Wordless Wednesday: Princess Kay

Our county dairy princess Kelsey Sellner, who will be running for Princess Kay of the Milky Way next Wednesday!  We wish her well as she represents the dairy farmers of our county!

Princess Kay....our calf !  Born on the same day that Kelsey was named a finalist...she's so big now!

Mental Health Day!

Every once in awhile the grind and stress of a dairy farm gets to us.  I would say that every couple months or so, we try to take at least one day off from the farm, making sure that we can relax and someone else is in charge of the cows.  Thank you so much to our awesome helpers, milking and feeding the cows and calves while we were gone.  On our day off we decided to celebrate our 5th Wedding Anniversary and the 4th of July.  We went to a local amusement park to "relieve" some stress.  It was an awesome day!  As a result though we had to work hard before the day off...and work hard afterwards to catch up.  Who knew cows were more work than milking and feeding?  Yep, we needed to bed the calves, heifers, and cows in before we left and then when we came back.  There was cows to breed, heifers to treat (one got sick with bloat while we were gone) and there were various other small projects to work on.  But every once in awhile it is nice to walk away from the "To Do List" and come back refreshed and renewed!  I know the cows appreciate that we are in a better mood...and we do too! 

So I am back and caught up...and ready to blog some more...so stay tuned, I have a bunch of pictures and video to share in the coming weeks.

Down with the Sickness

Oh I wish I could write more, there is so much to write, but thanks to a lovely virus our computer is down for the count...currently being looked at by a very helpful uncle, whom we REALLY appreciate. As a result I am online at my in laws until my computer returns back to me, clean and free of "disease". It's been crazy living without it, we use our computer to do everything from check the weather and markets to research news and do our farm projects. We miss it very much and wonder how in the world we ever lived without it.

So hopefully after this weekend I will be back to my blog again, in full force.

Happy Birthday Barn!

Today, we celebrate the 5th Birthday of our Dairy Barn! On February 17th, 2005 we milked the first cows in our new barn. We had so much help from neighbors, friends, and contractors that built the barn. It was amazing to watch the first group of cows calmly walk into their new barn and get milked in record time. By adding a parlor and a pack barn, we were able to decrease the time it took to milk cows allowing us MORE time to care for cows. We are also able to care for more cows, over 180 are housed in our barn right now.

Our Parlor (where we milk our cows)

We started with a simple parlor in 2005. We had 12 cows on each side of the parlor, for a total of 24 cows. We were able to milk 12 cows at a time with a pipeline that ran overhead, this photo is our 2007 renovation/upgrade. We can now milk 24 cows at a time in our parlor, running milk into the pipeline below the cows.

Our Barn (where we house and milk our cows)

Our farm looks like a "factory farm" from the road, but if by "factory farm" you mean a place that abuses animals-you would be wrong. We are a "factory farm" that uses industrialization to increase the time we have available to care for our cows in the best way possible. We are also a family owned farm, much like the other 99% of farms in the USA.

Adding this barn has brought its share of growing pains. We have experienced some of the best and worst years in the dairy industry-in only 5 years. $20 milk to $10 milk....it's been a challenge to say the least. When we started milking we had about 74 pounds/cow per day. We had some struggles learning how to feed and grow feed for our cows in 2005-and had lower milk production. I think we bottomed out at 59 pounds/cow per day, but now we enjoy 85-90 pounds per day! Such a great change, all because we were able to care for our cows even better than before. We love the environment that our cows live in though, and we wouldn't have changed that for the world. Our cows live a comfortable life where they have fresh feed and water every day, and only have to work for about an hour each day. The remaining hours of the day, they get to eat, drink, sleep and socialize...yep our cows love to socialize with other cows and with people as well. Being able to give our cows the best care possible brings us great pride.

Happy Birthday Dairy Barn!

The Value of Bio security....

Tis County Fair Season in our parts...Southern MN that is. I am the current County Dairy Superintendent for the 4-H, FFA, and Open Class Dairy Shows. In my role, I am responsible for working with youth and parents to make sure we run a fun, successful show, but still safe. When you visit your local county fairs you see the animals, you see the kids and their families working on their animals, caring for them, but there is a LOT of work behind the scenes that is done to make sure that you are safe to visit the animals and we as farmers are safe to bring our animals.

