Blogs

My dad is the most selfless and caring person I know. I think he’s so good at it because he practices those traits day in and day out with his cows. Dairy farmers put their cows’ needs before themselves so much that they dedicate their lives to the sole purpose of their cows’ comfort and well-being.

One Saturday night, my husband and I got a text from our milk co-op with milk quality data from the previous day’s load, and panic began to set in. Our somatic cell count (SCC) was far over our comfort threshold of 100,000, and in a small herd like ours, the blame – more often than not – lays squarely on the withers of just one cow.

We try to be faithful recyclers around the house. I make regular runs to town with the pickup full of newspapers, bottles, aluminum cans, cardboard boxes and tin.

Let me take you back to a time of innocence. A time when I thought everything was legal as long as there was no game warden around. A time when I thought all the best places to hunt ducks had huge sand boxes, manicured fields and flags every couple hundred yards to help find our way back to the truck.

There’s a lot happening on the planet’s surface right now. Global warming is killing off the biodiversity needed to sustain life as well as creating dangerous weather phenomena.

In farming, as well as in life, things sometimes go totally different than what a person expects or plans. This last winter proved to be a very hard one with all the ice, snow and bitter cold. Spring finally came, and with it the realization that most of our hay fields had terrible winterkill.