More about us....

I posted a picture of our pack barn a few days ago. Let me tell you about our pack barn. Cows can be housed in many different type of housing. Cows can be put in tie stalls: stalls where cows have their own personal stall, with their own feed and water. Cows can live in free stall barns: barns where there are a bunch of stalls where cows can choose where they will lay down each time they want to lay down. And then cows can live in loose housing barns, such as our pack barn. Our pack barn allows cows to lay down wherever they choose to lay down in a large open pen. Each cow as about 80 square feet per cow of laying space. In our pack barn we use a variety of different bedding types, depending on cost and availability. We used to use saw dust (left over wood pieces from a cabinet factory) to bed our cows, but due to the down turn in the housing market, saw dust got to be too expensive and less available. As of January we started using a new source of bedding: wheat starw dust. A local company makes a particle board for homes out of wheat straw, the "fines"-tiny particles from the process, are brought to our farm for bedding. We even have tried using sunflower seed hulls. We bed our cows once every 1-2 weeks. Each day we till our pack barn to work up the clean bedding and remove any cow manure. The cows are very comfortable, much like lying on the beach. As you can see in the photo above, cows like the environment and so do we ;)