2016 Year End Review: Farm

All of last years planning and hard work at least has something to show for in 2016. The big news of course for this year is breaking ground and building our new robotic milking facility. I will be honest I had fully expected to be ending this year as a robot dairy farmer. There’s no way I thought we wouldn’t be moved in and transitioned by winter. But big projects are big projects and that leaves more fun for the start of the new year! We finally can see the light at the end of the tunnel and really are very close to being finished. (And no everyone is asking, but we don’t have a for sure start up date set yet! 😉 )

We broke ground on March 30th and have seen steady progress since that day. I had hoped to keep an update log of all that was happening here on the blog, but that just didn’t happen. My parents joke that the time you need a milking robot is while your building a robot barn! This week though I finally did pull together Monthly Barn Reports to share what happened each month. You can find them all on this post or the robots tag. I won’t go into details here, cause there is just too much. The last 9 months have been crazy. It is also so exciting to see it all coming together!

The Ladies have been patiently waiting and plugging along doing their job. Last years extreme temperatures and drought put us into a spiral with reproduction. We are just now finally catching back up with pregnancies. Which of course affects everything else, especially the lactation curve. So we are at an extreme low point right now with production, but have lots calving in January and February which starts to bring us back to normal. It’s hard to have those outside affects on the herd and be careful and patient with management to let things come back around. We were still making milk, shipping 1,385,295 lbs or 161,080 gallons in 2016. We can’t wait to see what the Ladies can do in 2017 in the new barn!

We had 31 bull calves and 35 heifer calves in 2016.

Welcome to: Brelle, Jenebelle, Charlotte, Karma, LucyLou, Junebug, Jazzette, Sheen, Luv, Roar, Macchiato, Meadow, Frankie, Rowboat, Ruckus, Kickaz, Ila, Jellove, Jelis, Reagan, Sprig, Sunbeam, Blustery, Lunar, Allegra, Friday, Maebh, Lush and Lois.

After losing two of our all time best cows last year, this year felt kind of ordinary. No one instantly rose to the top to claim our hearts as the new herd favorite. There definitely are some individuals who are shining though. Classification in January brought 10 year old Lorry Boo to the highest scored cow currently in our herd at EX 92 with EX 93 FL. She is bred back and we are looking forward to her calving again with over 180,546 lifetime production. Classification in August saw Marksman Splat move to EX 90, fun to see this little cow being recognized for the type we enjoy breeding. Marksman is our own bull who didn’t get his proof released so it’s fun to have multiple successful daughters in our herd. With two classification dates moved 4 cows to excellent, one cow to VG 89, 3 Ladies to VG 88, and 6 to VG 87. The top producing cow for a completed record in 2016 was Abiqua Acres Grumpy Bluesky with an emc of 30,704lbs. It is always exciting to see our Ladies being successful.

2016 saw a first in the history of our farm as 4 Jerseys joined our herd in the middle of April. It wasn’t exactly a planned addition, but a friend needed a place to house these four heifers that were close to calving. Ben and I ended up purchasing two and all four calved with heifer calves. So we doubled our herd overnight! So welcome to Blest, Hibrite and twins Beatrix and Beatriz. Jersey classification in August brought scores of VG 86 for Blest, VG 84 for Beatriz (the two we own) and VG 83 for Beatrix and Hibrite. Not a bad start to our Jersey herd! One more springing heifer, Abbey, has been added in December, fingers crossed she behaves herself like the last girls did. Not sure how I feel about milking, soon, 5 Jerseys. I guess it will work out alright as soon the robot will be milking them. 😉 They have settled in nicely, but it still feels a little strange to be seeing a different color in our herd.

Luckily mother nature was much kinder in her weather this year. While not 100% back to normal we didn’t see the extreme drought like last year. The Ladies went out to pasture at a normal date on April 3rd. Grazing was a bit challenging this year in two aspects. The grass was still recovering from last year. And the new barn site sits right where the pasture lane was. So we had to get rather creative in creating a temporary lane for the year and getting them to all the pastures. Definitely looking forward to the 2017 grazing season and getting all the new pastures laid out with the new barn.

We are so excited for 2017 and finally getting the Ladies moved into the new barn. While we are optimistic that the transition will go well, please send good vibes, thoughts and prayers our way for start up. Hoping we can keep everything as low stress as possible for the cows through the whole process. This is definitely a time when I wish I  spoke cow! We could get everyone the same memo to be calm, understanding and helpful. If only it worked that way, don’t forget those good thoughts headed our way! Cheers to 2017, may the pastures be green, the heifer calves plentiful and the Ladies happy.