Rain again...

Yep, it's definitely raining again. Looks like we could get over an half an inch. We enjoyed about 3.5 days of almost perfect weather. Local farmers were able to get into the fields and start harvesting their soybeans and corn. Some tillage has also started. We are still unable to harvest our corn, since it is too wet and the cost of drying it is too high. We are waiting for the custom harvester to come and combine our soybeans, so we found other activities to do....MANURE removal.

My father-in-law and brother-in-law worked on moving our manure from the calf/heifer barn this morning. I worked on hauling out liquid manure from the cow barn and Jonathan worked on cleaning up the dry cows and heifer lots. All in all, a LOT of fertilizer was moved to the fields today. We will work this fertilizer into the soils to make an awesome bed for next year's crops. A "Fall Cleaning" of manure. We were very excited about the dry weather, sad about the rain today and tomorrow, but looking forward to the forecast for next week....cool and DRY.

RAIN!

It's been a dry few weeks at Orange Patch Dairy! We haven't seen anything over 1/2 inch of rain for the past 4.5 weeks. We are currently 8 inches behind in our annual rainfall. In the last 4.5 weeks we had one shower which dropped 0.02 of an inch. Needless to say its been very dry. Tonight it has been raining softly for the last few hours. While it isn't the inches of rain that we need, it does buy us time. Without this rain we will would have needed to start chopping corn next week before it was completely dry. Our corn doesn't even have grain on it, some hasn't even put on tassels since it was so dry. We will continue to pray for more rain...so we can have at decent crop of corn. So much is out of our control on a farm, so often we depend on a higher power-thank you God for the gentle rain, please send us more, for a healthy, bountiful harvest.