Farm Journal

Well, it has been busy here. Mama Cow (31) is milking fine now and letting the calf eat. All animals are doing fine. My hired hand, Cody, helped with getting some water collection gutters on the barn, repaired and added gate handles to the electric fence, and helped us with building.

“What were we building,” you ask. Well, we worked on the Hexayurt prototype! Yep, LaRahna has been here working on the Hexayurt design. We got the walls up! Ok, so here is a link that will take you to the videos we have been taking…

Hexayurt build video
Take a look! There are about 20 some videos so scroll down and check them out.

So, needless to say, it has been busy here!

Our chickens have been molting so we are down on eggs. Milk is good, getting about 3 gals a day (and that is with the baby eating all she wants.)

Staying blessed on Shekinah Farm!

Well, 31 is out of the woods, so to speak. This morning she got her last antibiotic treatment. Tonight we were able to milk her bad teet out and have infused an antibiotic in the quarter.  We will repeat this in the morning after milking to encourage the infected milk to move on out of the udder. Her udder has softened and she has much less pain. She is letting the baby nurse even on the infected quarter. This is a good indication that she is doing better. We won’t loose the quarter and we won’t loose the cow… Praise Yah!

With all the antibiotics, we won’t be using the milk until the antibiotic leaves her system. That takes about 3 days. The infused teet can’t be used for 3 days after the final infusion. S0 we should have milk again Sunday from the 3 good teets and Monday from the infected teet. The good news from all of this is that she is letting the baby eat… surprisingly!

The chickens are molting - early! We must be in for an early winter, possibly a cold one… not sure about that yet, haven’t seen the thick coats on the cows come in yet. I will let ya’ll know when it does! We may be in for a long, cold winter… we’ll see!

Well, I went out this am and 31 has mastitis. She is prone to it so we have been watching. This is the kind that doesn’t show up on the ‘litmus’ test. I milked as much as I could and could still not get enough bad milk off the quarter to put the meds in the teet. So, off to the vet I went to get antibiotics, pain killer and oxytocin. I gave her 35cc of antibiotic , 10cc pain killer, and 2cc oxytocin in the muscle this am and that same amount of pain killer and oxytocin this evening before milking. She is to get pain killer 2x daily if she is in pain, oxytocin 3-4 times a day and antibiotic today and again on Wednesday. What a hard time. She is still eating so she should be ok, but it is stressful.

On a good note, she was letting the baby suckle on the other 3 teets tonight when I went out there and that is a good sign that she isn’t hurting as much as she was this morning.  Well, we will have to discard the milk for 3 days after her last antibiotic (it will go to the calf) and then we will have lots of milk!

We lost one of our bee hives. I think the hive beetles attacked. We still have one, but will need to buy another next spring. I am very sad at the loss.

I hired a young man last week to work on the fence. He is coming back tomorrow to work on fence and a water collection project we are adding to our barn. Gigi and I are painting wood panels for the completion of the hexayurt this coming weekend. Yay!

I saw a living model of paddock paradise! I was so excited that I turned around, drove by again and stopped at the house to ask about it! The lady was very nice about it and walked out to the paddock to discuss it. She had what looked like a maze made out of white electric tape. I was enthrawled! I have been a bit intimidated at thinking how I could use this great pasture management system on my 7 acres… but when I saw it in use, I finally figured out how to do it in steps and make it work for us, cows and all! I’ll give you more specifics as I figure them out on our pasture. Oh, boy! Another project! Just never have enough to do ’round here!