Garry finally got to get out with the chopper to do the haylage for the big dairy farmer (this is the guy he was consulting for about changes to make in the dairy barn/ration in the winter, but after Garry made his recommendations, he mostly ignored them.) Garry was hoping to start first thing Saturday morning but here's a quote from an email he sent yesterday morning:
Just got finished chopping 40 acres of alfalfa for a neighbor.
He normally would green chop it all summer and the quality would get really bad so now he should have some excellent feed for his cows. He is milking 140 and averaging 8 liters a day. I am trying to convince him to feed separate rations for his groups, maybe with the silage he will. At the present all cows and heifers get the same ration around 80% corn silage and 20% brewers grain. I would bet that his calving interval is over 18 months. He has 50 cows milking less than 200 days and 90 over with 40-50 dry cows. I have a lot of opprotunity to help here. But what is really neat is that I and Victor spent 2 hours talking about Christ with him and his manager before we started chopping yesterday
Garry also said it was not easy to chop because it had been cut with a swather, which made for a very tangled swath to pick up with the chopper, and it was wetter than he'd like. Of course they cut more on Saturday/Sunday? they hoped Garry could do this morning so that's where he is now-- but time is limited since the chopper gets sent off to the Canadian-Ukrainian dairy commission people later this morning.
Garry left the tractor and chopper over in Molosahorina (village where that farm is)Saturday night, and Sunday morning after he loaded up milk for church he was trying to find his wallet, so we drove over in the car to look for it (and found it, and his cell phone that he knew he'd left in it) before driving to Dnepropetroesk.
It was good thing we drove through Mc Donalds for some breakfast before dropping off the milk at the Baptist church and going to Morningstar. We ended up not eating lunch until 2:30 in the afternoon! Those Fresh Mc Muffins were good too- if you are wondering its a sausage Mc Muffin (no egg) with mayo, lettuce and a slice of tomato with the cheese, a Ukrainian-styled special.
After church we went over to the history museum for a special crafts sale featuring clay items with some English-speaking friends who had told us about it last week. Seth and Jonah had decided to opt out by going with Maxim to church on Saturday night- but I think they were sorry when we told them about the sword-fighting tournament going on there. Unfortunately I forgot the camera, because there was a lot of people in native costumes, children dancing and the guys in armor fighting. However we did buy this cool traditional mens hat- really light, I wore it all afternoon, since it was hot in the sun.
Maxim has been busy welding up his fancy wagon since he got back last week, and its finally finished- and it can dump not just one way but either side or the back. Everyone wants to use it to pick up the hay that was mowed on Tuesday - Maxim got ours into the barn- a good thing since the last of the corn silage was fed yesterday morning. Maxim also cut more little half acre plots of alfalfa for people in the village yesterday.
Last night Garry and the boys came in after getting the heifers and dry cows into the barn around 7:20 ready to watch the two hour finale of the The Mentalist Jonah had downloaded the day before- it is one of Garry's favorite shows. The new internet has made the downloading of a few favorite shows possible. Shortly after they got it going- the boys hook Seth's computer to the television- there was a knock on the door and we hit pause while Garry went to artificially breed a cow in the village. He says he keeps getting more people wanting cows breed and not many repeats on the same cows, so it must be working. He came back in 15 or 20 minutes, and we resumed watching the show. Just as it got to a pivotal point in the plot, there was another knock on the door, and another cow to go breed. This time he was gone so long Jonah put on the satellite to watch the replay of the Tampa Bay hockey game- we watched to entire 2nd period before Garry returned. Jonah was wondering if the cows was in Zaporosia, by the time Garry got back- it turned out the cow was in a village ten miles away, although Garry recognized the girl who came to the door as being from the village, it was her aunt's cow. We did watch the rest of the show without pausing again.
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