Corn is in, time to celebrate

The annual school Thanksgiving dinner is set for next week Saturday evening because the corn is all harvested. Not as good as last year, but probably the second best corn we have had in Ukraine. The plowing is going to be finished in a couple weeks, last year they were still going at it in December.

The late corn fields were the best yielding ones as Garry hoped, they made 4 tonnes per hectare. The one at the corner near the highway was the best one he tells me, even though the headlands looked thin all summer. This is the field he bought a 70 year lease on this spring.  The grain was not as dry as the first fields they combined a few weeks ago, but decent, the last field was at 15% moisture, the first corn harvested was only 12%.

last load for the day

  Garry's thinking they need to start the ventilation system they installed so the grain doesn't start to heat up. The air moving through the huge pile of corn will help remove some of the moisture so it does not get warm and spoil. Garry says the pile is 20 feet high.
They moved some of the dry corn over to the other side of the shed before augering the new corn on top of the pile, but they couldn't move a lot as there is still a small pile of sunflower seed there. They plan to sell some corn and the rest of the sunflowers to buy fertilizer this fall and store it for spring planting.

Garry is still trying to get to a lot of the milkings, the morning ones in particular, he even told the milker ladies that they could have the morning off Sunday, he's going to do it with the students. He likes the chance to work with a couple of students each time to show them how he wants the job done. The students all work a number of shifts milking or feeding and cleaning up at the two farms each week, so there are a couple on the schedule for each milking.

Garry is quite pleased with how things are going in the new parlor. Everything is being kept really clean, and the equipment is working well. We aren't making much milk right now with less than 50 cows milking now, but there are about a dozen cows due to calve next month. Milking may take a little longer with more cows and these cows were dry when we moved the herd to the new barn so they will need to be trained to go through the parlor.

It's pretty cold outside now, there was a reported snow flurry sighting this morning. Yesterday the students helped chase 35 dry cows and springing heifers from the freestall barn to the tiestall barn, where they will be until they calve, when they will go back to the "new barn" to get milked in the parlor with the rest of the herd.