BIO SECURITY....our work to make sure that animals and people are safe from any hazardous organisms. Did you know that each exhibitor at the fair has to pass an on site inspection by a licenced veterinarian? Yep, that's right! Any animals that might have any contagious disease are sent home immediately...for the safety of the other exhibitors. These families and kids put months and years of work into developing their show animals....so we take their health very seriously. We would hate to make animals at the neighbor's farm sick and we would hate to bring home something from the fair and make the rest of our cows sick. Cleanliness is next to Godliness....that's right, we wash our trailers, wash our feed pans and drinking cups...everything to make sure the cows and calves are well taken care of.

Have you been asked to clean your hands BEFORE and AFTER petting an animal at the fair? There is a reason for that...just like we don't want you to get a "germ" from the cow, we also don't want you to give our cows "germs". Example: This spring we did a day care tour, and one of the kids that petted my calf did not wash their hands well. As a result my calf contracted a bacteria with gave it diarrhea. We treated her and she was fine, but if we had not exposed her to the kids she would have never gotten sick. So please remember to wash your hands BEFORE and AFTER petting animals at the fair...it's for your safety as well as theirs.

On the farm, owners and managers often post signs at the front of the farm stating "No One Admitted Past this Point, This is a Bio secure Area". These signs are to warn visitors that they must check in at the office and not go wandering around the farm. Our vets often "wash in" and "wash out". They scrub their boots before treating cows as well as washing before they leave. We use sterile equipment to prevent infection. We sanitize milking equipment to keep our product safe....when it's all said and done on a dairy farm, we are all about BIO SECURITY-for ours and ours :)

Had plans...then the plans changed ;)

Well it was an eventful 4th of July at Orange Patch Dairy. Not the kind of eventful that most people had...family, friends, beer, food, fireworks, boats, lakes, camping, etc....it was milking, baby calves, cows, mixed up heifers, fresh cows with health issues and a downer cow.

Sometimes even though you make plans on a dairy farm, those plans have to be flexible-to change at the drop of a hat. We were planning on heading to a friend's place on Friday night for some "illegal fireworks"(in MN we can't fire off anything that leaves the ground or explodes, so we go to WI or SD to buy them and bring them home-he he!). BUT instead of going there, we got to stay home and sort heifers that thought it was the perfect time to bust through the gate and check out the other pen of heifers. After almost an hour of sorting and fixing fence, we finally finished and were too tired to head out-so we stayed home. On Saturday night we were going to head out for fireworks at a local baseball field-which does an AMAZING show, with Jon's family-a 9 year tradition for us. BUT....instead we got to deal with a cow that had a calf-which needed to be pulled. After pulling the calf out (this is not as painful as it sounds, but more like helping out the cow, so she doesn't have to work as hard) we needed to move the cow to the milk barn. This is usually a leisurely walk through the pasture to the barn, but this cow decided that she was going to go the wrong way and as a result fell down. Dairy farms have downer cows, they happen, it's how we deal with them that makes the difference. Most farms focus on make sure that the walking surfaces provide good traction-which we had, but sometime we can't manage for "stupid". Cow are smart animals, but sometimes they are just down right stupid. With small brains they can't process much, so they can easily get themselves in bad places-such as this cow. We put down some barn lime (course calcium carbonate used for traction) hoping this would help her stand up. But instead of trying to stand up she decided to be stubborn! Darn cow! Frustrating really, but this cow was determined to get up on her own time. We thought she might have milk fever. Milk fever is a metabolic disease that occurs in cows post calving that are low in calcium. The cure for this is a bottle of calcium administered via IV. So we got the IV set and gave her a bottle of calcium...BUT she still didn't want to get up...so we let her sit. We continued with the rest of our chores and came back....she finally got up-all by herself! Darn cow was just being stubborn! We moved her and milked her and were still way too late to make the trip for fireworks, so we settled for watching the ones in town after we went home, and called it a night.

Not an excited weekend by normal standards, but in the world of dairy farming, it is the way it goes...maybe next year we will make it out ;)

Pictures from the Preschool Tour!

I finally got some time to sit down and post some pictures. The preschool tour threw off our schedule at the farm just a little, and now we are working on planning the tour for the High School Ag class coming next Wednesday. I love pictures of kids seeing a dairy farm for the first time...and a picture is worth a million words. Also a HUGE thanks to the Dairy Princesses that came out to spend time with the kids on Monday! I know they had a blast seeing a real life princess in person!

Explaining to the kids that in the summer heat we run sprinklers, which are ALOT like water parks....so fun for cows too!

