Dog days of summer and the drought

This Ukrainian "independent" city dog came inside the door of the church building 

to cool off in the shade Sunday

The drought continues, it has rained once in the month since we returned to Ukraine. The temperature today was up to 40 C (over 100 F) and has been almost that hot everyday, the ground it dry and baked - and so is the air. We are really wishing we had a car with airconditioning these days, if you ride in the car with the windows down for a couple hours "you know how cake feels in the oven".Victor told us it is the hottest summer on record in more than a hundred years.

The drought  is hitting the local farmers hard. The winter wheat harvest was bad, corn and most of the sunflowers won't be worth combining. There has only been one rain in the last month, and the temperature has been 40 C or close for weeks (100 F) The country is literally baking.

the truck is full of wet grain, liquid dripping out the tailgate

the cars and trailers are lined up wait

The village herd has been pastured in harvested wheat, barley and corn fields for the last month, but there is not much for them to eat out there, Yesterday one of our dry cows surprised us by calving out in the herd, she seems to be doing fine today, as is her bull calf. That's right six males in a row...can't wait until we have the six heifer calves to balance out the ratio! 





Cows in the village are being fed dry cornstalks cut from fields and brewers’ grain that we are selling to them. We can buy in bulk so it is cheaper for them to buy.  We are selling more now than ever, getting a 27 ton load in every week or two. Saturday morning a new load of brewers grain was delivered, and the customers were lined up all day, keeping Andrei the neighbor boy busy. He is the bare chested one in the photo below, he has grown in the last year, he now looks like he is really 16 like Jonah

filling bags full to take home

 Our own herd will be eating brewers’ grain, silage, a little hay  for the milking cows with grain just for the cows milking well this year.  If it ever rains, there may be another cutting of hay but no one is counting on it, they did cut the little garden alfalfa field this week, there will be 6-10 bales, Garry said, so almost a weeks' worth, they feed two bales a day to the milk cows. He plans to buy some of the dry corn in the fields to make some feed to fill up the heifers, as soon as the chopper returns from where the Canadian-Ukrainian dairy commission office sent it. Along with the brewers grain, the heifers are getting straw to eat to fill up right now, and that was expensive to buy this year, with the poor wheat crop.  The good news was with the newer better baler the bales are tighter and heavier so we use less- instead of a dozen small squares bales to bed up the cows it only takes a couple this year!