brent and Dad fought mud, miserable conditions, and late nights to beat the rain.
     Luckily we have good insurance on most of the acres.  There are several options/levels that a person can choose when taking crop insurance just like other insurances.  We have a combination of federal crop insurance which guarantees a certain number of bushels per acre along with production hail.  The production hail guarantees bushels above the federal crop insurance if you get hailed on, again there are many options/levels a person can pick.  I met with our insurance adjuster and after going through the situations we will try and replant some of the beans and some we will not replant.  Yesterday dad replanted about 60 acres before we had a breakdown, we will probably try and replant some more in the next few days however there aren't enough hours in the day and we need to get the hay up and nitrogen spread on the corn along with the daily chores relating to the cows.
    The beans we do replant likely won't yield very good because they are being planted so late. We will still harvest the damaged beans even if there is only a few bushels an acre.  Also the beans that won't be replanted will not canopy and will have more weeds so we will need to spray those acres an extra time or two this summer.  Because we carry good insurance it is never fun paying the huge premium in the fall but after a situation like this we are glad that we have high levels of coverage.  So far we have had an extremely late spring followed by too much rain and now hail.  Even with all of this there are many others around the region/state that have it much worse.                                                                                                                                                                               

                                             A field not hit by hail planted on June 7th

 

 

A field hit by hail planted the same day

 

 

 

Haying and Weather

     Wow the weeks are rolling by in a hurry.  It was a race to get the crops in between rains we finally finished planting on June 10th. Then there were cattle to move and Brent started spraying.  We started haying on Monday June 17th.  This is the latest I ever remember starting because the hay wasn't mature.  There was one other year we didn't get started good until the middle of June because we had 10 straight days of rain.  However that year the hay was way to old when we got started and we lost a lot of quality.  I will dedicate this post to explain how we put up our hay.
    We bale our hay wet and wrap it in plastic to keep the oxygen out.  This causes the hay to ferment and it makes excellent feed for the milk cows.  We call this balage.  Quality feed is very important for the cows to produce well.  If we put up poor feed our milk production could suffer for the entire year.  The quality in the alfalfa is in the leaves and during the day the leaves are dry from the heat of the sun even though the stems are still wet.  Because of this we try to bale at night or when there is dew in order to keep the leaves attached to the stem. We run a baler with knives in that chops the hay into 4 inch pieces.  We switched to this baler last year, it saves a lot on the repair and fuel bill when we mix the balage for the cows.
    After we bale the hay we have around 12 hours to get the hay wrapped.  The sooner we get it wrapped the better the quality.  Normally we like to haul the bales to the building site and wrap them close to where we are mixing the feed.  But there are times when the workload and the weather don't allow for this and we have to wrap the bales on the field and haul them in the winter as we feed.  Once the bales are wrapped we can't take them out of the plastic until we are ready to feed them or the bales will spoil.  In the winter we can haul bales for 2 weeks to a month at a time.  This is similar to sticking your food in the freezer. 
     Ideally we like to bale the hay between 40-60% moisture.  This usually means baling about one day after cutting.  However when making excellent quality balage the wetter stuff get to "hot" and the cows are not able to properly digest it.  Everything is a balancing act and tradeoffs in order to get up quality feed to produce quality milk.
    We baled Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  I started baling around 9:30 Wednesday night and it started raining about 4am Thursday morning when I had about an hour left to bale.  I kept baling until I got done.  We got about .75 inch of rain and we went out Thursday afternoon and wrapped these bales on the field.  Luckily we did because we had some nasty weather Thursday night.  We got about 45% of our hay acres baled June 17th, 18th, and 19th before it rained. 
    I'll post again in the next couple of days to explain the weather.  It was not good we lost 67% of our beans to hail.  It looks like we will get to start planting again, along with haying, spraying, and applying nitrogen fertilizer on the corn.

                                                   My view at nights this week.

 

 

chopped hay after going through baler

view from the skidsteer when wrapping hay

wrapping

helpers for the day

A New Home for the Calves

 It has been a very busy week of moving cattle for Travis and the guys. The calves were moved from their calf hutches, which is a great home for them from October through June.

In the calf hutches, they are fed pasturized milk twice a day until they are six weeks old, when they are then fed a grain mixture and water twice a day. Madi really likes when they are little and still drinking milk out of a bottle because she thinks they are the cutest at that point. Can you tell just how much she loves them by the big grin on her face?

Once the calves leave the hutches, they are brought to a turkey hutch to live which is a great place for them to be from mid June through late September. The turkey hutches provide a great environment where there is a lot of air movement and also protects the calves from rain and hot sunshine.

The past couple of weeks, all of the new calves were immediately put into a turkey hutch to live.

Today, Travis and the kids worked on moving all of the weaned calves (those that no longer need milk but grain and water instead) from their regular calf hutch home to the much cooler turkey hutch.

 

Farm Rescue

Last week, we had some very special visitors on the farm. Farm Rescue came and helped finish planting the soybeans for us. We are so grateful for all of the help from these amazing volunteers! The work that they do to help farmers who are in need is such a blessing and we hope to pay it forward to them someday!

If you would like to see some photos from media day on our farm please click on this link to Mandy's blog...VIEW PHOTOS HERE.