Kids enjoying snack time, cheese and crackers.

Dairy Princess Angie handing out stickers to the preschoolers-which say "I met a dairy farmer".-Those were awesome stickers!!!

Meeting Baby Joey. Those kids wanted to hug Joey so badly!

Talking about what we feed the cows to the little boys, so curious about the smells that they smelled.

Petting a cow for the first time. They weren't scared at all!

Snack time with cheese and crackers, and their new stickers.

Mmmmm...juice boxes :)

The best group picture we got at the farm!

Mainly, as you can see, 21 preschoolers and a baby calf are all hard to manage and get to stand still, oh well.

Bottle feeding calves with Dairy Princess Val. Kids LOVED this activity!

Bottle feeding with Dairy Princess Angie. Odessa enjoyed all of the extra attention.

HAY RIDE! The boys were huge fans of the hay ride, but we learned that only boys should drive not girls, like me ;)

Loading the hay ride to the calf barn.

Our tank overfloweth....

As were milking cows tonight we discovered something exciting...we filled our bulk tank (the stainless steel tank we store our milk in) was filled to the TOP!!! In fact we spilled a little milk out the sides of the tank and on to the floor. We have a tank that holds about 1650 gallons of milk. Each of our 84 milking cows make over 10 gallons on milk each day!!!! We are VERY excited about this good news....as you can tell! Our milk flows into this tank and is cooled to about 38-40 degrees. We hold the milk for 2 days and then it is picked up by a tanker truck from our local creamery. Now, as a result we will need to have the tanker truck pick up our milk every day to ensure that we will not have to lose anymore milk to the floor. Needless to say it was a good night tonight. This increase in milk production can be attributed to a variety of things. The first thing is a change in haylage (chopped fermented alfalfa stored in a silage bag) and an increase in the number of fresh cows.

The change in feed has been awesome! The cows LOVE the new bag of haylage! We opened the bag that contains alfalfa cut last May 2008. It is our best feed and we were saving it for the best cows to calve this winter/spring. Our goal is to produce the BEST quality feed possible. Better feed means that we can feed a higher percentage of our total diet as forage. Right now we average about 62% of the cows' diet as forage. The remainder of the diet is concentrates (corn, soybean meal, vitamins, minerals, and other "goodies"). With a higher forage diet we also keep our costs down. We have to purchase less concentrates if we can feed better quality forages. The other advantage to feeding more forage is that we can also increase rumen and cow health. More forage helps to make rumen microbes happy! Forage helps stimulate cud chewing, which helps the cows make buffer in their saliva-helping their overall health.

The addition of more fresh (recently calved) cows has also increased our total milk pounds. We have calved in about 25 cows in the last 2.5 months. These cows are all producing the most milk that they will produce in their 305-365 day lactations. A cow typically peaks at about 60 days into their lactations....our cows average about 67 days in milk. That peak is the highest amount of milk that they will produce, then they will decline until they are dried off (vacation time) and calve in with their next calf. Many of our cows are between 1-60 days in milk. These cows perform well and make lots of milk if they are taken care of post-calving. We do our darnest to make sure that they are off to a great start after calving. Every day for 10-14 days post calving we take our cows temperatures. We watch them eat, making sure they eat. We also monitor their personalities...making sure they are "bright eyed and busy tailed" every day. Cows should be eager to eat when they get fresh feed, so we always check them at feeding time. Overall cow health has been awesome this spring!

Our milk production is the result of all of the cows' hard work. We do not "push" our cows or force them to milk. We respect dairymen who use rBST, but we do not. We have always felt that we can manage cows to milk better, but we do see a place for rBST in the industry. Our cows milk naturally...we provide them the BEST feed possible, the BEST care possible, and the BEST love possible and in return the cows pay us in the bulk tank!

Trying out blogging for the first time....

So here we go, on another adventure in technology! I am excited to enter the blogging world, and tell anyone interested about dairy farming and our busy hectic lives. A little about ourselves first: My husband Jonathan and I were married in 2005. That very same year we finished construction of our dairy barn and starting milking cows. At that time we had about 75 cows, but now 4 years later we have grown to about 100 cows. We milk Holsteins, which are the black and white cows. We milk 2 times a day in a double 12 parlor. Our milking parlor holds 24 cows at one time. Milking our cows take about an hour and a half. I am open to any questions to anyone who might be interested in what I have to say ;)

Thanks for bearing with my first time out!