At the farm

 Garry has sent a bunch of photos of things at the farm. The day he arrived in the village was two years after the day we left Ukraine for 3 months, or so facebook tells me. What we didn't know. Here's some cow/ calf photos he took the day he arrived. He says they all look good.

This is the shed we built two years ago for grain storage. With the price of grain in Ukraine, we have lots of wheat and some corn stored. They feed it to the cows and chickens, and hope the price goes up to sell the rest. The war affected transport and depressed the price since foreign sales always accounted for most of sales for wheat and corn. 

They were able to buy the new machine last year, I think with other small farmers in the village. They also went in on the scale put in two years ago. They were working on installing it when we left. Garry tells me that this truck is a load of sunflowers we were selling Monday. Garry says Max planted a new variety of sunflowers this year, yields were higher than other farmers, 3 1/2 instead of 2 1/2 (I'm thinking per acre but I could be wrong) but they make less oil so the price is 8000 a tonne instead of 9000, but Max thinks they are still ahead of the other farmers on them. 

Garry did some hoof trimming on Monday, and prostaglandin was given to some heifers ready to breed. He was excited to find out Max had been trimming feet and breeding cows. However, he has trouble artificially breeding heifers, so Garry is going to try to breed all 17 heifers that are big enough to get pregnant in the two weeks he's there. The hormone will bring them into heat, or ready to breed, if they are at the right place in their cycle. They sold the bull that was in the barn breeding cows a couple months ago. Today Garry was going to preg check cows, I did not hear how that went. He did call at 4:20 this morning while he was eating lunch with the students.

This afternoon he was going to go to the city when Oleg went to sell cheese, so my next post will be about the chickens and cheese, since I had trouble getting back to sleep, then slept late and I'm off to stay with some grandkids overnight shortly.