Stone Road Farms- Week 5

Week 5 of Stone Road farms has been slightly different from previous weeks. It has been a slow week, which is kind of nice for a change. But it has consisted of more work to be done at home rather than at the farm itself. Since we have slowed down, I have been performing more paperwork for the farm to record all of our activities that we have completed this spring. Some of this is having to update manure application records on our online platform for generating reports for organizations such as DEQ and the local conservation district. Along with this I have been doing some crop scouting for our own crops and recording my findings for each week. Along with this I am logging different weather patterns to track our  crop growth to compare yields against variety’s for future use. Along with this I have logged our tillage operations so that we can compare yields to tillage practices to determine what tillage provides the highest yielding crop. This is very important due to limited land resources.

This is just some of the work, on a daily basis work is different from crop related tasks. I am dedicated to cattle work lately. I get to work around 530am (this makes for some good views on the way to work) and begin to scrape barns.  After this I discuss different management strategies for cattle movement with the herdsman. Once we have came up with a game plan for how we want to stage pens to limit sorting of animals in the future, we put that plan into action. We have sorted out a new breeding pen every week, and also we put all of our preg check eligible animals into one pen to limit the need to lock down other pens for the Vet. We have came up with this plan for several reasons. One of which is it limits the amount of time the vet can be on the farm and saves us a large amount of money every week. Also it limits the likelihood of an animal becoming injured due to moving pens on one day. We do all of this on herd health day, but the week before it is needed. We do this to allow the animals time to calm down from the stress of sorting so the Vet does not get injured.

These are just some of the tasks that I perform on a daily basis. Along with this I have been doing routine maintenance on equipment and preparing for the next cutting of hay. That is starting Monday or Tuesday (weather permitting), so I am taking my weekend off to get rested up for the busy couple weeks ahead.