Business diversity

Winds blowing tonight, and it never got above freezing today, in spite of the sun shining this morning. Spring will come sometime. Right now the ground is frozen in the morning, but muddy most days. Garry is planning to get a load of fertilizer this week to spread on his rye field, the snow is disappearing, and hopefully in six weeks we'll be feeding it as green feed to the cows. Meanwhile, Garry is buying some more hay (there is still some in the barn now- from the fall purchase.)

Feed is in short supply for cows in the village and it will be weeks before the grass will be ready to graze, so some people are looking to sell heifers and cows. A lady talked to Maxim yesterday about a cow she wanted to sell. Garry and Max went to see her this morning, Garry thought the cow looked a little old, so they asked how old she was. The lady said she thought she was 13. When Garry checked her she was not pregnant and she wasn't milking much since she calved last year. So they didn't buy that cow.

They did go look at some heifers (unbred younger ones) Yana bought one (soon she'll have a big herd for her mother to milk), and Garry looked at some, but the man there sent them to talk to his wife who works at one of the village stores about price. There was some disagreement about how big they are so she's going to get a scale on Friday to weigh them to decide on the price. Garry says it was interesting discussing price of heifers with about six other people in the store, and one of the customers said she had a heifer she'd like to sell, so they went to look at that one and Garry bought her - she's black and white, looks like a Holstein. Garry figures that some of the milk cows in the herd we bought may not milk many more years- since several cows are over ten years of age.

Our experiment with product diversity went well, the neighbor lady separated 150 liters of milk from Monday morning, getting 10 liters of very thick cream (which becomes sour cream) and then made 20 kilograms of cottage cheese (Ukrainian style- used in many Ukrainian dishes) They are selling the sour cream for 40 grivna a liter and the cheese for 25 grivna a kilo, so 900 grivna for 150 liters of milk- minus whatever we pay her for processing (she's been trying to find a job for a year) will still be more than the 3.7 we are getting from the milk buyers. Tommorrow they deliver to their first milk/cream/cheese bulk customer- the dentist office where Garry is having bridgework done.