Howmars Farm
Home of Willa and Winona
That's me, Willa, right there in the middle. The girls and I are eating from a delicious round hay bale.
The blue things in this bucket are called "taps." To collect sap, Jonathan sticks them into maple trees and then connects them to pipelines. Now that sugaring season is over, he's taken the taps out of the trees.
Here's one of the maple trees that was connected to Jonathan's pipelines. After sugaring season ended, he removed and cleaned the taps, rinsed out the pipelines and washed the sap buckets, holding tanks and the "sugar rig"—the giant pans he boils sap in.
This is my daughter Winona. (Hi, baby!) She's just chewing her cud and soaking up the warm spring sunshine. She looks a little sleepy, doesn't she?
Hello from Howmars Farm in Franklin, Vermont. This is Willa reporting from up near the Canadian border…but you wouldn't really know it from the warm weather we've been having! Holy cow! Last month, farmer Jonathan said that someone delivered us April for the month of March!
The herd is looking at a very early grazing season this year—meaning we'll all be out on the fresh spring grass any day now. Jonathan's pretty sure it's going to be a new record. The earliest we've ever gone out was April 19, so let's see what this spring brings! Everyone in the herd loves it when we can finally feel the thawed earth under our hooves. Already, some of the heifers and steers penned behind the farmhouse have used the warm hillside there to do some sunbathing!
I'll be four years old in July and am going to have another calf in August of this year. I'm kind of hoping it happens on August 24, which would be the exact date I gave birth two years ago. In my "mid-lactation", as Jonathan calls it, I'm doing well and giving good milk still. I'll be dried off in June, to prepare for the birth.
With the temperature swings we had this winter, Jonathan was concerned for our health. Warmer temperatures often mean more dampness and the damp can lead to conditions like pneumonia. But we all stayed really healthy throughout the short winter. Jonathan made sure our free stalls were always well-bedded, which keeps them dry. Like humans, he says, as long as we've got a good bed and good food, we do pretty well.
It's been strange to already have the windows open in the barn during milking, and the warm temperatures sure make some chores easier on Jonathan, but they've also kind of ruined his usual crop of maple syrup! You see, sap needs cold nights and warm days to run properly through the sugar maple trees. Warm nights and HOT days just don't make the sap run and, despite all his work, Jonathan was down by nearly two-thirds from last year.
Jonathan's two younger sons, Noah and Justin, helped with the maple sugaring lines and his brother-in-law and brother helped put in the "taps"—the spigots that go into each tree. Then Jonathan's father took over the sugaring house operation—the boiling of sap. He's been doing that every spring for over 60 years, Jonathan says.
The warm weather did mean he got to do a little more work in the woods. He's been clearing out some of the trees to improve the way he'll run his sap-gathering tubes for next year.
The U.S. inspectors came through our farm a few weeks ago, and we had everything in ship-shape for their annual look-in. Jonathan patched up a bit of concrete in the milking parlor, another project it was nice to do in relatively warm weather. State inspectors will come by this month. They come about every six months. We always know which month they're coming, but never the actual day.
I got registered by Jonathan with the American Jersey Cattle Association. Every one of us in the herd gets registered eventually, so this time it was my turn and my daughter Winona's. Jonathan enters all the information he can on us—our birthdate, our father and mother, our number on the farm (for record-keeping) and it costs him anywhere from $12 to $30 per registration. Then he gets a paper certificate that is filed away here on the farm. A farmer needs these registrations especially if he's going to sell any animal off the farm, which Jonathan is planning to do with some of the young stock here. He's got more than he needs at the moment, so he'll sell some of them at an auction soon.
Well, that's it for now. Next time you hear from Howmars, it'll be my darling daughter Winona delivering the news. She's going on two years old and is pretty smart. See you then!
Love,
Willa
