Milk Mustache Contest

Grab a cold glass of milk, say "cheese!", and help us celebrate this year's June Dairy Month by sending us a photo of your best milk mustache! You can either post your photo on our farm's Facebook page or email it to "gilmerdairy [at] gmail [dot] com". 

Be sure you include your name, age, and hometown along with the photo. We will accept entries from May 8 - June 10. If we get several good submissions, we'll post finalists on our Facebook page and let the winner be determined by fan voting. 

"Dairy Farmboy" parody song

I came up with some dairy-themed lyrics set to the tune of "Rhinestone Cowboy" several months ago. I never did share them, though, because my singing of the song was awful (even by my low standards). However, I've now come to the realization that you actually have to have credibility before you can worry about losing it, so I broke out the old FlipCam this morning and put together something I hope won't make your ears bleed too badly. Try your best to enjoy the video below, but make sure you read my DirecTV-esque disclaimer first:

When you live on a dairy farm, you milk cows.

When you milk cows, you get up early every morning.

When you get up early every morning, you become sleep deprived.

When you become sleep deprived, your judgement suffers.

When your judgment suffers, you start thinking you can sing like Glen Campbell.

Don't start thinking you can sing like Glen Campbell.

Ryegrass harvest

It's been a busy two weeks, but we're nearly finished with our ryegrass harvest for this year. Our yields have been comparable to last year, and we should have enough harvested to make it our milking herd's primary forage from June until possibly as late as early October. Up to this point we have cut and chopped just over 75 acres with 12-15 more to go. Depending on the weather, we may pass on chopping a few of those acres in favor of rolling a few bales of dry ryegrass hay.

We will follow our ryegrass with a BMR forage sorghum variety just as we did last year, but we won't be planting that crop for at least a month. Next up on our "farming" agenda is planting our silage corn, which we tried to do two weeks ago but got rained out. That was probably a blessing considering we've had barely a sprinkle since then. If all goes perfectly (which, of course, it never does) we'll have our corn planted by the end of next week, spend the next vaccinating heifers and doing some pasture maintenance, followed by our first cutting of bermudagrass hay.

Here are a few photos from our ryegrass harvest, followed by my latest MooTube Minute video update:

We mow the ryegrass with a hay conditioner, which leaves the cut grass in a windrow.

Our silage chopper (forage harvester) is a bit of a hybrid. The chopper itself is a John Deere,
but the forage head is a Gehl model my father modified to attach to the Deere.

Once the forage wagon is full, it dumps over into the truck.
The truck then hauls the ryegrass to the silage pit/bunker where it is packed.

"Pet" in the pit

We had a momentary visitor in the milking parlor's pit this morning. I had been walking back-to-front prepping a new line of cows when I turned around and saw cow #923 standing in the middle of the floor. "Pet", as she has come to be known, either didn't want to be crowded in the holding pen or simply wanted some attention. This isn't the first time she's walked down the ramp into the pit, and she's the kind of cow that always tries to go where she's not supposed to...the kind that would walk a mile just to take three steps out of an open gate.

I managed to get her to turn around and walk back up to the holding pen after giving her a good head rub. No harm, no foul, and thankfully no manure left on the pit floor!

Gettin' busy

With a much milder than normal March now nearly behind us, our long "busy" season is beginning. We actually had three tractors operating yesterday afternoon, the first time that's happened in quite a while. I was busy applying nitrogen fertilizer and pre-emergent weed control to a vacant bermudagrass pasture while one of our farmhands bush-hogged a newly-leased field. Meanwhile, another one of our farmhands was mowing our first ryegrass of the season, which we'll bale and plastic-wrap this afternoon.

Within the next couple of weeks we expect to plant our silage corn and begin our full-fledged ryegrass harvest. The weather of course will dictate when (and in what order) we start, and it will take us 2-3 weeks to complete those tasks assuming the usual amount of weather delays and equipment problems. We'll likely be looking at cutting bermudagrass hay in the first half of May and planting forage sorghum in the later part of that month.